Lisa The Boy Scout Is Not Canon, But It Proves The Simpsons Still Belongs On TV

thegamer.com:

The latest episode of The Simpsons, Lisa The Boy Scout, follows the traditions of the likes of Barthood, Brick Like Me, A Serious Flanders, Woo-hoo Dunnit?, Thanksgiving of Horror, and The Great Phatsby. If you don't know what any of those are, I probably don't care too much about your opinions on the episode, nor The Simpsons in general. Those are all relatively modern episodes wherein the show has looked at its own stale formula and tried something new. The internet is full of people who no longer watch The Simpsons explaining why The Simpsons is no longer any good and hey, broken clocks. Occasionally The Simpsons produces a dud. It's way off the pace of the Golden Age, but then so is pretty much every comedy on television. There are arguments and debates swirling around Lisa The Boy Scout, but the way it has managed to capture the public conversation once more is further proof that the show is still going strong.

The episode starts out like any regular episode. Bart joins the boy scouts, so does Lisa, who is initially better than him. It's a classic set-up, especially these days as the show increasingly makes Lisa the villain. However, shortly after the opening scene, the show is 'hacked' by two internet vandals holding deleted clips of the show hostage. Throughout the episode they reveal these clips, and cancelled episode ideas, as if to prove that the show is out of ideas and needs to be cancelled. In a nice piece of meta irony, the existence of these hackers proves the opposite.

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It's not an entirely new idea, but it is a new take on it. Community once did a clip show consisting of 'clips' that had never been aired. In the show's reality, the cast were reminiscing