Marge vs. the Monorail

Plot

After being caught by the Environmental Protection Agency dumping nuclear waste in the city park, Mr. Burns is fined $3 million. A town meeting is held so that the citizens can decide how to spend the money. Marge suggests that the city use the money to fix Main Street, which is in poor condition. The town is about to vote in favor when someone new to town, a fast-talking salesman named Lyle Lanley, suggests that Springfield construct a city monorail. After being swayed by a song, the now enthused townspeople decide to build the monorail.

Even though Lanley succeeds in winning over almost the entire town, his salesmanship fails to convince Marge, who is frustrated with the town's purchase because she (correctly) believes the monorail is unsafe and that Lanley is a conman. While watching TV, Homer sees an advertisement that suggests he attend Lanley's institute of monorail conducting, which is a transparent effort to make even more money from the con. Homer immediately decides to enroll. After a three-week course, Lanley selects Homer at random from among his classmates to be the monorail conductor.

Still annoyed about the town's lack of understanding of the monorail, Marge visits Lanley to question his motives, and discovers a notebook containing drawings which reveal Lanley’s intention to run off with bags of money skimmed from the monorail project while everyone else falls victim to his faulty train. Marge immediately drives to North Haverbrook, which Lanley mentioned was a previous purchaser of one of his monorails. She discovers that the town is in ruins. While exploring, Marge meets Sebastian Cobb, the engineer who designed Lanley's North Haverbrook monorail. Cobb explains that Lanley embezzled construction funds through shoddy workmanship and materials, and that the entire project was a scam. Realizing Marge believes him, he offers his assistance in helping to prevent the same fate from happening to Springfield.

At the maiden voyage of the Springfield monorail, Lanley arranges for a well-attended opening ceremony, which will divert the town's attention while he escapes on a plane to Tahiti. The whole town turns out, and Leonard Nimoy is the guest of honor. The monorail departs just before Marge and Cobb arrive. Although it runs normally at the start, the controls soon malfunction and immediately begins to over-speed around the track, leaving Homer, Bart, and the passengers in danger, as the monorail's electricity cannot be shut off due to it being solar powered.

Meanwhile, Lanley's flight to Tahiti is interrupted by a brief and unexpected stopover in North Haverbrook. The townsfolk are alerted to his presence and they storm the plane to attack Lanley as revenge for ruining their town. Back in Springfield, Marge and Cobb contact Homer by radio and Cobb tells Homer that he will need to find an anchor in order to stop the train. Improvising quickly, Homer pries loose the giant metal "M" from the logo on the side of the monorail's engine, ties a rope to it, and throws it from the train. Eventually the "M" catches on the sign of a doughnut shop and the rope holds, stopping the monorail and saving its passengers.

Production

Conan O'Brien conceived the idea when he saw a billboard that just had the word "Monorail" on it, with no other details or explanation. He first pitched this episode at a story retreat to Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who said the episode was a little crazy and thought he should try some other material first. O'Brien had previously pitched episodes where Lisa had a rival and where Marge gets a job at the power plant and Burns falls in love with her; both went well. James L. Brooks "absolutely loved" this episode when O'Brien presented it.

Leonard Nimoy was not originally considered for the role as the celebrity at the maiden voyage of the monorail, as the writing staff did not think he would accept, because William Shatner had previously turned the show down. Instead, George Takei was asked to guest star as he had appeared on the show once before. After demanding several script changes, Takei declined, saying he did not want to make fun of public transportation as he was a member of the board of directors of the Southern California Rapid Transit District. As a result, the staff went to Nimoy, who accepted.

Reception

In its original American broadcast, "Marge vs. the Monorail" finished 30th in the ratings for the week of January 11 to January 17, 1993, with a Nielsen rating of 13.7. The episode was the highest-rated show on the Fox network that week.

"Marge vs. the Monorail" has frequently been selected in lists of the show's best episodes. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly released a list of its Top 25 episodes, ranking this episode in fourth, saying "the episode has arguably the highest throwaway-gag-per-minute ratio of any Simpsons, and all of them are laugh-out-loud funny." In his book Planet Simpson, Chris Turner named the episode as being one of his five favorites. In 2006, IGN named the episode the best of the fourth season. John Ortved of Vanity Fair called it the third best episode of the show, due to, "An amazing musical number; Leonard Nimoy in a random guest appearance... Besides being replete with excellent jokes, this episode reveals the town's mob mentality and its collective lack of reason. This is the episode that defines Springfield more than any other." In 2010, Michael Moran of The Times ranked the episode as the ninth best in the show's history.

The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, called it "an unsurpassed episode. It's hard to know where to start dishing out the praise — Leonard Nimoy's guest appearance, the Monorail song, Marge's narration, the truck full of popcorn..." Robert Canning of IGN strongly praised the episode, stating "It is by far one of the most loved episodes of The Simpsons and can safely be called a classic by any fan. From beginning to end, there's joke after joke after hilarious joke. There's nothing in this half-hour that doesn't work, and no matter how many times I watch this episode, it never, ever gets old." Todd VanDerWerff of Slant Magazine named it the show's best episode, stating "It's the one you think of when you think of a Simpsons episode", and is "maybe the show's funniest, and it most perfectly encapsulates what may be the show's overriding theme: People are really stupid and self-serving, but if you give them long enough, they'll eventually bumble toward the right answer."

Leonard Nimoy's appearance as himself has been praised as being one of the show's best guest appearances. In a list of the 25 greatest guest voices on the show, released September 5, 2006, IGN.com ranked Leonard Nimoy at 11th. Nathan Ditum ranked his performance as the 13th best guest appearance in the show's history. Nimoy would make a second guest appearance in season eight's "The Springfield Files".

Conan O'Brien has said that of all the episodes of The Simpsons he wrote, this is his favorite. Homer's lines "I call the big one Bitey" and "Doughnuts, is there anything they can't do?" are among series creator Matt Groening's favorite lines.

Conversely, the episode was not initially well received by many fans of the show's earlier seasons, as it was a particularly absurd early example of the show taking a more joke-based cartoon approach to comedy, rather than the more realistic situational style of comedy it had employed in its first few years. In 1995, during the production of the seventh season, Yeardley Smith said of the episode as "truly one of our worst – we [the entire cast] all agree".

In 2012, "Marge vs. the Monorail" was the second-place finisher in a Splitsider reader poll to decide on the best episode of any television sitcom, losing to the Community episode "Remedial Chaos Theory".

Conan O'Brien and Hank Azaria performed the monorail song live at the Hollywood Bowl from September 12–14, 2014 as part of the show "The Simpsons Take The Bowl".