The death of Maude Flanders on The Simpsons was a decision born of commerce, not of storytelling. A pay dispute between Fox and Maggie Roswell, who voiced Maude for the show’s first decade on the air, is the reason the series killed off Ned’s wife. And it shows.
As I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, her death veers somewhere between “cartoon gag” and “afterthought.” In fairness, Maude was never one of the show’s most prominent or interesting characters. While one could fault the writers’ room for not fleshing her out more, particularly on a series where well-developed female characters are vastly outnumbered by their guy counterparts, the fact is that by the show’s eleventh year, all we really knew about Maude is that she was religious, provincial, and a bit of a stick in the mud.
That means that “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily”, the episode nominally devoted to her death, isn’t really about her. It’s about Ned and how he deals with this new gaping hole in his life, and the strange, stop-and-start process of mourning someone close to you. It’s still The Simpsons, so that’s tackled from a comical perspective, and it’s also a season 11 episode, so much of that exploration is rushed and a bit disjointed. But there is, nevertheless, an earnestness and even a sweetness to how the show approaches Ned Flanders losing his wife, which carries the day and makes one of the series’s most infamous episodes a minor gem within one of its roughest stretches.
The problem is that the episode has to churn through a decent amount of uninspired throat-clearing before it even gets to Ned’s part of the story, and it kills off Maude in a contrived, wacky, over the top fashion that robs her death of any immediacy or emotional impact before dipping into that more meaningful material.
Who among us hasn't tragically lost a loved one this way?
Perhaps the latter can be forgiven. Maude being knocked over the top of a stadium after Homer taunts (and unwittingly dodges) a firing squad of cheerleaders brandishing t-shirt guns is the sort of loony accident that tries your patience more than it tugs at your heartstrings. And yet, death is a tough topic for a primetime sitcom to tackle without devolving into “Very Special Episode” territory or making the proceedings too heavy. I’d be lying if I said Maude’s death worked for me, and it’s certainly discordant with the earnest tone the show wants to strike later in the episode. But there’s something to be said for the near-Looney Tunes tack of her demise helping to take the edge off a nominally realistic cartoon choosing to kill off a character.
What can’t be accounted for is how “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily” spends almost its entire opening act on a tired, toothless NASCAR spoof before getting to the meat of the episode. There’s zero plot progression or even a point to the first third of the episode, prior to Homer’s lard-laden challenge to the t-shirt launchers. The family tries to go for a hike, stumbles onto a stock-car racing track, and the show, appropriately enough, spins its wheels for minute after minute filled with dull racing gags.
This portion of the episode features animals who act like people (a Matt Groening pet peeve), lazy interludes about hillbillies being incestuous, and the barest of bare observations about racing fan culture. It’s not as though the “first act folderol which goes nowhere” routine is new to The Simpsons, but the show can’t wring much comedy from its trackside setting, making the whole outing seem like pointless vamping until the show can get to its ratings-chasing stunt.
But once that stunt is out of the way, and the show proceeds to Ned actually processing his wife’s death, the episode finds another gear. Don’t get me wrong, “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily” is not the most trenchant look at grief there’s ever been on television. But after all of that mostly unfunny fumfering, the episode manages to lock onto something real in the effect Maude’s death has on Ned, which elevates it.
Some nice visual framing to represent Ned's loneliness here.
Granted, the episode muddles a good bit of that buoying central concept. “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily” is, all at once, an episode about the shock of a sudden loss, about dating again after losing a spouse, and about a crisis of faith. Each is a worthy enough idea on its own, but they start to feel a bit cramped when wedged next to one another.
Even if all of these aspects of the grieving process could benefit from a little more space to breathe, they’re all good enough in the moment to make you want more. The show plays Ned’s sense of being lost without his wife reasonably straight, replete with signs of loneliness and self-blame that the episode doesn’t retreat from, even if it eases them along with white noise gags and Freudian Scrabble games.
That brings out the best in Homer who, in a bit that seems self-aware on the part of the show, consciously sheds his fully-in-bloom “Jerkass” persona to be supportive and well-meaning (if a bit characteristically misguided) with his otherwise rivalrous neighbor. Homer tucking in Ned, eschewing a crudely-personalized rock fight in favor of some comfort and concern, and endeavoring to cheer his neighbor up (albeit in his usual overeager fashion), all reflect the sweeter side of Homer that seemed lost to the wind by the show’s eleventh season.
The episode even finds its comedy backbone when it moves past the ill-conceived stadium precipice tragedy and embraces the pathos of its aftermath. Bart remarking, “Aw, man, why does everything bad have to happen to me?” when sent to play with a grieving Rod and Todd is a welcome dose of the show’s wry humor. Homer lurking in the mailbox as Ned mails out his dating video is the sort of bit that doesn’t really make any sense, but in an enjoyable, almost winking sort of way, that makes it funny.
They're the people that you meet, when you're walking down the street, they're the people that you meet each day.
And the video dating profile that Homer puts together for Ned is a laugh-a-palooza all its own. From Homer’s fascination with star wipes, to his privacy-violating inserts, to his “Flanswered”-based wordplay, to a hilarious testimonial from an oblivious Chief Wiggum, that little sequence becomes the comic peak of “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily”. On the whole, the show strangely manages to be funnier when dealing with the death of a wife and mother than with the colorful world of professional racing.
It also manages to wring some real pathos and even a heartening final note from that story. The episode’s interlude about Ned trying to find romance again after some time has passed and his loneliness persists quickly veers into some generic “Aint the dating world crazy?” material. And while Ned’s frustration with God for taking Maude away from him after all his years of devotion is well-earned and interesting as a concept, it’s also very brief and not as well-utilized as it could be.
Still, the two concepts dovetail nicely at the end of the episode, where Ned’s quick reunion with the church and his realization that he might be able to open his heart again someday come together in a single, Shawn Colvin-voiced package. Rachel Jordan, the singer of country-ish Christian rock band who performs at The First Church of Springfield, isn’t necessarily the show’s most memorable character. But her God-loving rock song is cute enough to be amusing, while close enough to actual religious rock and roll to feel well-observed. And the show’s understated (or, less charitably, underdeveloped) connection between her and Ned through her faith-affirming tune accomplishes what it needs to. There’s humor in their awkward attempts at flirting after the show, and there’s a realness to Ned’s admission to her that while he’s not ready to move on, he is ready to be himself once again.
With that, the show returns to its vaunted status quo, but leaves Ned a little different than it found him. That’s may be the best you can hope for from this sort of sitcom. There’s a notable strain of meta-humor here, from Bart wondering whether Homer even has a job anymore, to the fan-hated Ian Maxtone-Graham getting a giant “written by” credit after Lisa complains about how people plaster their names all over everything. But the most concentrated dose of it centers on the idea of change.
America's 78th line of defense.
Reverend Lovejoy’s sermon at Maude’s gravesite recognizes that she was a supporting character in the series, the sort of presence that’s easy to take for granted and whose absence is easy to shrug off. But it also highlights The Simpsons’s biggest changes to the status quo up to that point, from Apu marrying Manjula and fathering eight children, to the Van Houtens’ divorce. His speech works as a tacit acknowledgement that however static Springfield had remained over the last eleven seasons — with Homer destined to work at the nuclear power plant forever, Bart and Lisa doomed to remain in elementary school for decades, and the Simpson family as a whole fated to continue going on wacky adventures until the sun burns out — the show still intended to shake things up a bit now and then.
Ned Flanders didn’t change dramatically after “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily.” He remained the Simpsons’ irrepressibly kind, overly religious, impossibly square neighbor until the present day. But he did love again, even marry again, and as the years went on, we saw new shades of the familiar friendly face next door to Our Favorite Family. The way The Simpsons killed off his wife is still unbearably stupid, but the sincere-if-humorous way this episode approached the aftermath of that cartoon mishap made that later growth possible. And Maude’s death may have been a financial choice for a network that didn’t want to open its voluminous checkbook for a tertiary character, but it still gave another character who’d been on television for eleven years someplace new, and someplace real, to go.
Odds and Ends
– This episode runs hot and cold on Marge-based continuity. In the couch gag, the show’s writers totally forget that Marge doesn’t actually like to bump in bumper cars. But her spud-based encouragement to Ned later in the episode shows they remembered her fondness for potatoes. She just thinks they’re neat!
– There’s also some brief continuity with Homer, who rekindles his propensity to be outsmarted by parrots.
– As much as this episode’s racing gags bored me, I did get a kick out of Homer’s “We can hike anytime. This is our chance to see cars driving!” remark. It felt like a small bit of the show’s cutting social commentary directed at the world of sports that had been unleashed on baseball, football, and other athletic endeavors in earlier episodes.
– I’ll also cop to enjoying the weird line from Maude about having seen enough of “Homer Simpson’s torso.”
– It’s a dark gag, but Moe’s descent from offering a seemingly innocuous compliment about the recently deceased, to getting pummeled by Ned while declaring “send me to Maude!” is awful but hilarious in its blackly comic progression.
– Though it ends up pretty hamfisted in execution, the very concept of a “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster” video game is rib-tickling enough on its own.
– In a three-second scene that will live in Simpsons infamy, this episode at least has the gumption to account for why Ned is uncomfortable about “footlongs.”
– Despite his public complaints about the show during this era, Harry Shearer does a very nice job conveying Ned’s despondency here, particularly with his little stutter when Ned tells Rachel that he recently lost his wife.
– It feels like an inadvertent Easter egg almost twenty years later, but it’s kind of fun seeing the barely-there beginnings of “Nedna” in this one.
– There’s a great blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gag here of Ned having somehow ridden his swan boat all the way to the Simpsons’ house.
– Why are Lisa and Marge familiar with the lineup of a band called Satanica?
– The show would return to the idea of Ned processing his grief over Maude, and even bring back Rachel Jordan, in season 12’s “I’m Goin’ to Praiseland”. But that episode mostly squanders the measured-but-commendable victory The Simpsons managed to eke out in this one.
– If there was a way to include a star wipe in this review, you can be damn sure I would have done it.
