D’oh!
“The Simpsons” is doing the Springfield version of a Christmas special, now streaming on Disney+.
“O C’mon All Ye Faithful” is a special double episode that follows British mentalist Derren Brown as he comes to Springfield. Events soon spiral into chaos, which includes Homer getting hypnotized into believing that he’s Santa. It also comes out on the 35th anniversary of the original Christmas special, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” which first aired in 1989.
“I had a very hard 2023,” the show’s writer Carolyn Omine told The Post.
The Emmy winner said that she got the idea for the episode because during that time, “I ended up just watching a lot of YouTube, and I watched a lot of Derren Brown…he sort of was exactly what I needed, where it was something very entertaining and light-hearted, but there was always something sort of deeper, underneath it. And it was always making a human point, and it was touching and educational.”
Since the show has a deep bench of regulars, she said the side characters who get prominence in episodes like this Christmas special are just what feels natural.
“When we decided that [Homer as Santa] would have an elf and that it would be Ralph, we weren’t thinking like, ‘Those two haven’t really been together, let’s combine them.’ But then we realized, ‘Wow, these two have never really been a pair.’ So we enjoy it as we’re doing it.”
She added, “I feel like if we did it like, ‘What’s a pairing we haven’t done?’ And then we just stick together and then come up with the story, that would feel off. You just come out with a story, and who would fit best for the story. That’s the great thing, we have these characters that have such a rich backstory. We could stick them in anywhere.”
“The Simpsons” has also frequently been credited with “predicting” the future several times – among pop culture events, its seemingly predicted smartwatches, the Trump presidency, the FIFA scandal and more.
Showrunner Matt Selman told The Post, “People really want magic to be real, right?”
He joked that they use a cauldron with herbs and do “witch and wizard-type stuff” to predict the future.
“We never try to predict anything. There’s nothing we’d ever say on the show, like ‘Hey, here’s a prediction, everybody,’” he explained.
“It’s just that we talk about the world, which is full of dumb-dumbs. And dumb-dumbs do the same dumb stuff, again and again.”
He joked, “People want it to be like, ‘Oh, there’s this amazing laser that beam into a crystal… and then we all meditate and then we say a prayer. Then we all wake up the next morning covered in sweat, and we know what’s going to happen. That’s what it is!’”
Omine added that part of the reason the show sometimes “predicts” the future is the sheer volume of episodes, which is currently over 700.
“We’ve done a lot of episodes, and a lot of things we predicted did not come true,” she explained.
“I do think that we try to, whenever we put any sort of facts out there, we tend to try to be very accurate. Sometimes it’s just luck.”
She added, “We would all be much richer than we are if we could actually predict the future!”
