Selma’s Choice has the pedigree of being a part of the nearly (It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show, I’m looking at you.) perfect fourth season of The Simpsons, and really manages to capture the almost effortless sweetness of the show and era, sadly obsolete after the dawn of Seth MacFarland and the demand to keep up with Family Guy’s Can’t-you-take-a-joke meanness. It first aired in 1993, the year I graduated high school, and it was my favorite, which was honestly an odd choice for a dark and pretty miserable kid stuck in a dead-end job demonstrating a bubble-blowing gun outside a large toy story at Pier 39, a tourist-y amalgamation of shops and attractions located in San Francisco’s famed Fisherman’s Wharf. The episode, even at what I assumed was my lowest point, had the kind of genuine loveliness I couldn’t deny.
The episode opens with the Simpson family gathered round the TV, delighted by an ad for the beer themed Duff Gardens (“Where roving gangs aren’t a big problem anymore!) amusement park. Sadly, Marge has to inform them that her Great Aunt Gladys has died, and Duff Gardens will have to wait for another day, and they attend the funeral with her mother and twin spinster sisters, Patty and Selma, in tow. During a video reading of Gladys’ will in the office of Lionel Hutz (“II earn my fee simply by pressing this ‘play’ button. Pretty sweet, eh?”), Selma is struck by her great aunt’s words, and the warning that she and her sister should marry and raise a family “before time runs out,” and she makes the announcement that she wants a baby. Hilarity ensues, in classic Simpsons style, with jokes about her resorting to psychics, video dating, and artificial semination, and despite the sensitive topics, none of it is particularly dehumanizing, or make the viewer unempathetic to Selma’s plight.
When an ordeal, shown in hilarious flashback, with a submarine sandwich taken from a work picnic leaves Homer with a terrible case of food poisoning, Selma Volunteers to bring Bart, Lisa and Maggie to Duff Gardens, where they behave...well, pretty much the way they always do: Bart dares Lisa to drink the water beneath the boat in the It’s a Small World-esque ride, resulting in her going on a bad trip and swimming naked in a beer fountain (“I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!,) and then fudges his height to ride a rollercoaster, almost killing himself in the process. Crestfallen, Selma reveals to Homer that she doesn’t have the wherewithal to raise a child, and admits that all she ever wanted was “a tiny version of herself to hold in her arms.” Cut to her cradling a large, unimpressed iguana named Jub Jub- the companion of the late Great Aunt Gladys- saved by Patty from their mother, who’d been trying to stab him with a hat-pin. With Patty filming, Selma looks lovingly into Jub Jub’s eyes and sings “Natural Woman,” a reference to the scene after Murphy Brown gives birth and holds her son for the first time, at the time, a cultural touchstone. Perfect.
(So, also, yes, I’m old enough to remember when Murphy Brown was a cultural touchstone. Repeat viewing of Selma’s Choice, even nearly thirty years later, brings about the same warm feeling in me, once a sprightful Lisa, then a hopeful Marge, now a bitter Grandpa Simpson telling stories about old TV. )
Nadine Darling is the author of She Came from Beyond! (Overlook Press) and is the winner of the McLaughlin Esstman Sterns First Novel Prize.