People often say that the best seasons are 6 and 7, but they only say that because there must be a very memorable episode in those seasons that stands out from all the episodes in the series. But I'm increasingly understanding that the decline actually started from season three or four and started to intensify from season 5 onwards.
This is because in the first three or four seasons, the series was still not fully aware of what it had become, a social phenomenon, and the creativity of the show was still rooted in human emotions and satire from a therapeutic point of view rather than just humor.
This episode is a great example of the use of satire from a therapeutic standpoint. The plot is dedicated to that ignored housewife who can't find her role in the world, and her desire for recognition is drowned out by television, which absorbs the attention of her loved ones and treats her unfairly. Even if you haven't been that kind of housewife, who hasn't at some point in their life felt identified with the scene where Homer defends something he believes in a discussion with Marge, but it turns out to be false, and the kids side with Homer because they weren't paying attention to Marge when she said she was going to audition for a play?
It was a faithful way of portraying the average homo sapiens, who is actually not sapiens but stupid and cruel, and the majority are like that. Unfortunately, the series gradually stopped using that type of satire that dealt with the perverse, cruel, and stupid dimension of human beings, which served a therapeutic role for the viewer.
In fact, thanks to that, the humor was quite funny, whether it's because you identified with Homer for being as stupid as him due to attention deficit disorder or because you identified with Marge.
That was faithfully reproducing a scene that we can easily recognize in real life, and it was original because nobody had ever done it before, since before those early Simpsons, the world didn't consider it something that should be given importance, it was assumed that everyone was satisfied with their lives and the traditionally established roles, and neither television nor advertising helped to become aware that it wasn't actually like that.
In short, The Simpsons showed that world as it was, and even how television used to be before The Simpsons, excessively banal and imitating the silly and human society, assuming that everyone had a satisfied life with traditionally established roles.
Later on, the episode doesn't lose its masterful value, it still maintains scenes and dialogues like that, but it also delves into the value of theater. They show theater like those early episodes of The Simpsons, the only conscious form of art, along with literature, of those world complexities that human beings have created. So much so that Marge is forced to ask the play director why her character has motivation to act angrily against Stanley. It's a lesson in which to be a good actor, you precisely have to understand the motivation that drives a character to do such a thing, and that already sparks interest in acting.
And, finally, the movie parodies are wonderful, especially the one where Homer is bored playing with the pleats of his clothes, like a scene from Citizen Kane, which precisely scenes like those in that movie made it noteworthy because those natural details in cinema had not been invented before that movie.
And the most important thing is that, in the end, it shows us that Homer, after all, has a soul. You will never see an episode from later seasons where he is seen like that again, which is sad. It is also therapeutic to see Homer with his head drooping during the play, it is a facial expression that many of us can also identify with in moments of radical empathy.
