is it projecting to see neurodivergency in Bart?
i honestly really like the vibes of season 1? in not having figured itself out fully tonewise, in not having nailed that fifty-layer joke-a-minute attitude, it has a lot more room to put work into showing you these characters and the world around them in a much more... earnest? way. there's so much room for a very different kind of simpsons than the many other things it would become. this is laying the foundations, getting you to care about these early forms of the titular dysfunctional family and the city of screwballs they live in before they begin stretching them all too far. (this is not to say there aren't absolutely wacky plots. these plots still get so fuckin wacky, of course.)