When The Simpsons was at its peak, they could afford to leave gold like this on the cutting room floor.
Kirk van Houten, the father of Millhouse, is one of the underappreciated secondary characters that helped make The Simpsons into such a great show during its glory years.
A little like Gil Gunderson, it always seems to be the case that just when things couldn’t get any lower for Kirk, society came back to hit him with another slap in the face.
Although, to be fair, he didn’t help himself.
Kirk’s struggles in the show are probably best depicted in ‘A Millhouse Divided’ in Season Six, when the friction between him and his wife, Luann, comes to a head and she tells him she wants a divorce.
The news prompts Kirk to enter into a downward spiral as he is soon informed that he is being let go from his job at the cracker factory (where he used to be a big wheel) in what is an incredibly frank and emotion-free meeting with his boss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Le4sGUeXTk
Clip via Bill Murry
That scene is amongst the most regularly-quoted by fans of The Simpsons, but it could have been even better immediately afterwards had a follow-up scene not been deleted from the script due to time constraints.
Josh Weinstein, a writer on the show, posted a picture of the original first draft on Twitter earlier this week, a first draft that would have piled on the misery even further for Kirk after his dismissal.
This would have been great…
https://twitter.com/Joshstrangehill/status/865040430143946752
Interestingly, however, Weinstein also revealed that a rewriting of the first draft led to the inclusion of ‘Can I borrow a feeling’, a song which received a less than ringing endorsement from Homer and failed to win back Luann’s affections following a typically pathetic attempt to do so by Kirk.
https://twitter.com/Joshstrangehill/status/865352970749173760
Already one of the show’s great episodes, we can’t help but feel that the inclusion of the deleted scene would have made it even better.
We’re just thankful they didn’t see fit to omit possibly the most cutting comeback in the history of television…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul6UcvNX4o8
Clip via FoxAnimationOfficial
