(courtesy IMDb (c) Disney+)
The Simpsons are known for their irreverence and willingness to skewer all the weird and strange and bombastically expressed pomposities of life.
But for all the propensity of the 36-season-long, Matt Groening-created show to parody and satirise and push the critical envelope, it has demonstrated over more than a dozen Christmas specials that when it comes to the festive season, it’s happy to get a whole lot more serious than normal and takes its characters into some very long, dark nights of the soul, and of course, back again.
In the all-new Disney+ exclusive special, O C’mon All Ye Faithful, Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) are the ones in the seasonally existential hot seats, the first becoming convinced he’s Santa after a hypnotic trick to convince him he can be a good gift giver goes awry, and the second having a severe crisis of faith, believing for a time there is no god, a loss of belief that creates a hugely amusing but somehow still affecting weird Christmas experience for religiously conditioned sons Rod and Todd (Pamela Hayden and Nancy Cartwright).
The catalyst for all this deep seasonal rumination is the arrival of British mentalist-illusionist-writer Derren Brown, a real person by the way, who arrives in town ostensibly to get Springfield’s Christmas cheer back but who ends up causing a huge amount of chaos.
If you’re wondering what a real-life British mentalist is doing in a The Simpsons Christmas special, then let the double episode’s writer Carolyn Omine explain:
I had a really bad 2023. I had a couple of family members die and a lot of drama, and I had to do a lot of travel. Some of it was international, so I ended up watching a lot of YouTube. Part of it was YouTube, and part of it was wanting to look for certain things when you’re in a dark place. Derren Brown was very comforting to me because it was wildly entertaining, but there was something very deep about it as well. It seemed like it was a light and fun reality show, but there’s also these experiments he did. Like he made an entire town think this statue was lucky, and it ends up being very moving and a story about the beauty of humans. Even though he’s a cynic and a stoic, there’s a beautiful humanity that comes through. (CRACKED)
His self-serving need to film a special in Springfield – like many of the people who appear in The Simpsons, he is affectionately parodied, obviously with the full cooperation of the person himself – where he purports to bring the magic and wonder of Christmas actually does it for real for both Homer and Ned but in wholly different ways.
Homer, who proves to have a very weird and hilarious reaction to being hypnotised, becomes convinced he is Santa, aided by a characteristically delusional Ralph Wiggum (Nancy Cartwright), even going to far as to manifest a beard and moustache, reasoning that he must be Santa because his belly is like jelly.
He is cured of his delusion but Homer’s fix triggers a massive crisis of faith for Ned who isn’t sure anymore what he believes and right at Christmas too!
Both men get to the end of their long dark Christmas nights, but not without a great deal of fun and a sizeable amount of introspection which turns out to be quite affecting (and almost heartbreakingly sad because people like Ned don’t lose their faith and just skip off to something else; it ruins them and Ned is no different).
O C’mon All Ye Faithful is the perfect Christmas special that is hugely funny and thoughtfully humanistic, and which proves that while life can be bleak and terrible at times, even at the most wonderful time of the year, there is still wonder and magic to be found if your heart is open it.
O C’mon All Ye Faithful streams on Disney+