BBC Television Shakespeare production had a style referred to as "stylized realism"; the environments are suggestive of their real life counterparts, the foregrounds are broadly realistic representations, but the backgrounds tended to be more artificial; "a representational context close to the actors, with a more stylized presentation of distance." Jan Spoczynski won Designer of the Year at the 1985 Royal Television Society Awards for his work on this episode. The "Prefaces to Shakespeare" episode for "Much Ado About Nothing" was presented by Kenneth Haigh who had played Benedick in a 1976 Royal Exchange Theatre production directed by Braham Murray. The "Shakespeare in Perspective"
Much Apu About Nothing succeeds as a savage satire on the scapegoating of immigrants. Homer has never been so frighteningly dumb, although he does come through with a rousing liberal speech." The episode is "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening's third favorite episode of the show. The episode received a negative review from Dave Foster of DVD Times. He considered "Much Apu About Nothing" to be one of the season's most "tiring" episodes, "mostly because Apu is not a strong enough character to focus an episode on no matter how much writer David Cohen develops him". Foster commented that the episode deals with a political