‘The Simpsons’ Season Premiere Illustrates How Much Lisa Has Changed Since the Classic Era

Even though The Simpsons has been on the air for nearly four decades, most residents of Springfield haven’t really changed that much.

After all, Homer is still a dum-dum who loves donuts. Chief Wiggum continues to be a wildly incompetent cop. And Mr. Burns remains an evil, corrupt billionaire — much to the chagrin of the real world’s nuclear energy industry. 

But one core character who has evolved quite a bit since the early days of the show is Lisa Simpson. 

Think about it: Lisa became a Buddhist and a vegetarian — not just for one or two episodes, but for the rest of the series so far. We can thank Paul and Linda McCartney for the latter development’s permanence, since they only agreed to guest star in “Lisa the Vegetarian” on the condition that Lisa not go back to meat-eating immediately afterwards. 

In the Season 37 premiere, Lisa makes another bold leap: she becomes a thief.

“Thrifty Ways to Thieve Your Mother” finds Lisa and her new fashion-obsessed friends burgling homes containing vintage ‘90s clothes. The scheme isn’t Lisa’s idea, and to be fair, she rejects the plan at first. But Lisa eventually finds a way to rationalize breaking into homes and stealing people’s belongings.

This is a far cry from the Lisa Simpson we saw when the show first began. Specifically, in Season Two’s “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment,” Lisa becomes seriously concerned about the issue of theft. Her opposition to stealing is so extreme, Lisa even urges her mom to pay for the two grapes she tastes in the grocery store. 

But the bulk of the episode is about Lisa’s concern that Homer’s illegal cable hook-up is immoral and will therefore lead to the family’s eternal damnation. 

Obviously Lisa is no longer a Christian, and likely isn’t afraid of being consumed by hellfire over cable TV and stolen grapes. But even before her conversion, Lisa did dabble in some light robbery in Season Three’s “Separate Vocations,” which found a disillusioned Lisa stealing the school’s teachers editions in an effort to embarrass Springfield Elementary’s educators. 

But obviously there’s a big difference between purloining a few textbooks and breaking and entering. Lisa’s latest escapade illustrates that her moral code is quite a bit more relaxed than it used to be.

Hopefully, Lisa’s latest criminal salience doesn’t mean that she’s one step closer to becoming the serial killer we briefly saw in “Treehouse of Horror XXXIV.”