Burning Bad Bridges With The Simpsons

A couple of posts ago I talked about how overrated The Simpsons has been for a while now.  As I rewatch it on Disney+ there's one thing I really hate in some episodes:  really poor bridges.

My definition of "the bridge" is what connects the start of the episode to the rest of the episode.  Ideally it's some kind of inciting event that leads to the conflict of the rest of the episode.  Let me break it down in a couple of episodes I like:

Otto crashes the bus, which leads to the school instituting a carpool, which leads to Homer torturing the kids with his 70s music, which leads to them complaining, which leads to Homer feeling uncool, which leads to Homer taking the kids to the "Hullabalooza" music festival, which leads to Homer becoming a freak getting hit with a cannonball in the stomach and becoming cool to Generation X kids until he quits to avoid being killed.

So from start to finish there's a certain amount of logic to the writing.  One thing leads to another in a fairly organized way.  The first act introduces the conflict that's built up and then addressed without really anything excess.

The next episode, my favorite one, also is pretty tightly plotted:  It's the end of the school year and Lisa hands out the yearbooks, which she edited, but no one wants to sign hers.  Flanders tells Homer that he has jury duty and so offers his beach house for the Simpsons to use.  Lisa decides that since they're going to a new place she'll adopt a new persona to make friends.  Instead of dressing and acting like a goody-goody nerd, she dresses and acts more like a slacker and makes friends with the local kids.  Bart becomes jealous of Lisa's relationship with the kids and so sabotages her by showing them what a nerd she was in Springfield.  Lisa and Bart briefly feud before she finds out that the kids actually don't care about what a nerd she is; they like her for who she is.  And so all is forgiven as the Simpsons leave town.

See how everything pretty well naturally flows together?  The only thing you could consider a jump is Flanders offering the house to Homer, but that's basically running concurrent with the thing at school.  The point being that it all logically holds together with the conflict introduced at the beginning, then it's built up, and then everything is resolved.

A few seasons later in season 12 there was an episode that was really the first time I thought an episode had a weak bridge.

There's a talent show at the retirement home that Grampa wins by virtue of being the last one on stage.  The prize is a free autopsy so they go to the funeral home, during which the funeral director offhandly mentions that a mausoleum has enough cement for a tennis court.  So Homer randomly decides to build a tennis court that leads to Homer and Marge entertaining the local couples, who love playing them because Homer is terrible.  Marge, embarrassed, confronts Homer, who signs them up for a local tournament that winds up having professional players replacing everyone.

The thing is, the start didn't really connect to the rest of the episode.  The extremely weak connection was someone mentioned a tennis court and so he builds a tennis court.  The first 7 minutes of the episode then winds up essentially being useless filler.

Another time was an episode where Homer is pissed because the electric bill is too high.  Lisa convinces him to buy a wind turbine to run their house.  When there's no wind to power the house, Homer has Bart go up on the turbine to spin it manually.  During that Bart prays for a storm.  There's a storm, during which a whale washes up on the beach.  Lisa tries to save the whale, but it dies and she's bummed before eventually she's cheered up.

The extremely weak bridge between the beginning and rest of the episode is Bart prays for a storm.  You don't really need Bart praying for a storm, though; you could just start the episode with the whale getting beached.  I mean are we really supposed to believe Bart's praying caused the storm that caused the whale to end up on the beach?  The rest of it flows naturally from there but again the first 8 minutes wind up as filler.

One I watched just before writing this entry starts with Bart and Lisa watching a show called Ki-Ya Monsters.  Marge gets tired of them talking about it constantly and so decides to take them to a museum.  At the museum they see a display on probability saying how terrible the odds of winning the lottery are.  But Homer still buys the weekly lottery ticket with Moe, Lenny, and Carl only this time they win.  Carl takes the ticket but instead of splitting the money absconds to his native Iceland.  His friends follow and find out he used the money to buy a page of an ancient saga that was supposed to clear his family of an old shame but actually did the opposite.  Homer, Moe, and Lenny convince Iceland that Carl is a good guy because of nice things he did for them and so that should clear his family's name.

The whole Ki-Ya Monsters thing is never mentioned again after they get to the museum.  In fact the kids are barely in the rest of the episode.  Again it's just filler.  The only bridge is there's a mention of the lottery.  They could easily have started with the lottery drawing.  That's where the actual conflict begins.

So anyone reading this, maybe you can see the difference between a good bridge and a bad bridge.  A good bridge is strong because it logically follows from beginning to middle to end.  It introduces the conflict that's then built up and resolved.

A weak bridge has 6-8 minutes that wind up being filler because there's only a tangential connection between the beginning and end.  The same virtue from a long-running animated TV show also applies to books or really any story.  If your beginning doesn't really connect to the middle and end, then it's a lot of filler.

You need to have a strong bridge if you're going to get where you're going.