Simpsons Did It!: “There’s Something About Marrying”

When this episode first aired in 2005,  it opened with a parental advisory warning the home viewers the show would be tackling same-sex marriage.

Today, same-sex marriage is legal throughout the United States, and there’s a lot less open opposition to it than there was before.

You know what, though?  This is a rather mediocre episode in terms of laughs.  Bart and Milhouse prank a guy who literally fell off the back of a turnip truck with all kinds of nonsense some of which involved Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish (now with a human-shaped body), and the problem was the guy was a TV personality who reported on all the places he visited.  Springfield got his lowest rating (six out of ten), and to raise money from lost tourism, Springfield legalized gay marriage.  Reverend Lovejoy wouldn’t do it, but Homer would gladly do it for $200 a pop with a minister’s license he got off the Internet.

The problem comes with Marge, who openly supported gay marriage, finds out her sister Patty is gay and engaged.  How did Marge miss the signs?  How did a whole lot of people?  On the one hand, Patty is far less developed than Selma, who’s obvious straight and has been married a few times already, including briefly in this episode to Disco Stu.  On the other, this is an episode framed around an issue and a slightly dated one at that.  Besides, Patty’s sexuality (hinted at briefly once) doesn’t seem to come up again too often.  If the woman she was marrying wasn’t secretly a dude, it might have been nice.  And of course Marge comes around.  Why wouldn’t she?  I don’t have much to say about this episode.

But it looked like a decent crowd for the aborted ceremony.  Jub-Jub was there.  Grampa declined.  And there’s Principal Skinner…

Skinner?  Now that’s awkward…