1 year ago
103
There’s a reason Yeardley Smith is conducting our Zoom call sitting among piles of silk scarves and frilly tops in her wardrobe, interrupted by her cats Zipper and Petunia, who want to jump on her lap. “It’s a busy day at my house on Thursdays,” says the actor who has voiced Lisa Simpson for the past 34 seasons. “The gardeners are here with the leaf blowers. My housekeeper and her two sisters always come on Thursdays. The guy is also here to fix the microwave. And when Detective Dan moved in, I gave him my office, a bedroom upstairs. So I’m in the closet today.”
Detective Dan is one half of the two ex-cops Detectives Dan and Dave (surnames unknown), identical twin co-hosts of true-crime podcast Small Town Dicks, which explores everything from bank robberies to murder, kidnap and gun rage. The podcast began in 2017; Smith joined as a host a couple of years later. Smith started dating Detective Dan in 2014. And whenever she visited his home, she would eavesdrop on the twin brothers, both of whom were cops, offloading their crime-sodden weeks to each other. “I was like: ‘You what?’” Smith recalls of overhearing their stories. “You couldn’t believe that that was somebody’s day-to-day.”
“So we had this idea,” Smith goes on. “What if we recreated what Dan and Dave did on their sofa, downloading their weeks over wine and whisky, and turned it into a podcast? We tried, but it didn’t work. It sounded like they were downloading with such an enormous amount of stress. So they said, ‘Yeardley, you need to sit in and question the things we take for granted.’ I don’t do a lot of talking. The cases are phenomenal.”
In Small Town Dicks, Detective Dave, Detective Dan (both now retired from the police) and Smith chat to the small-town detectives involved in investigating so-called small-town crimes. “Big-time crime is happening in small towns all over the US,” explains Smith, who provides the podcast with much-needed gallows humour. There have been 11 series of the podcast so far, and the team has visited Australia and the UK to investigate international small-town crimes. For security, the names and locations of the victims and detectives are redacted. “It can get pretty dark,” says Smith, “so we introduce sections for levity, such as discussing what Hollywood gets wrong and right about police work, or a segment called the World’s Dumbest Criminals, where we’ll talk about how one guy left his wallet behind after a robbery, or how another tried to steal his bike back from the police impound with CCTV everywhere.”
Episode recaps of the latest series include such tales as: “An early-morning call to respond to a community garden where a man’s body is found slumped over at the base of a tree.” Or “Police discover the body of a woman near the bottom of a flight of the stairs that lead to her bedroom. She’s been shot in the head and the main suspect is the man she just broke up with.” And “The nearly invisible trace evidence left behind after the body of a gay man was found dumped in a ditch.”
According to Smith, the audience for true crime podcasts in the US is overwhelmingly female – 75% plus. “Which is massive,” Smith says. “People always ask me: why do you think that is? I think part of it is that we’re often the victims. It makes us think: God, that victim looks like my sister, my mother, my best friend…”
After eight years of dating, Smith finally married Detective Dan in June 2022. (“Third time for me, first for him. I hope it works out,” she grins.) And now he likes to hog all the office space. What are the downsides of being married to an official Small Town Dick, I wonder.
“If you’re married to a detective, they’re programmed to never give anything away, just as if they’re interrogating a suspect. So if I say something funny, I’ll get no reaction at all. I’ll say, ‘I hope you’re laughing inside,’ and he’ll say: ‘Yes, it’s really funny.’”
There are disadvantages for Dan, too – he’s married to one of the most famous voice artists in the world. Simpsons fans often ask for selfies – “always selfies”, Smith says, “never an autograph” – and diehard aficionados somehow find out what planes Smith is travelling on (she regularly travels between LA and New York), and will be waiting for her as she touches down at the airport, armed with memorabilia. Smith tells me she’ll generally try to be accommodating. “I’ll say, ‘I’ll sign one for each of you.’ But it’s Dan who will think: ‘Wait, what? How does this happen? This is not OK,’ and will stand guard.”
When I ask how Smith manages to find time to voice Lisa Simpson and create 12 episodes of a podcast a year, she laughs that she does “nine jobs at once”. Her production company, Paperclip, LTD, has just finished producing an indie film in Nebraska City. She’s also the last set of ears on each episode of Small Town Dicks – the “flea comb”, as she describes it.
“Nobody is just listening” to a podcast, she reasons. “Everyone is doing something else – walking the dog, making dinner, driving… You have to make sure people can follow. I work all the time, weekends, too. I was always pretty good at compartmentalising, but now I feel as if it’s a superpower.”
I wonder if Lisa Simpson might end up on an episode of the podcast one day. “Lisa Simpson’s had some sleuthy moments, for sure,” says Smith. “But I would be devastated if she turned up as one of criminals; that would mean the sky has fallen.”
Small Town Dicks is so popular it has been referenced on The Simpsons; Channel 6 news anchor Kent Brockman starts his own crime podcast in an episode in which Smith cameos as herself. (“Hey Kent. I’m Yeardley Smith,” she says. “Your voice sounds familiar. Where do I know you from?” Kent replies. “From my true-crime podcast, Small Town Dicks. And nowhere else.”)
Smith’s performance still worries her. “I had, like, two lines that I don’t think I delivered very well at all,” she laughs. “It was nerve-racking. Plus, you cannot be Simpson-ised and still be good-looking. I find Lisa Simpson so unbelievably adorable, sweet and cute. I love that little girl like a three-dimensional living, breathing, red-blooded eight-year-old. But she has no hairline, a massive overbite and no eyelids.”
With Zipper and Petunia vying for attention, it’s time to ask the big Simpsons question: will the show go on forever? It’s currently yet to be renewed for a 35th and 36th season. But – as Smith points out – The Simpsons is regularly nominated for Emmys and was recently voted by Rolling Stone as the second greatest television show of all time, behind The Sopranos.
Smith gives me an example of how the show has moved with the times. In an episode called Lisa’s Belly, Lisa is struggling with body anxiety and is introduced to new character, Dr Wendy Sage, a breast cancer survivor who has had a unilateral mastectomy, a character based on and voiced by one of The Simpsons’ showrunners’ wives who had a double mastectomy in real life. “To be able to normalise something like that is one of the great assets of being on a show that’s been on so long,” she says.
The common myth prevails that The Simpsons isn’t as good as it used to be. For example, when speaking to NME in 2021, showrunner Al Jean said: “To people who say The Simpsons isn’t as good as it used to be, I would say: I think the world isn’t as good as it used to be. But we’re declining at a slower rate.”
“Al’s so clever,” Smith says. “And you know what? He’s not wrong. I don’t think we’re declining. I do think that, when you’re almost 750 episodes in, they can’t all be gems. But to stay relevant you have to adapt. There will always be people who go: ‘It hasn’t been good since season 10 or season 12,” although, as I point out, these people are generally people who haven’t actually watched The Simpsons since season 10 or 12.
“There are so many gems and bona fide classics after season 20,” Smith continues. “I know how hard the writers and the animators work; I know their enthusiasm hasn’t waned. I have the most extraordinary job. I get to play a character who is so inspirational, aspirational and means so much to so many people. She’s genuinely funny, clever, flawed and complicated. In the land of entertainment, I don’t know you’d find a better female character than Lisa Simpson.”
After 750 episodes, has the line between Lisa and Yeardley started to blur?
“Lisa Simpson sets her sight on a goal, then things rarely go the way she planned. That absolutely happens to me, but Lisa is a lot more resilient and optimistic. I’m learning to be adaptable, but, at 58, I’m still a novice.”
We chat further about The Simpsons’ uncanny knack for predicting the future, from Lady Gaga’s flying entrance at the Super Bowl and the Fifa corruption arrests, to Donald Trump becoming president. Do the Simpsons writers have a crystal ball in the middle of the table? “I have a multilayered theory,” laughs Smith. “One, we’ve predicted many things that don’t come true and nobody talks about. Two, as I think quantum physics states, we’re all made of the same matter with a collective consciousness that goes way below where any of us can actually see it. And three, if you’re on for 34 seasons, you’d better get something fucking right…”
Will Lisa Simpson ever be president, as predicted in one episode? “There was a big push a couple of years ago: Lisa for president. Then they said: Yeardley for president. I said: ‘No. Let’s be clear. You want Lisa Simpson to be president and you want 24 writers behind her as her cabinet?’”
Perhaps we could have Lisa for prime minister, I suggest. This causes Smith to snort with laughter. “Now that she’s on Disney – a bona fide Disney princess – she could hang out with Kate Middleton!”
I could talk to Smith all day. Like Lisa, there’s something calming, clever and inspirational about her presence. But Smith has to get ready for a Simpsons read-through. Even though we are post-pandemic, read-throughs are still happening via Zoom. “At first, we were also recording from home, which was not ideal with all the barking dogs, garbage trucks and LA police helicopters. When they said, ‘You can come back to the studio’, I was like: ‘Fuck yeah!’”
Before we go, there’s one last thing I need to hear. Please can Smith give me her best Lisa Simpson, “Meh”?
“It came from very early on, where Bart and Lisa were in the car and Marge or Homer were asking about something. We’d had ‘beh?’ and ‘sneh?’ but “meh” stuck. It’s such a great kind of non-answer answer that covers so many things, which is why it’s pure genius.”
So will she give us one, I plead, as Smith – not for the first time – slips into her best Lisa Simpson?
What did she think of this interview? I ask.
“Meh!”
All episodes of Small Town Dicks are now available, see smalltowndicks.com. The Simpsons season 34 arrives on Sky and Disney later this year
English (US)