“Well, here I am, right on time. I don’t see Barney “Let’s crash the rocket into the White House and kill the president” Gumble.” – Homer Simpson
“Actually, he’s been here since sunrise.” – NASA Guy
“Hi, Homer. Since they made me stop drinking, I’ve regained my balance and diction. Observe: I am the very model of a modern major general, I’ve information vegetable animal and mineral.” – Barney Gumble
[Programming Note: I’m way behind on Season 11 Compare & Contrasts, and this post is the first of me digging out to finish them off before Season 24 starts on Sunday.]
Easily the most aggravating aspect of “Days of Wine and D’Ohses” is the way it takes the most central trait of Barney and permanently altered it for no reason other than providing part of a story to one very poorly done episode. This being Season 11, that is only the tip of the iceberg though. To add salt to the wound, not only did they make Barney sober because, well, they could, but they also made him anathema to the Barney we knew before.
In “Days of Wine and D’Ohses”, dry Barney is nothing like Barney in general. He’s prickly and whiney, petulant and self pitying, and he falls to pieces at the slightest difficulty. In short, he’s no fun, either to watch or to be around.
On its own that’s pretty bad, but what makes it even worse is the fact that we’ve seen Barney pull himself out of the bottle before, and not only was he nothing like that fragile wuss, he was awesome! Consider Barney in “Mr. Plow”, who, while not going stone sober or anything, does get himself together to be the best Barney he can be by taking Homer’s business and destroying it with superior service and well aimed gunfire. Or Barney in “A Star Is Burns”, who is acutely aware of his own drunkenness, but is still capable enough to put together a sensitive and wildly popular movie that wins the film festival. And, of course, there’s Barney in “Deep Space Homer”, where we get to see what the normally happy-go-lucky drunk would be like with a 0.0 BAC: still happy-go-lucky, only now he’s fit, attentive and has amazing balance and diction. On The Simpsons, Barney was always Barney, even on the rare occasions when he was doing something other that spending his life at Moe’s.
A talented, if besotted, man.
By contrast, the sober Barney in “Days of Wine and D’Ohses” is nothing like any kind of Barney we’ve seen before. He has no self confidence, gets nervous and filled with doubt at even the tiniest of problems and can’t even go to an AA meeting by himself. He spends most of his time in the episode either freaking out about beer, childishly arguing with Homer, and/or despairing of ever being a decent person. Drunk or sober, those aren’t things we’ve ever seen Barney do.
Barney screaming or losing it, this episode has far more of that than I can fit into an image collage.
The Barney who was Harvard bound before Homer introduced him to Duff as a teenager isn’t like this, nor is the Barney who was kicking ass in the NASA competition, the Barney who fails miserably at monorail construction, or even the Barney who went on the mother of all benders and may have given a guest lecture at Villanova.
What makes the sober Barney of “Days of Wine and D’Ohses” so awful isn’t that he’s sober, it’s that the show seems to have forgotten that while Barney was a drunk, he wasn’t the one-dimensional drunk they made him out to be. Barney was a smart and talented guy with a lot of potential to do more than sit on a barstool and belch. He just didn’t care enough to get off the stool so long as he had a drink in his hand. (Writ larger, Barney is a years long demonstration of the show’s cynical double-take on alcohol: that it really is both the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.) On The Simpsons, he didn’t need to be drinking to be entertaining, though he certainly could be. In “Days of Wine and D’Ohses”, he not only doesn’t drink, but he becomes this entirely new person who can’t handle his friends and doesn’t seem like he’d be much fun to hang out with anyway. It’s not just that they messed with a great character for no reason, they messed with a great character they clearly didn’t understand in the least.
Dead Homer Society 
11 responses to “Compare & Contrast: Barney Drunk and Sober”
That was season 11? It seems like a later season: Not funny, pointless and forgettable.
The problem a lot of times shows do “change basic characteristic of character” plots is that if it is a positive change, the new person is forced into being unlikable to pressure status quo to return. I find these pointless plots frustrating.
It is also important to remember that this was intended to be (shakes head at the thought) “a very special episode.” As such, they had to inject a plot about how hard it is to get sober, “but don’t give up” into Barney’s journey to sobriety as part of the lesson plan.
Damn, it never occurred to me just how amazing Barney is. All this, plus a singing career and a voice like an angel.
“YEAH, WE WANT CRUNCHY! WE WANT CRUNCHY!” Heheh. Barney is hilarious!! My fav. thing he did was when he shot the tires out of Mr. Plow’s truck. That and him donating $50,000 to the dance theatre. I think it’s interesting that Barney is clearly intelligent and into a lot of artistic endeavors (like his film), but you know… he’d rather be in the bar all day. It’s kinda depressing but he’s always remained an interesting character to me.
I read over on that Futurama retrospective blog (http://pajamasalready.wordpress.com/) that many of the Simpsons staff were bored with “drunk Barney” as far back as season 6 and wanted to make him Mr. Burns’s REAL shooter and then REALLY have him in prison for a while. But James L. Brooks suggested Maggie and that was that. Pretty interesting.
I often mark Barney going sober as the fall of the simpsons.
Great writeup and something I was thinking of earlier. They’d done episodes dealing with Barney being sober, and to an even larger degree, “Duffless” dealt with the often-drunk Homer going sober and the problems an addict can face in going clean, so “Day of Wine… Whine… and uh Doh’..ses.. yeah.. akastupidtitlewhogivesafuckifIspellthisright..” is even kinda more redundant and boring and annoying when you realized they changed the character permanently using ideas they’d used before, for, like, nothing. And after this, they kinda went with sober-Barney for a while, still at Moe’s but drinking coffee, and now I think they flipflop between him being sober and drunk, and often while not being a drunk he still acts like a drunk. And either way, he has mostly just disappeared as far as I can tell, most likely because there’s really nothing to do with him after this episode kinda, you know, KILLED HIS CHARACTER. Fuck this show.
You see, this is what happens when you let the lead actor and his wife write an episode…
On the commentary they say that Castellaneta and Lacusta actually wrote this around the time of Season 4, but “Duffless” meant it wasn’t used. So it may well have turned out differently.
Just like with the whole donkey basketball scene hmmm
I pay almost no attention to Zombie Simpsons but I always suspected that there was a PC element to Barney getting sober. ZS seems to be more children orientated (possible for merchandising reasons) so I was wondering if there was some lame idea that it conveyed the wrong message to kids having a character on the show who was constantly drunk.
In all honesty I doubt this had anything to do with it. They were just out of fresh ideas.
If they wanted to be more kid friendly then they wouldn’t have crap like co-dependents day, marge’s playboy photoshoot, corpses, maude death (complete with a total lack of respect) and most importantly bob peeling that guy’s face off (and then it being used twice after in the same ep.)