The Best ‘Simpsons’ Side Characters Who Still Haven’t Had Their Own Episodes
Through 762 total Simpsons episodes, how the hell has Lenny never had a single episode to himself? He doesn’t even have a clock!
You’d think that, 35 seasons and 35 years into the longest-running American sitcom of all time, no yellow, lemon-shaped stone would be left unturned and every single Springfieldian would have their own episode out of the sheer necessity of new original storylines. There’s only so many different iterations of the whole “Lisa feels like an outcast because she’s so much smarter and more cultured than everyone else” plot, so the writers naturally have to expand their focus and tell stories about the characters outside of the titular nuclear family every now and then in order to pad out the 20-plus episode seasons that come out every year.
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And, yet, each and every successive Simpsons writers’ room has decided that certain fan-favorite characters aren’t ready to step into the spotlight. Here are the top Simpsons side characters who should have had their own plot lines by now, starting with…
Lionel Hutz
Okay, obviously, there’s a very good, very dark reason why we’re never going to get an entire storyline featuring Springfield’s most underprepared ambulance-chaser, considering that The Simpsons wisely retired the character of Lionel Hutz following the tragic death of Phil Hartman. However, there were seven years between the character’s introduction in “Bart Gets Hit By A Car” and Hartman’s murder when The Simpsons could have told the attorney’s story. It’s a damn shame we never learned what really went down between Hutz and Judge Snyder’s son.
Helen Lovejoy
The reverend’s wife takes a lot of flak for her judgmental temperament and “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” sanctimony, but we only really see the insufferable gossip in an auxiliary role through her relationships to the other characters around her — whether it’s her devout husband or her many Mean Girls-esque women’s groups. Who is Helen when she’s not around the people she feels the need to either impress or oppress? We’d gladly spend 22 minutes figuring out the answer to that question.
Dr. Hibbert
Despite being in the Simpsons family’s lives since Season Two’s “Bart the Daredevil,” Dr. Julius Michael Hibbert, M.D. hasn’t had a single opportunity to be the medical main character of an episode. The closest we’ve come to a Hibbert-heavy plot line was when he played the maniacal, mutating villain of the “Treehouse of Horror XIII” story “The Island of Dr. Hibbert,” but that was hardly a deep-dive into the character himself. We’d like to know more about the inner life of the inappropriate chuckler and his relationship with his late brother, Bleeding Gums Murphy.
Lenny
Just to clarify, Lenny = white, Carl = Black. Perhaps The Simpsons writers had Homer write that important piece of trivia on his hand because they, too, couldn’t be bothered to devote any brain power to poor Lenny, who still hasn’t seen his time in the sun despite so many hundreds of appearances. Hell, even Carl got his own extended storyline in Season 24’s “The Saga of Carl,” but his Caucasian counterpart has only ever played sidekick duties. You couldn’t tell just by looking at him, but the day the Simpsons writers decided that Lenny would never be worthy of his own plot line was the worst day of his life.