"The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants" is the seventh episode of the twenty-third season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.
In the episode, Homer becomes an account manager for Mr. Burns after successfully hosting a viral marketing event for Krusty the Clown.
To make it popular, the agents insist that Krusty hold a tastemaker party at the home of a Springfield trendsetter.
Marge discovers that he has double-booked the weekend while both rafts float near a waterfall, and is upset that he chose to do work on a family outing.
"The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants" was written by Jeff Westbrook and directed by Steven Dean Moore.
[2] Weiner is the creator, writer, and showrunner of the television show Mad Men, in which Slattery portrays the character Roger Sterling.
[6] "The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants" even recreated a scene from Mad Men, in which a lawnmower runs loose in an office.
[4] In an interview with IGN in 2011, the showrunner of the episode, Al Jean, named Mad Men as one of the two television shows he always makes time to watch.
[13] The show received a 2.6 Nielsen rating in the demographic for adults aged 18–49, which was a 4% drop from the previous episode "The Book Job", and a six percent audience share.
[14] It was preceded by The Cleveland Show and became the highest-rated program in Fox's Animation Domination lineup that night in terms of total viewers, finishing higher than Family Guy (5.50 million), American Dad!
[15] For the week of November 21–27, 2011, "The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants" finished in 21st place in the ratings among all network prime-time broadcasts in the 18–49 demographic.
[16] Since airing, "The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants" has been generally received as being average in quality by television critics.
"[4] Similarly, Jason Hughes of AOL TV commented that "[w]hile it was a charming enough episode, there were no stand-out moments of clever satire or unexpected twists.
[9] On the Mad Men parody, Childs found comedic potential in Homer's transformation into Don Draper, but concluded that this was "where the episode could have gotten very funny very fast, but it doesn’t bring any of these jokes home."
He further elaborated that "Don Draper is a sad character, true, but there is some real comic potential in his pretensions and vanity.