Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife

Plot

Lenny throws a party at his apartment to show off his new plasma screen high-definition television. Homer becomes obsessed with the HD picture and spends every moment at Lenny's place watching it. Marge sends Bart and Lisa to bring him home, but they also get hooked. After a few days, Lenny kicks Homer out.

Back home, Homer can no longer stand his old CRT TV, so Marge enters the family in a contest where the top prize is a plasma HDTV. They end up winning third place: a trip to the Fox studios. There, Homer discovers a reality show called Mother Flippers, where two families swap mothers. The grand prize is enough money to buy a new plasma HDTV, so the family signs up.

Marge is traded to Charles Heathbar, a laid-back man with a perfect son named Ben. Homer gets Charles's strict wife, Verity. Charles dislikes his wife because she constantly bosses him around, so he is pleasantly surprised by Marge's understanding and kind nature.

As Marge enjoys her time with Charles, he starts to develop feelings for her. Meanwhile, Homer, Bart, and Lisa struggle with Verity, who disciplines them and disapproves of everything they do. At one point, she makes Bart and Homer write reports on Itchy and Scratchy and CSI: Miami.

Charles sings a song declaring his love for Marge, but she tells him she loves Homer. Charles then reveals his unhappiness with his marriage, including that Ben is not his biological son because Verity had an affair. Marge advises him to tell his wife how he truly feels. Charles agrees and decides to take Marge back to Homer and get rid of Verity.

When they arrive in Springfield, however, Verity has already decided to leave Charles. She has found a new partner: Patty Bouvier, bonded by their shared hatred of Homer. That night, Homer plays guitar and sings about his undying love for his newly acquired plasma HDTV, and to a lesser extent, for Marge.

Production

Many Simpsons staff members were fans of English comedian Ricky Gervais and his British comedy series The Office that he created and starred. In January 2004, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening called Gervais to congratulate him on his double Golden Globe win. During the phone call, Gervais was invited to lunch with Groening and executive producer Al Jean since they were big fans and wanted to meet him. At this lunch, he was offered a chance to appear in and write an episode of The Simpsons.

Groening first asked Gervais for just a guest appearance, but came to the conclusion that he might be interested in writing an episode too. Gervais told The Independent that when he got the offer, "well, I knew I had to say yes, but fear kicked in at exactly the same time." He became the first person to be credited with simultaneously writing and guest-starring in an episode of The Simpsons. He was also the first Briton to write an episode for the show.

Writing process

As a big follower of The Simpsons, Gervais saw the experience as "a dream come true." After the lunch with Groening and Jean in early 2004, Gervais began coming up with a storyline. Because The Simpsons had been airing for such a long time, he found it difficult to think of a story that had not been done before. He finally based the plot on the British reality series Wife Swap after a suggestion from his girlfriend Jane Fallon, and wrote the character Charles to resemble David Brent, the character Gervais played on The Office.

While working on the episode, Gervais made sure to make use of his favorite characters from The Simpsons, such as Lenny. He revealed to the press for the first time in December 2004 that he was writing an episode, commenting that "I've got the rough idea but this is the most intimidating project of my career. The Simpsons is the greatest TV show of all time." When he showed his first work to Groening and Jean, they liked it.

Groening told the press that "we could never have written his character the way he did" and that "he caught our tone exactly, and then added his own Ricky Gervais/David Brent patheticness."

Release

"Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife" first aired on Fox in the United States on March 26, 2006. It drew 10.09 million viewers, ranking 38th for the week of March 20–26, 2006, and was the seventh most-watched Fox program that week. In the United Kingdom, its debut on April 23, 2006, attracted 2.18 million viewers on Sky1. At the time, this made it the channel’s second most-watched broadcast ever, trailing only a 2000 Friends episode that had 2.8 million viewers.

The high UK viewership was attributed to Ricky Gervais’s involvement; new Simpsons episodes on Sky1 typically drew around one million viewers. Instead of the usual animated opening, this episode began with a live-action sequence that mirrored the classic intro using real actors and locations. British Sky Broadcasting originally created this sequence to promote The Simpsons on Sky One, and it had already become an Internet hit before its television debut.

Matt Groening decided to use it for the episode. Executive producer Al Jean remarked in a press statement that he was “just amazed there are people who want to be known for looking like the Simpsons.” Re-runs and the season 17 DVD and Blu-ray release use the standard animated opening. Critics have praised Gervais’s performance.

Critical reception

In 2012, Entertainment Weekly’s Mike Bruno named him one of the 21 best Simpsons guest stars, and in 2007, Simon Crerar of The Times called it one of the funniest cameos in the show’s history. The Guardian’s Johnny Dee cited Gervais’s character Charles as one of the most memorable Simpsons characters. However, the episode itself received mixed reviews. Larissa Dubecki of The Age gave a negative review, writing that “this cross-pollination of stellar US and British comedies gives rise to great expectations but there’s a massive letdown in store for anyone hoping for something approaching even the middling efforts of the two comedic benchmarks.”

She added that “this effort proves that The Office and The Simpsons are the comedic equivalent of oil and water, with the former’s wry observational style sitting oddly with the latter’s pop-culture pie-eating competition.”