This evening saw the debut of the third episode in the 36th season of The Simpsons, entitled “Desperately Seeking Lisa” (a play on the title of the 1985 Madonna-starring movie Desperately Seeking Susan), and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.
At the beginning of “Desperately Seeking Lisa,” the title character (voiced, as always, by Yeardley Smith) and her mother Marge (Julie Kavner) have been uncharacteristically getting on each other’s nerves lately, so Lisa is being sent on an overnight trip to Capital City with her aunts Patty and Selma (both also voiced by Kavner). Naturally Lisa has a long list of cultural sites she wants to visit in the city, but Patty and Selma’s priority is to spend an entire day pigging out at a Laramie Cigarettes theme restaurant (Surgeon General’s Warning: “The food here is delicious!”) in the tourist. But after they rather ironically get kicked out of the dining establishment for smoking, Patty and Selma run into some artist friends they had met a year earlier at a Pride parade (guest stars Richard E. Grant from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Molly Shannon from Only Murders In the Building) while they sneer at out-of-towners.
These friends invite Lisa, Patty, and Selma to an art-scene party that evening, but the Bouvier aunts have other plans– namely seen a “Juice-ical” about cranberries– that are also sidetracked by their coming down with a severe case of indigestion from the cigarette restaurant. They pass out in their hotel room (after literally losing their lunches in the toilet) and Lisa sneaks out to join the party in a very trendy part of town. There she encounters dozens of artsy bohemians who she immediately begins to admire, and even helps them move all their new pieces to an art show. Together they wind up at a quite Kafkaesque play directed by the Pulitzer-and-Tony-Award-winning Tracy Letts (creator of August: Osage County). After Lisa accomplishes the secret goal of the play by interrupting it via outspoken compassion for its main character, Letts convinces her that she should go to an upper-class Capital City art academy, though the admission price is far out of her parents’ budget.
Long story short, these new art friends bring Lisa to meet a wealthy benefactor, she passes an extraordinarily brief test, and a check is written for her tuition. But when she returns back to the loft these artists share, she notices her Springfield Elementary schoolmate Martin Prince in a photo with them on the wall. This clues her in to the fact that she is not the first small-town smartie to fall in with this crowd, and then the artists reveal they were really just scamming her so that the old woman’s check would be written out to them (as they certainly aren’t getting by on money made from their art). But a heartbroken Lisa grabs the check and runs out into the city streets, initiating a chase sequence that ends with her floating away on a giant balloon shaped like writer Joan Didion intended for a snooty parade the following morning. Along the way she also encounters Superintendent Chalmers, who is in Capital City having dual, competing romantic trysts with Lunchlady Dora (Tress MacNeille) and Miss Hoover (Maggie Roswell), neither of whom knew about each other… until now.
Lisa’s balloon conveniently floats her back to Springfield Elementary, where she receives a knowing nod from Martin and witnesses Chalmers get the cold shoulder from his two would-be lovers. Then she settles into Miss Hoover’s classroom for a story about a wayward firecracker, and accepts her own humdrum existence outside of big city life. I have to say, in my decades of watching The Simpsons, this is one of the craziest episodes I’ve seen that wasn’t hyper-conceptual like the faux-series-finale series premiere a few weeks ago. It paints an ugly, cynical portrait of urban bohemian life– at one point Molly Shannon’s character reminds Lisa to never forget what being an artist is really about: having rich parents– though I can’t argue that lifestyle doesn’t deserve being brought down a few pegs.
I got some good laughs here, particularly early on as Lisa first arrives in Capital City with her aunts, but the back half of the episode feels so ungrounded that I expected Lisa to wake up from what I could have sworn was an extended dream sequence at the end. So I’ll say “Desperately Seeking Lisa” worked about 50% of the time for me, which isn’t great for The Simpsons’ recent winning streak, but ultimately might make for some fun clips, like the rest of the family staying up until 5:30 AM watching a 12-hour documentary about the history of ringtones while Lisa is away, preventing them from hearing her desperate call for help. That kind of gag is so delightfully off-the-wall that I can’t help but appreciate its boldness.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.