Lisa’s Last Stand

There’s something weirdly unsettling about The Simpsons when you think about it too hard—a show so domesticated and yellow and safe that people forget it started in the dark corners of The Tracey Ullman Show. Lisa’s vegetarianism became this weird marker of sophistication in a family that lives on donuts and Duff beer, something almost defiant in how specific it was. The show’s been on so long that the horror angle isn’t in some jump-scare adaptation but in watching it calcify, episode after episode, the Simpsons refusing to age or change in any way that matters. The comics that lean into the creepy stuff—the Treehouse of Horror episodes, the fan art that imagines them as grotesque and wrong—maybe they’re just making visible what’s always been true about American entertainment: that anything left running long enough starts to look like a haunting.