The double-length special is focused on Springfield in the Christmas season.
As is tradition withThe SimpsonsChristmas episodes, the new story fluctuates between hilarious gags and more emotionally resonant elements.
The special boasts plenty of great gags, and highlights the kind of emotional beats that elevate the show.
Screen Rant: There have been plenty of other holiday specials over the course ofThe Simpsons.
What lessons did you want to bring from those episodes to “O C’Mon All Ye Faithful?”
and how did that impact your approach to the episode?
Custom image by Yailin Chacon
With Lisa’s Buddhism, I wanted to go more accurate with her Buddhism.
That image was always so beautiful to me.
I really just wanted to sort of use that and illustrate that story.
The Simpsons is a long-running animated TV series created by Matt Groening that satirically follows a working-class family in the misfit city of Springfield. Homer, a bit of a schmoe who works at a nuclear power plant, is the provider for his family, while his wife, Marge, tries to keep sanity and reason in the house to the best of her ability. Bart is a born troublemaker, and Lisa is his super-intelligent sister who finds herself surrounded by people who can’t understand her. Finally, Maggie is the mysterious baby who acts as a deus ex machina when the series calls for it. The show puts the family in several wild situations while constantly tackling socio-political and pop-culture topics set within their world, providing an often sharp critique of the subjects covered in each episode. This series first premiered in 1989 and has been a staple of Fox’s programming schedule ever since!
Kind of like a children’s religious story.
We haven’t really done that with the Buddhism as much.
Like a Bible story for Sunday school they would sort of animate.
It was sort of nice to do that with that story.
I think it was really beautiful.
This little wood-cut Japanese style was really pretty.
Screen Rant: Something I love about the episode was getting to see Homer and Ralph paired together!
What excited you the most about putting those two together?
Carolyn Omine: Yeah!
Like, I don’t know if they’ve ever really had a conversation!
But it’s very sweet to see them together.
Matt Selman: They’re both kind of childlike in their way, you know?
I mean, Carolyn’s whole episode was about how we wanted to give people a treat.
It’s just like a little delicious Christmas treat.
What’s one of those candies you only get on Christmas?
Carolyn Omine: It’s like somebody’s homemade fudge.
Carolyn Omine: That’s a tough one.
There was a whole side story, which probably can’t be done the same way.
But the Cat Lady got kind of cured.
But then you realize, there’s a whole segment that was seen from the view of her cats.
They actually see her as their Goddess.
When you bring out the tree, they know it’s that time.
Maybe there’ll be another time where it’s all from the point of view of the cat.
Screen Rant: The Ned Flanders plotline of this special is really effective.
It’s so sad and bittersweet and moving, but it’s also still silly.
Finding the balance between the earnest emotion and goofball comedy has always been at the core ofThe Simpsons.
How do you approach that without tipping too hard one way over the other?
That emotion [in “C’Mon All Ye Faithful”] is sad, you know?
There was was something very melancholy about that.
It’s funny, because we wrote out these sort of joke texts because it’s Ned.
He’s sort of his own thing.
And so there is this long list of texts that are just like, ‘Nothing beats an orange!’
or ‘Hand soap, a real winner.’
They’re all these little Ned-isms that are sort of funny, if you just see them.
It’s sort of the situation that makes it sad.
And then we tried to have jokes in there.
I like Ned when he’s human and vulnerable.
All these years for Ned, he’s like the Job of our show.
That Carolyn showed it so kind of realistically and humanistically is really terrific.
That means something is going good if the audience gasps when you want them to gasp.
There was this sort of ‘aww’, and then when somebody answers, that immediately got a gasp.
And then they laughed.
Matt Selman: They laughed over the second joke.
It was once they saw it was Nelson.
Carolyn Omine: I know for sure that was a Joel H. Coen joke.
This meant it could really breathe."
Carolyn Omine: The thing about this one is it’s not a two-parter.
It’s a special.
We wanted to say this isn’t a two-parter because it doesn’t break into two parts.
Matt Selman: I sort of feel this is one and a half amount of plot in two episodes.
This meant it could really breathe.
We had time for the Buddhist segment to breathe, we had time for all the moments to land.
But here, we weren’t really limited by time.
We could add pauses and add moments.
Carolyn had such a clear view of the music in her mind.
There could be more music here, and it’s not rushed.
It’s like a double juicy stocking stuffer, but there’s no cliffhanger in the middle.
There’s no black outs.
You would build to an exciting moment, like the moment in the submarine.
You’d have to have this little pause.
You would pause it at the most climatic moment.
And we didn’t have to do that.
The Simpsons: O, Come On All Ye Faithfulis now streaming on Disney+.
This series first premiered in 1989 and has been a staple of Fox’s programming schedule ever since!
