To be honest, it's difficult to tell if the subplot makes sense on purpose, or if the writers just wanted to make a joke and it just happened to end up making sense. I don't think I had ever put the three scenes together before now.
One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.
> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity.
Perhaps they should have taught you to be less sure of that. So many takes in movies that ended up being the best one are where a punch accidentally did land, something is ad-libbed, a dialogue is mixed up, etc.
To take an example of a very critically acclaimed show: in Breaking Bad the only reason we got Jonathan Banks in the role of Mike is because Bob Odenkirk had a scheduling conflict, and Banks improvised a slap during his audition. Paul Aaron even complained about it indicating that he would not have agreed to it.
It seems like there is a lot of serendipitous in writing and production. That's not what it was about. The point is how much agonizing and second guessing it takes and how many alternatives explored and how many takes, etc before something, anything makes it in the final product.
The lucky break is first a result of a lot of planning and work - and it gets analyzed to death before included - and then probably re-inforced here or there elsewhere. (So that for me, I do notice when I hear movie or TV dialog as completely natural and said exactly right. It's exceptional.)
This is a cartoon though, significantly less adlibbing, everything has already been storyboarded and scripted out etc.
Pixar's approach to making their movies is a fascinating highly iterative process going through many story boards and internal showings using simplistic graphics before proceeding to the final stage to produce a polished product. I wonder how Simpsons do it.
> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.
Not everything, for example I read somewhere that chess "fight" in Tween Peaks was random and didn't adhere to chess rules because no one really paid attention to record or follow moves.
The entire writing room was Harvard grads and people who went on to accomplish impressive things in the industry (eg Conan O’Brien was a writer, David X Cohen was a writer and then went on to cocreate Futurama with Groening). The early writing team was one of the sharpest ever assembled and dismissing it as a “goofy cartoon” is missing the talent behind it just like if you dismissed Futurama in that way.
Lisa's first word is still a personal favourite of mine, especially now as a father.