Spoilers ahead for the “Simpsons” season 36 episode “Desperately Seeking Lisa.”
Since time immemorial (that is, the early ’90s), “The Simpsons” has done countless pop culture parodies. Its annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes, in particular, have been responsible for spoofing famous horror movies like “The Shining,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” as well as darker TV series such as the popular anime show “Death Note.” Among the iconic animated sitcom’s more frequent targets, however, is Martin Scorsese, the Oscar-winning filmmaker whose classics like “Goodfellas,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Raging Bull” alone have inspired multiple episodes of “The Simpsons.”
Without a doubt, though, the show’s best Scorsese sendup to date was the one based on his 1991 thriller “Cape Fear,” which became the basis for one of the all time greatest episodes of “The Simpsons” — “Cape Feare.” It’s a classic installment that not only has the Simpson family terrorized by Sideshow Bob, but is also full of memorable slapstick gags. It’s an episode so good that it actually inspired a post-modern play and was even banned in Germany for a period. Likewise, for all the young millennials too young to have seen “Cape Fear” when it debuted in theaters, the episode was their first exposure to the film, which had just been released two years prior. Now, in season 36, “The Simpsons” has poked fun at another Scorsese film, albeit one that never got the kind of praise or attention it deserved — “After Hours.”
Season 36, episode 3, “Desperately Seeking Lisa,” follows Lisa Simpson as she spends a weekend in Capital City with her aunts Patty and Selma. But what starts out as a rather dull trip becomes an avante-gardist nightmare in the small hours of the night, with the middle Simpson child on the run from a mob of pretentious local artists across the city who think she’s committed a crime.
The Simpsons parodies After Hours with hilarious results
In “After Hours,” Griffin Dunne plays an uptown Manhattan office worker who ends up going through the worst night of his life after venturing downtown, believing he’s about to hook up with a woman he met earlier that evening. Most of the film involves Dunne’s character going from one awkwardly tense encounter to another and getting entangled in increasingly worse-looking misunderstandings until a mob starts chasing him around the artsy SoHo district. It’s a spectacular movie and a clear influence on recent dramatic thrillers like “Uncut Gems,” where the whole goal is to leave audiences sweating in discomfort and anxiety.
In “Desperately Seeking Lisa,” Lisa thinks she’s about to fulfill her dream of becoming part of the art scene, but ends up on the run through the streets of Capital City in the middle of the night after a mob accuses her of stealing art. It’s a hyper-specific parody about a piece of art not that many people know about, but also one that “The Simpsons” can only do now after airing so many episodes. As co-showrunner Matt Selman explained to Animation Scoop, “We can do it because we have this amazing creative freedom and people expect us at this point to go deep on unexpected worlds.”
What makes the parody even more interesting is the fact that “After Hours” is far from one of Scorsese’s better-known movies. Though considered a cult classic, the film wasn’t a hit, and given how modern audiences don’t really watch older movies (in no small part because of how hard they are to access), it’s funny to realize that many people might think of “Desperately Seeking Lisa” as an original plot, rather than a parody. Indeed, if you haven’t seen Scorsese’s film, the episode still works as a very strange, dreamlike plot that’s cartoonishly absurd and tense. For those who have watched “After Hours,” though, the moment where Dunne himself cameos as the voice of an actor playing Gregor Samsa in a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” takes on an extra meaning, given how much Kafka influenced “After Hours.”
“The Simpsons” season 36 airs new episodes Sundays on Fox.