10 Times The Simpsons Ruined Homer's Life

With Homer and Abe’s relationship being as strained as it always has, it was really no surprise that this carried over into the next generation. Homer and Bart have their loving moments (Bart’s the most inclined to join in with Homer’s antics, after all), but the young troublemaker and his exasperated father often fail to see eye to eye.

Many times over the course of the show’s long run, they’ve expressed a wish to be apart from each other. Late in Season 4, we see a lot of these feelings come to a head in “Brother From Another Planet.” In this episode, Homer forgets to pick his son up after a soccer match, the last straw in Bart’s mind. Tired of his father’s neglectful behaviour, he signs up for the Bigger Brothers program, pretending that his father has left him.

Homer learns of Bart’s new father figure, a young man named Tom, and is devastated. In retaliation, he applies to the program himself and is assigned a young boy named Pepi to care for. As always, the situation resolves itself and father and son begrudgingly reconcile after Homer and Tom fight, but there’s still something fundamentally wrong here.