Nancy Cartwright scripts her first Simpsons episode

It’s only taken three decades but Nancy Cartwright, better known as the voice of Bart Simpson, has finally scripted an episode of The Simpsons.

“Girl’s in the Band” is S30 E19 with guest star J.K. Simmons and centres around Lisa, not Bart, Simpson.

Cartwright based her script in part on her own childhood experiences as well as her family’s experience supporting her niece, Girl Meets World star Sabrina Carpenter.

Here are some excerpts from a Q&A with TV Insider:

This is the first episode of The Simpsons that you’ve written. Why now? Why did it take so long? Have you been working on this one episode since the very beginning?
Nancy Cartwright: [Laughs] I wish I could say I have, but no I haven’t been. I just never really made it something that I wanted to do. I was very happy doing voices and loved what the writers were doing. But for 20 years I’d been working on this dream project of mine, In Search of Fellini. When I actually made it happen, I thought, I should probably write a Simpsons episode now!

Why did you want to write an episode focused on Lisa rather than your own character?
I started playing trumpet when I was 10 — when I was Bart’s age! I was in band in elementary school, middle school, high school. I was in orchestra and switched over to French horn. I was not first chair. [Laughs] But I did have a sense of what I put Lisa through. But in my life, I did speech competitions [instead of band]. I took that and put it into the music world for Lisa, because it was something that was real for me. For writers, your best stuff is what you can pull from your own life.

Do you have ideas for future Simpsons episodes?
We’ll see. I also co-wrote a romantic comedy. So I’m having fun doing that, and I’m also doing art — I’m painting and sculpting. I’d like to do another Simpsons, but we’ll have to see how it falls in with the other things that I’m doing.

The episode should air on 7mate in around 3 weeks.

You can read more here.