The Simpsons: 10 Best Episodes From The Past 15 Years

6. Lisa Simpson, This Isn't Your Life

Season 22, Episode 469 - November 2010 Lisa episodes are always a tricky prospect - they can be boring and tedious, but if you avoid them entirely, you lose out on one of the major moral compass points of the show. So there's some fine balance that needs to be done. Lisa Simpson, This Isn't Your Life is an episode that works. It tackles Lisa's obsession with academic success and balances it with the love of her family, while having enough side gags and other plot angles to remain more than just a simple Lisa outing. It focuses on Lisa attempting to attend a private school so that she doesn't wind up like her mother, whose grades dropped from honour student levels after meeting Homer. In other action, Homer's quest to bring home a collectible elf figure for Maggie also resonated with me solely because my own father did something very similar when I was a kid (picking up every single Ghostbusters collectible cup in a series that was being offered by a chain of gas stations at the time). His frustration at this endeavour, and attempts to secure the item, are classic Simpsons. If you watch no other Lisa-centric episode of the last few years, watch this one.