They finally made a worthwhile curling TV episode
🎵 In The Great North
You may remember when The Simpsons did an episode in 2010 to coincide with the Winter Olympics. It wasn’t bad. Homer and Marge discovered a curling club in Springfield and took to it so quickly and so passionately that they became team USA at the Olympics for the demonstration sport of mixed curling.
They honored the sport fine, despite some trite motifs such as Marge being good at housecleaning therefore she was a good sweeper, ha ha ha. But it was one of the litany of passing fancies in the show. It also took them 21 season to get to the curling episode, and it’s not coming back.
The Great North, made by the creators of Bob’s Burgers, is a story of a single dad of four voiced by Nick Offerman. It seems to center around his only daughter Judy (Jenny Slate). The fifth episode of the series is about curling, and it’s not your typical “family discovers it and decides to try it.” No, in this case their hometown of Lone Moose, Alaska has a curling club (with an attached restaurant called the Three Sheets Bar), and Beef Tobin, the father, plays in a senior curling league (or “the over-36 curling league,” as he likes to call it). He needs a coach for their next game and wants to ask Judy due to her wealth of knowledge and natural ability. But he’s concerned about her intensity, which in the past led to a lot of broken brooms and making everybody cry, especially her own teammates.
So that’s the premise. I won’t spoil the whole episode, but with the show still in its first season, there is a chance that curling reappears in future episodes, perhaps not as the plot, but at least backdrop. Especially since it’s a small town in Alaska — there can’t be that many places of note.
And the animators really knew what they were doing with the nuances of the club: the sweepers were in the closed position. The scoreboards looked authentic. There’s a very much deserved Anette Norberg shoutout. Yes, there were some weird things such as the hack built into the back of the house, and supposedly veteran curlers bringing food and drinks onto the ice, but the important thing here is they acknowledged the sport was weird, but it’s a way of life in Lone Moose.
There’s also an exchange at the beginning that I quite enjoyed:
HONEYBEE: I have to be honest. I don't totally get curling.
BEEF: Well, it's an exquisite game with complexities that could fill a thousand books, so no one ever totally "gets it."
Almost as good as this exchange:
And you probably saw this already, but if you didn’t — heck, even if you did — here’s Greg Smith’s wonderful circus shot for two points, which he pretty much had to try because it was the Brier and he was losing.
Then on the other side you have Kevin Koe’s wild card team, whose star-studded lineup features three Olympians, three gold medals, six different Briers, and an alternate who is the team chiropractor and hasn’t … wait, what?
