In November an unlikely current of opinion was created: those who continued to pay attention to The Simpsons argued that, against all odds, the family created by Matt Groening was in a good creative moment. The scripts were once again well structured, focusing on the conflicts of the characters, and the more experimental exercises contributed to getting out of the routine. And, after the recommendations offered in this article, comes a new example of good television: When Nelson met Lisa.
The episode’s title isn’t especially cryptic: it centers on a meeting between Nelson Muntz, the most popular bully at Springfield school, and Lisa, the nerdyest student. If in the eighth season the screenwriter Mike Scully delved into the unresolved romantic tension between these two students, in the thirty-fourth it is the turn of the screenwriter Ryan Koh to push this story into the future. Are they predestined to be attracted despite the opposite of their personalities and intellectual concerns?
As always with The Simpsons, the line between what is canon and what is not is blurred: as they live in an eternal moment, without growing or aging, the viewer can never know what future elements will end up being the truths of the characters. And the episode raises a mature Lisa who, after graduating from college, finds Nelson as a professional ‘pusher’, her only skill. Would she rather be with him or with an adult Hubert Wong, now a successful engineer and businessman, and therefore a better match for the intellectual?
When Nelson met Lisa, which with its title evokes Norah Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally, draws as much from romantic comedy as from less comedic titles. The melancholic tone adopted by the encounters between the two characters even leads one to think of Richard Linklater’s Before Dawn, both because of the characters’ need to experience a unique and transcendental moment (and that could lose its meaning if they are lost sight of) as for the missed opportunities that practically pass before your eyes.
Koh, who has been on The Simpsons’ payroll since 2015, isn’t carried away by the weight of studio cameos, which this time include a Marvel superhero like Simu Liu. If the episode is intelligent, it is because of how its first act is written, the one that takes Lisa to the bell tower, and for knowing how to take advantage of the imaginary accumulated by the fictional universe since the beginning of the series in 1989.
With this episode it is confirmed that, despite the fact that The Simpsons in theory has its best times inevitably in the past, it is in a good moment. Perhaps it no longer needs to reach certain levels of quality and inspiration after its cultural impact and having become television history, but this creative resurrection behind the scenes and the way in which it establishes the emotional component in the episodic plots is appreciated.