My Seven Favourite Simpsons Episodes

As I’ve already documented, this has been an incredibly difficult list to make. I will therefore not complicate it any further by saying which of these are better than which others, but simply list them in alphabetical order. Here goes nothing:

1. Bart On The Road I much prefer this to the novel of (almost) the same name, which I read last year and found utterly tedious. The plot of this episode is stretching the old plausibility a bit further than Classic Simpsons normally did, with a 10-year-old posing as a 25-year-old. Even with a very convincing fake ID, Bart’s fooling nobody. However, I’m happy to suspend my disbelief for the series of brilliant lines featured in this episode (“This ID is completely fake!”, “I’m going away for a week, see ya,” “We could rent a carpet shampooer,” “Bart, Nelson hit me!” “He sure did,” “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title,” “That’s it, back to Winnipeg!”, “Nothing up there except boxes and boxes of unsold wigs. Are you gentlemen gonna buy some wigs, or ain’tcha?”, “A cup holder! Bart, we gotta stop and get a cup,” “This never would have happened if we’d gone to Macon, Georgia,” “Diablo Canyon 2, why can’t you be more like Diablo Canyon 1?”, “You are, as we say in Latin, a dorcus mallorcus,”) and so on and so forth. The sub-plot with Homer and Lisa bonding is one I enjoy, without being a classic, and I like the stuff with Principal Skinner, especially the fact that the whole thing is essentially his fault.

2. Brother From Another Series This was always going to make the list. Casting David Hyde Pierce as Kelsey Grammer’s brother was a rather inspired, if not especially original, move, which absolutely made this episode. This is the last of the run of five classic Sideshow Bob episodes which began with Black Widower, all of which I’d like to include if I could. After this one, Bob was used more as a ratings grabber than because there was a genuinely good story for him, at least in my opinion, because he was one of the most popular characters (and my personal very favourite) on the show. The dynamic between Frasier Bob and Niles Cecil is brilliant throughout, familiar yet different at the same time. Lines such as “Your children are no more…than a pair of troublemakers,” “Shake it, madam, capital knockers,” “I forgot to mention, I’m planning to blow up the dam with you inside,” “Truth, huh? That sounds like the testimony of Crazy Old Lisa Simpson,” and “He’s just a little shy because I’ve tried to kill him so many times,” will live long in the memory, and continue to raise a laugh every single time.

3. Cape Feare Another of the Great Sideshow Bob Appearances, and the first episode I ever saw. I was about eight or nine years old, round at my friend’s house, and he told me I should watch it. He was right, I should; from then I was hooked, and The Simpsons became must-see TV for me, every weekday at 6 on BBC2. Sometimes, they would show two episodes back-to-back, which was just the best. Perhaps it being my first experience of The Simpsons is one of the reasons I love Cape Feare so much, but I don’t think it’s as big a factor as the brilliance of the episode. The rake scene is a particular favourite of mine, and almost every one of Bob’s lines is written and delivered perfectly. “Bake him away, toys,” “This coffee’s too hot,” “Come on, leave town. I’ll be your friend,” “It doesn’t work if you invite him,” “I shall send you to heaven before I send you to hell,” “Use a pen, Sideshow Bob,” “Pee-pee soaked heckhole,” and “The FBI Light Opera Society Sings The Complete Gilbert & Sullivan,” are just some of the highlights of this one, as well as Bob singing the HMS Pinafore score on the boat.

4. Homer Vs. The Eighteenth Amendment Done partly in the style of a 1920s/30s film noir, the one-and-only appearance of Rex Banner sees him chasing Homer “Beer Baron” Simpson around Springfield to stop him supplying bevvy to the townsfolk. Parody flows from every pore, and there are some great visual moments, such as Rex sitting in the diner with his ice cream and sparklers, and him raising his eyebrow at the telegrams. One of The Simpsons’most famous lines comes from this episode: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems,” but some of my favourites include “Look at me, Rex Banner, I have a new hat,” “42 bathtubs please…I said 42!”, “The innocent words of a drunken child,” “Take that badge out of your mouth! You’re police officers,” and “I’m the prime minister of Ireland!” are some of my favourites from this one.

5. Lisa’s First Word I love all of the flashback episodes (or at least, the early ones, such as The Way We Was, I Married Marge, and And Maggie Makes Three) but this is my favourite of them. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but I do love this one so. I like seeing the genesis of Homer’s relationship with Flanders, and Lisa’s relationship with Bart. “We’re gonna start doing it in the morning?”, “You guys wanna play Stickball?”, “A baby and a free burger,” “He became Francine back in ‘76, then he joined that cult,” “Takes one to know one…Swish!”, “I almost swallowed some of the juice,” “I like those odds,” and “Bart can kiss my hairy yellow butt,” rank among my highlights. I really, really like the flashback; it’s one of my favourite narrative devices.

6. Lisa The Iconoclast Heists, crimes and misdemeanours, scams, get-rich-quick schemes, capers and uncovering shady truths are among my favourite things to happen in fiction. Lisa discovering that Jebediah Springfield was a fraud made for a great episode, and is the kind of theme which embiggens the show, although isn’t terribly cromulent. I particularly love the stuff with the silver tongue and the George Washington portrait, and Donald Sutherland is always great even if you can’t see him. Homer’s town cryer sub-plot is also very entertaining. My favourite lines include “You’re banned, you and your children and your children’s children…for three months,” “One, where’s the fife? And two, gimme the fife,” “I shouldn’t have let you let me get carried away,” “Can’t we have one meeting that doesn’t end with us digging up a corpse?”, “Ye olde toaste,” and “You will have the hat cleaned and then return it.”

7. Raging Abe Simpson And His Grumbling Grandson In: The Curse Of The Flying Hellfish Remember what I said about heists and capers? While not exactly a heist, this episode has a lot of the same features, as well as shady truths, crimes and misdemeanours, and is certainly a caper. It also has flashbacks; what more could you want? I don’t know exactly what more I can say about it, it’s just absolutely brilliant. The title alone is most excellent, the plot is gripping, and it’s very, very funny. If you’ve never seen it, you absolutely should (same goes for all of these episodes, obviously). I love the Grampa/Mr. Burns dynamic, and it’s one of Burns’ finest episodes, although he has quite a few, and it’s definitely Grampa’s best. Lines in this script include: “We had to say ‘dickety,’ because the Kaiser had stolen our word for ‘twenty’,” “Ah, Del Monte. Enjoy them, old man; they will be your last,” “I spent three years on that turlet,” “The fortune doesn’t matter, boy, what matters is that you’re safe. Now let’s get that fortune!”, “I’ll be in the car, dudes,” “How long was that?”, “I got this in the Second World War II,” and various others.

Of the episodes I left out, the hardest to omit were Duffless, Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo, The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace, and Who Shot Mr. Burns? All true classics, but there’s no room for them in a seven-episode list. If I’d made the call on a different day, any one of them could have made it. I may also have included Sideshow Bob Roberts and/or Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming, since both are excellent, but I didn’t want too much Bob on the list.

I really do love Sideshow Bob. Just in case you hadn’t got that.