What is Lisa's finest hour ? Lisa is at her best I think, when she is struggling with what all children seem to struggle with and that is being accepted by her peers. We did a wonderful episode that aired this season where the family goes on vacation to the beach and she finally meets this group of kids and she does her best to fit in. Bart is absolutely outraged that Lisa should have a friend at all and he really tries to wreck it for her. There's another episode very early on where she really gets a crush on her substitute teacher. She's trying to get from these people whatever it is she lacks in her daily struggle to be just a normal 8 year old, with a couple of gifts. Those are my favourite episodes because they're so smart and so well written and I do think it's because the writers themselves have been misfits at one point, or perhaps all their lives. Writers are often quite introverted, which puts them in a different place. They spend a good deal of time alone so they understand isolation and that struggle to appear normal, when in fact they regard the world through a different lens. How 'real' are The Simpsons ? I gather that one of James Brooks' credos in the beginning was that the Simpsons would never do anything that regular live action people couldn't do. That meant all of the stories had to be character-driven as opposed to situation-driven, which is so much easier with an animated show, where you can have them flying off a cliff and survive. Obviously over the years we had to get away from that somewhat because you run out of things to talk about, but the writers work so hard on that, and again it has to do with the actors not being identified with the characters in the beginning. The Simpsons are an entity, you know, people believe in them and I don't mean in some silly culty way, but they are actually more real than many of the real people on television. Also I think that animation affords you enough distance to say the things you might otherwise not be able to get away with on real television.

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