Recap / The Simpsons S 23 E 6 The Book Job

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When Lisa discovers that her favorite book series is really the product of committee writing by publishers (with an actress posing as the author), Homer and Bart decide to gain fame the same way — until a real publisher wants to publish their work and change it into yet another vampire love story based on Twilight.

Guest stars Neil Gaiman As Himself, acting as one of Homer and Bart's writing partners, plus Andy García as Slick the publishing agent.

Tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance: Neil Gaiman has a lucrative writing career and is frequently on the bestsellers' list...even though he Never Learned to Read.
• A Degree in Useless: Literature majors are so desperate to make a living that they have to work for soulless executives who don't give them autonomy or credit.
• Adam Westing: Neil Gaiman plays a hilarious Cloudcuckoolander version of himself as the Butt-Monkey on Homer and Bart's writing team, who also turns to be a deceptively brilliant Manipulative Bastard at the episode's end.
• Affectionate Parody: Of heist films.
• Alien Blood: Parodied; When a bunch of kids freak out upon seeing Moe and scream that he's a troll, he pricks his finger to prove that he's human. When he instead bleeds green blood, Moe admits that "the first part's always green, but it turns red!"
• Artistic License: While writing by committee is a real thing, for literature the process is more that one or two people take charge while different drafts and manuscripts are passed to researchers and editors for review. The episode portrays it as everyone having a hand in the direct writing the actual book, which would result in a wildly different tone and style throughout. The system actually better resembles a television writers room, where they might divide up a script to different writers according to act breaks.
• Artistic License – Paleontology:
  • Hilariously discussed. When Homer gets taken away by security for taking a nap inside a dinosaur head he protests that it's not against the law to sleep in a Tyrannosaurus head, to which the guards respond that he's inside an Allosaurus.^note In Homer's defense, the head actually does look more like that of a Tyrannosaurus, having a much bulkier skull shape and none of the brow horns Allosaurus is known for having.
  Homer: I demand to speak to my paleontologist!
  • Milhouse denies that the animatronics seen during the show are real dinosaurs, since dinosaurs are supposed to sing. Judging from the masses' reaction, many of the other children may have had similar beliefs.
  • Zigzagged with the Pteranodon at the dinosaur show. While it lacks pycnofibres^note fur-like covering found on all pterosaurs, it has a pteroid bone^note A small wrist bone unique to pterosaurs that attaches their wing membrane to their shoulder, like this.◊.
• Avengers Assemble: Homer building his Caper Crew-style writing team. He starts by approaching Bart, who's playing a shooting game at an arcade, and from there the two round up Skinner, Patty, Moe (when Lenny is unavailable), and Professor Frink.
• Back to the Womb: Ralph gets scared by the dinosaurs at an arena show and says, "I want to go back in Mommy!" before trying to go up Sarah's dress.
• Basement-Dweller: Principal Skinner joins the crew to have enough money to move out of his mother's house.
• Batman Gambit: Lisa pulls this off by pretending to betray the crew, as she knows that even if the team could reach in to the publisher's office with their original version of the book on a flash drive, there is no way they could put their original version into print without the publisher's password. As part of the plan, she tips off the publisher, and when he types in the password while giving Lisa the flash drive containing the vampire version, Lisa secretly switches the flash drives by hugging Bart to ensure that the original version goes into print instead.
  • However, despite being happy that the team values creativity over profit, Lisa learned too late that Gaiman pulled off a similar trick with a third flash drive that lists him as the author, much to her frustration.
• Becoming the Mask: Team Homer initially made The Troll Twins of Underbridge Academy to make an easy million dollars, but as time went on, they grew more and more invested in the story they've crafted and become outraged when their publisher heavily alters it to be about vampires; they even ripped up the check to ensure that they value their creativity over money. It was also this same trait which motivated Lisa to help the team in tricking the publisher in publishing the original version.
• Butt-Monkey: Neil Gaiman mostly spends the episode having his life repeatedly threatened and harassed by Moe, though it's subverted in the end when he steals the credit for Underbridge Academy.
• Bittersweet Ending: The literary industry is still a hellhole, but Homer's team have won a victory that is meaningful to them... except that Neil Gaiman steals the credit for their story.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Lisa finds out that the author of the Angelica Buttons series is really an actress and that her favorite books are written by the publishers in grueling sweatshop-esque conditions. It gets to the point that fervent environmentalist Lisa wants to burn her old Angelica Button novels out of shame.
  • When Marge tries to defend the books by saying Lisa still liked the stories when she read them, Lisa points out that Betty Crocker was never a real person but an invention of men in The Roaring '20s. Marge pretends not to be hurt and chastises Lisa, but then goes outside and empties all her Betty Crocker goods in the trash.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Neil Gaiman. First he betrays the crew by taking sole credit for the book and its success, and then he poisons his co-conspirator. And it's heavily implied that this is what he has done for every single book ever published under his name.
• Clueless Aesop: Parodied. The dinosaur-themed show the family watches at the beginning of the episode has a forced Green Aesop after the meteorite hits. Lisa thinks the message is sweet, but Bart says the lesson is skewed because if the world is going to be destroyed by an unrelated cause you might as well party while it lasts. Homer, Maggie and Marge all end up agreeing that Bart has a point.
• Composite Character: Spiritually, the author of the Angelica Button series is a committee of writers using a Pen Name calculated for maximum appeal. It also invokes the real practice of Ghost Writers and House Pseudonym, using a form of Uncredited Role that does the majority of the work but doesn't get credit for it.
• Deconstruction: Of the common assertion that ghostwriting is soulless and lazy. Lisa is disgusted that her favorite book series was actually written by a board committee and decides to write her own book to stick it to the men upstairs. Except that she doesn't actually know what to write about, just that she wants to write, and since she insists on doing it herself, she finds herself unmotivated and constantly procrastinating. Homer and Bart's team, however, prove to be much more effective at putting a book together by using their individual talents to inspire and push each other along, and there being multiple men on the job means they're able to stop each other from slacking off, creating their novel in record time. While they're motivated primarily by profit, they're still more motivated than Lisa actually is, and they eventually grow attached enough to their story that they give up the paycheck to get their version of it out there.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: When Moe is accused by kids of being a troll, he pricks his finger to show them that he bleeds red like an ordinary human. The blood that comes out is green. At which point Moe desperately insists that it turns red eventually.
• Entertainingly Wrong: After being outwitted on their heist, the team sadly meet up at the bookstore where they co-wrote Underbridge Academy. They're convinced that they've failed completely, but unbeknownst to them, they've already won: at that moment, they see copies of the novel with its original cover on sale, and people waiting in line to buy it. At which point Lisa shows up to them and explains what she was really doing during the heist.
• Everyone Has Standards: The team's aim from the outset is to pander to preestablished fandoms, but even they look at the dozens of vampire books on the shelves and admit they have to write something different.
• Evil Is Petty: Agnes' oppression of her son extends to not even letting him have his own magnets on their fridge.
• Evil Laugh: "The audiobook is only available... abridged. Abridged!" (cackling, maniacal laughter)
• Executive Meddling: In-Universe. Homer and Bart originally created a fantasy novel that's best described as Harry Potter with trolls, but when it actually gets published, the company plans to turn it into yet another vampire romance series for preteen girls.
• Extranormal Institute: Discussed; Seymour concludes that the trope has been so successful because children can relate to a school setting. The "magic" aspect, however, is necessary because it makes the trope more interesting than schools in real life.
• Fake Defector: When the crew breaks into the printing room, the Executive is aware of this because Lisa informed him in exchange for getting to write a sequel. It turns out she's just tricking him into revealing his password so she can see to it that the original book will be printed instead of the vampire-themed version.
• invoked Follow the Leader: In-Universe, Underbridge Academy is heavily inspired by the Angelica Button series (read: Harry Potter), but it gains enough genuine creativity and talent behind it to elevate the material. Furthermore, the publishers wanted to rewrite it into a poorly-done ''Twilight knockoff, angering the team and motivating them into action to save their story.
• Foreshadowing: After the team is put together, Bart mentions that he feels like they're missing some key role, but he can't think what. If later events are any indication, that role is a man on the inside. The team know stories, but they don't know publishing (note that Homer was distracted from Lisa's anti-system anger by his own greed earlier in the episode), so Lisa's ability to infiltrate the latter ends up being key to their victory.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: invoked If you pause any DVD or streaming video in the right places during the episode, you can see actual story being written, rather than the usual gibberish often used to simulate writing, meaning that either the team at the show were planning to actually make the book in real life and just never got around to it, or they (correctly) assumed people might be curious to what was being written by Homer and Bart's crew and put actual story text in certain shots.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: When Lisa crushes Marge's blissful delusions to deal with "T.R Francis" having done the same thing to hers.
  Marge: I know you're hurting, but that's no reason to lash out at me!
• Ghostwriter: Lisa finds out that all the young adult books (including her favorite "Angelica Button" series) are really just based on market research by the publishing companies and then written by teams of writers desperate for work. The "authors" who have their names on the book are just made up, backstory and all, and are represented by actors. After finding this out, Homer and Bart assemble a team to create their own hit young adult novel, using Lisa as the author to be credited.
• invoked Growing the Beard: As alluded to below, Underbridge Academy is originally written to be Strictly Formula novel with no real intent to be anything above disposable fluff, but the novel's quality significantly improves and it actually ends up as a genuinely good book as everyone gets increasingly invested in it.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: Despite mortal levels of enmity between them, Homer asks his sister-in-law Patty to join The Caper on the basis of her fantasy knowledge. She agrees (when Bart asks too) and ends up having a great time with Homer and the rest of the group.
• Good Capitalism, Evil Capitalism: The bad capitalists are faceless corporations that run literary sweatshops, but Homer's team of profit-motivated entrepreneurs are portrayed as heroic capitalists whose desire for money gradually turns into genuine artistic interest.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Though sometimes Hard Work Hardly Works in Real Life, there are plenty of times when it does, and you shouldn't write off hard work just because of the possibility of this trope happening. While it's initially done through underhanded means, Homer and Bart's group-penned novel is able to succeed through grueling work together, while Lisa doesn't take her own efforts as an author seriously enough and so never pens anything.
  • Creativity is best as a team effort. Homer and Bart's team is ultimately able to pen a novel far more successfully than Lisa is because they have each other to work off of and get inspiration from. Just because you're primarily driven by profit doesn't mean you can't still take pride in your work and produce something genuinely good.
  • Assuming that Viewers Are Morons will only prevent work that is both high-quality and marketable from seeing print. The publishers edit Underbridge Academy into a generic Twilight clone because they're convinced it won't sell, but it actually does, showing that marketers should give audiences a little more credit.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: An in-universe example. If Lisa's reluctance and lack of cue cards before giving her faux-biography is any indication, she improvised it completely on the spot.
• Hourglass Plot:
  • invoked The episode's main story starts with Homer and Bart (and, by extension, the rest of their team) Only in It for the Money and wanting to create a Strictly Formula novel to cater to the masses and publishers, but they find themselves all getting increasingly invested in the novel itself along with actively improving themselves as writers, to the point where they produce a truly good creative work and are outraged when the publishers inflict Executive Meddling on it.
  • In contrast, Lisa starts the story firmly believing in the auteur theory and arrogantly believing that she doesn't need any assistance to help her write her novel. Her novel never makes it off the ground and instead she is the one who ultimately makes a deal (at least appears to) with the corporate publishers to make sure the publishers' version of Underbridge Academy is released.
• Heist Episode: Technically only the last part is an out-and-out caper, but the tone feels like one from the moment Bart and Homer cook up their idea to write a money-making book, with Homer meeting Bart at an arcade and talks in thinly veiled Spy Speak to get him on board. The caper consists of writing a young adult fantasy novel, complete with multiple title cards within the episode showing the part of the heist they are on and the job of the specific members of the "crew." However, when the publisher changes their manuscript, they execute an actual heist to break into the printer and switch manuscripts.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Whichever of Springfield's denizens viewers might have expected to have written a series of "moderately successful children's books", it almost certainly wasn't Moe.
  • Frink is invited into the project solely because he's the first guy Homer could think of who owns a computer, but he readily agrees and is the one to suggest the "Fuzzlepitch" idea.
  • Patty turns out to be a huge fantasy buff and is invited to join the team on the basis of her expertise.
  • Bart's intelligence is not forgotten, as shown when he accurately references Shakespeare's history to win an argument with Lisa.
• Humble Goal: Homer dreams of making enough money to sip cocktails on a beach...in Shelbyville, a nearby town no more famous or exotic than Springfield itself.
• Hypocritical Humor: When Lisa "reveals" herself to the rest of the crew as a traitor, Patty comments that it's always a woman who betrays the team.
• Insane Troll Logic: Mrs. Skinner tells her son to wash her undergarments again just because Homer and Bart saw them.
• It's Personal: The writer team initially cared about making a book for profit. However, they care very deeply about the changes made to their book and decides to fight back against the publishers. Bart initially chastises the team for caring about the book by pointing out that they will lose the money if they do this. However, Skinner convinces him otherwise by pointing out that the epic war featured in the book's backstory that Bart wrote in has been turned into a dance competition. As such, Bart tags along after furiously tearing up the check in disgust.
  Bart: Let's steal back our book.
• It Will Never Catch On: The publishers go out of their way to stop the crew from getting their book published as they intended it to be. As it turns out, the people of Springfield love Underbridge Academy, and its publication is a success for the authors both financially and emotionally (though Underbridge is portrayed as original in comparison to its vampire version).
• Oh, Crap!: After Neil Gaiman sweetly tells Moe that he didn't take a sip of the drink he just poured for Moe because "I'm afraid I don't like the taste... of poison", Moe looks at his emptied cup and sighs "Aww... crap."
• Properly Paranoid: If Moe had gone through with shanking Gaiman when he first showed up, Gaiman wouldn't have been able to betray the team (although that same result could have been achieved just by refusing his request to join...).
• Karma Houdini: Played for Laughs; Neil Gaiman never receives his comeuppance for stealing credit for the team's novel and poisoning Moe at the very end to avoid sharing the profits.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Lisa thinks she can just start writing a novel on her own with no prep work. In real life, it can take weeks, months or even years to prepare to even start writing one on your own, so of course she fails to write a single sentence.
• Mythology Gag: According to the publishers, the original version of Twilight supposedly had a golem instead of a vampire as the supernatural Love Interest. Said golem looks like the one from Treehouse of Horror XVII.
• Never Learned to Read: Neil Gaiman somehow manages to have a writing career despite this.
• Noodle Incident: Homer and Bart repeatedly mention a prior heist they tried to pull in Kansas City going south.
• No OSHA Compliance: The majority of children at the show are terrified by the life-sized animatronic dinosaurs and run within moments of the show starting.
• Omniglot: Apparently, Patty is fluent in numerous fantasy languages, "from Dothraki to Parseltongue."
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Played for Laughs. Bart tells Neil Gaiman to "lose the [English] accent", which prompts Gaiman to speak what amounts to a line of stereotypically American nonsense in the least convincing American accent ever heard by man.
• Out-Gambitted: The Executive thinks he's pulled this on the crew when he recruits Lisa, only for Lisa to secretly take the crew's side. But then everyone turns out to have been dancing on Neil Gaiman's strings.
• Plot Tailored to the Party: In a sense. The team Homer and Bart assemble to assist in writing their novel each bring their own talents that prove vital to the novel's success - Homer and Bart are collectively The Leader, Skinner for his understanding of a child's mind as an elementary school principal, Patty's experience and understanding of the fantasy genre, Moe having previously published several moderately successful children's books, and Professor Frink providing a computer for them to write their story on. Neil Gaiman is later included due to his own experience as a widely successful fantasy author.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Homer and Bart's writing team consists of Principal Seymour Skinner, Patty Bouvier, Moe Syzlak, Professor Frink, and Neil Gaiman.
• Raptor Attack: The dromaeosaurids at the dinosaur show are Jurassic Park-styled. Justified in that they are just costumes.
• Self-Deprecation: It's unclear which type of author (as presented in the show) the Simpsons writers identify with, but both types are decidedly flawed.
• Series Continuity Error: The family attended the midnight release of the final Angelica Button book in "Smoke on the Daughter" in a scenario analogous to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here, the series is not only ongoing but is Extruded Book Product released at a rate of ten installments per year.
• Serious Business: The team is terrified when they first hit writer's block, instantly jumping to the idea that they should flee the country and get facial reconstruction surgery. Bart halts them with a gunshot ^note actually, a recording of a gunshot from a toddler's interactive book about cowboys and suggests they try a new approach, after which they get back in the groove again.
• Shout-Out:
  • The episode's title is a reference to The Bank Job, and the whole episode is one long Homage to Ocean's Eleven.
  • As previously shown in the series, the Angelica Button novels are an obvious Affectionate Parody of the Harry Potter series. In another reference to Harry Potter, Bart later remarks that Aunt Patty has "read enough fantasy novels to choke a hippogriff." Patty is also revealed to speak Parseltongue.
  • Some of the fantasy novels on Patty's bookshelf include "The Winkles of Elfinshire," "Percy Sledge and the Olympians," "Dragonfriends of Plonk," "Cloud Atlas 2: Cumulus Rising," "The Body Snatcher in the Rye," and "Booze Cruise of the Dawn Treader."
  • When Lisa is telling her fake backstory to the TweenLit CEO, the latter briefly mentions R. L. Stine and Goosebumps.
  • When Homer and Lisa chase after T.R.Francis at the dinosaur show, they pass by a group of actors still in their dinosaur costumes reenacting The Far Side cartoon "The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct".
  • The dinosaur show at the start is of course a pastiche of the Walking with Dinosaurs arena show.
• The Smurfette Principle: Patty is the only female member of Homer and Bart's writing team.
• The Spark of Genius: The creative version of this trope is deconstructed, with Homer and Bart's group effort being shown to be a more successful and clever way of writing a novel as opposed to Lisa's solo effort, as she's unable to properly focus herself. The episode all but states that no one on their own really has the creative wherewithal to be able to write "the Great American Novel", and instead the most successful artists take inspiration from others (intentionally or not).
• Special Guest: Two - Neil Gaiman As Himself, and Andy García as Slick.
• Spy Speak: Played for Laughs between Homer and Bart as they discuss breaking into children's fantasy publishing.
  Bart: Whatever the job is, I'm not interested.
  Homer: A million bucks has changed stupider minds than yours.
  Bart: I like the beat; play me the tune.
  Homer: We're taking down kids who read.
  Bart: Chapter-book crowd? That's a juicy peach, but what's the cream?
  Homer: I'm putting together a tween lit gang-write.
  Bart: Tween lit gang-write?
  Homer: Tween lit gang-write. But this Babar needs a Zephir.
  Bart: A Zephir?
  Homer: You're the Zephir.
  Bart: This better not turn out like Kansas City.
  Homer: It won't be like Kansas City.
• Strictly Formula: The Angelica Buttons series and other popular books. Our protagonists try to make some quick money by writing a book the same way, but accidentally evolve the story into something good, become attached to it, and fight to prevent Executive Meddling from ruining it.
• Take That!: The whole episode is one to the idea of the "lone auteur," with the success of the novel penned by Homer and Bart's team showing that the creative process is (however distanced) ultimately a group effort, while Lisa intentionally trying to make her novel just on her own is shown to make it doomed from the start.
• Tempting Fate: After Lisa explains how she tricked the Executive into publishing the crew's original story, she comments that the best part is that she's been credited as the author. She then opens a copy of the book and is outraged to learn that Neil Gaiman got that credit.
• Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: Subverted in the sense that despite being initially appalled at the writing by committee strategy, the team actually find the collaboration and end product satisfactory creatively. This contrasts Lisa trying to write by herself, allowing any and all distractions keep her from writing anything. But once the book was bought by the publisher, their focus groups and efforts to follow recent trends made them rewrite the book away from their efforts to be a bit more original (such as using trolls instead of vampires).
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: After it's revealed to the viewers that the company published the original book instead of the vampire-themed version, Lisa explains how it happened. Knowing the crew would fail without the Executive's computer password to allow them to send the book's original version to the printing machines, she pretended to betray them so the Executive would trust her with the password and she would insert the pendrive with the original book instead of the one with the vampire story. Then she sees Neil Gaiman credited as the author instead of her and the next scene features Gaiman commenting that Lisa never thought there might be three pendrives.
• Wham Line: An in-universe example. The first Underbridge Academy book ends with the heroes receiving a message that says "Your parents are still alive."
• Wham Shot: The Reveal on the inside dust jacket of the published Underbridge Academy that Neil Gaiman is being accredited as the author.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Invoked with the presentation at the museum featuring realistic and genuinely terrifying dinosaur animatronics and costumes, making it more on the horror side of Jurassic Park than the whimsical side. Kids run screaming out of the arena and Milhouse is shaking in fear holding a Barney doll wondering why they aren't singing.
• Wild Card: Ultimately, the conflict between the team authors and "big money" is decided by Lisa, who had been a neutral party up until them.