QUICK SYNOPSIS

Marge becomes a real-estate agent.

POINTLESS GUEST STAR(S)

None! And if you think Phil Hartman is pointless then your face should get acquainted with my brass-knuckled fist.

WHY THIS EPISODE SUCKS

It doesn’t, this is one of the highlights of Season 9. People who are naysayers about Marge-centric episodes can eat my butt. Hello? “Marge on the Lamb”? “Marge in Chains”? And it’s not outlandish for Marge to get a job as a realtor. She was a power plant employee in “Marge Gets a Job”, a cop in “The Springfield Connection”, and she sold pretzels in “The Twisted World of Marge Simpson”. Again, eat my butt.

Homer’s a bit of a jerkass, as he will increasingly become as the seasons wear on, but his B-plot is kept to a minimum while the main realty plot is kept at the forefront. In any case, his brawl with Snake on top of a speeding car reminds me of why the show is starting to slip, but I can’t help but find charm elsewhere like the whole Murder House plot in Act 3 with the Flanders family. Does anyone else think of “Bart of Darkness” with this one?

The sad fact of this episode is that this is Phil Hartman’s last speaking role as Lionel Hutz, who kills it in this episode as a longtime incompetent lawyer who seems to be semi-competent at real estate. At least enough where he should probably consider it a fulltime job. He uses his lawyerly spin to show Marge a shitty book of available houses on the market: small = cozy; dilapidated = rustic; on fire = motivated seller!

“Realty Bites” introduces Gil, a dead ringer for Shelley “The Machine” Levene! Obviously, the whole idea was to make a hapless character based entirely off of Jack Lemmon’s character from Glengarry Glen Ross and it was splendidly done. Ol’ Gil used to have it in him, but now he’s pathetic. This character should have been one-and-done, but they literally brought him back dozens of times as the “guy who sucks and keeps getting new jobs”. He was brilliant in this episode, and otherwise overplayed.

Great jokes include the Lumber King’s ass-shaking billboard, Ned Flanders yelling about purple drapes, and George Bush collecting unemployment checks. The worst joke is Kirk Van Houten losing his arm while driving through the taut piano wire. It smacks of a Treehouse of Horror joke that felt out of place. Didn’t like it!

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

The episode marks the first appearance of Gil Gunderson and Cookie Kwan. Excuses were made by the writers to bring back Gil in future episodes based on Dan Castellaneta’s performance at the table read, which proved popular with the staff.
You know it’s not the best idea when you have to use a phrase like “excuses were made”. Sounds like the credo of Zombie Simpsons to me.

The piano wire scene was meant to end with Kirk’s sandwich being sliced just the way he wanted, until George Meyer suggested that his arm be cut off instead. Mike Scully described the ensuing laughter at his suggestion as the most intense he had ever heard from the staff, saying: “They were literally choking because the joke was so unexpected. It was a shocked kind of laugh, and it just started rolling, one of those laughs that build the more they reverberate through you.”
The staff are a bunch of morons.

FINAL GRADE
A-