Yeardley Smith Looks Back On 30 Years of 'The Simpsons'
*By Conor White*
Yeardley Smith has voiced the iconic Lisa Simpson for three decades, and she's still amazed that the show has remained such a massive success for so long.
"I remember reading once that the average life of a sitcom is five years, and that's if you're doing really, really well," "The Simpsons" star told Cheddar in an interview on Monday.
"The Simpsons" premiered on Fox in 1989, after originating as a sketch on "The Tracey Ullman Show". After 651 episodes, it's still going strong.
"I like to say we're halfway through," Smith said, perhaps only half-kidding.
Aside from giving birth to a countless number of memorable characters, the show has become something of a pop culture prognosticator ー predicting everything from the U.S. upsetting Sweden in Men's Olympic Curling, to the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, to yes, Donald Trump being elected president.
"Well, there's a crystal ball in the middle of the writers' table," she joked. "And they just gaze into it and things come to them."
"It is kind of uncanny," she agreed.
With the production of "The Simpsons" now a "well-oiled machine," as she described it, Smith is now lending her unique voice talents to a new medium ー podcasting.
Alongside longtime friend and fellow actress Zibby Allen (of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."), Smith hosts "Small Town Dicks," a true-crime podcast that looks at the most harrowing crimes in America's small towns, featuring the real detectives who solved the cases.
"People think that in small towns, that it's small-time crime ー like you're rescuing a cat out of a tree or something," she said. But that's not the case.
"These big-time crimes are happening in small town USA with the same level of depravity and reckless and disregard for human life, but with less frequency."
As for "The Simpsons," all good things must come to an end ー even the longest-running series in primetime history.
"We're probably closer to the end than we were, say, 10 years ago," Smith said.
Not that she wants it to end anytime soon.
"I could do this forever," she said.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/yeardley-smith-iconic-voice-of-lisa-simpson-talks-30-years-of-the-simpsons).
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