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Many live-action sitcoms will do flashback scenes, or even flashback episodes. That’s easier to do with animation, of course. In time, The Simpsons was going to do such an episode, and in the middle of the second season, they did. Fortunately, “The Way We Was” was well worth it.
What this episode does is tell us how Marge and Homer got together. They met in high school in, um, 1974. I am not fully on top of the temporal canon of The Simpsons now, but I know that is no longer the case. After all, were they born in, charitably, 1967, they would be Grampa’s age now. Back in 1991, though, this all tracked. Homer, then as now a doofus, meets Marge, a go-getting straight-A student, in detention. He pretends to need French tutoring, she tutors him, she falls for him, she finds out the truth, they end up together in the end anyway. Also, Artie Ziff is there! Jon Lovitz lends his voice to the know-it-all high schooler who Marge is supposed to go to prom with. He’s a very Lovitz character.
“The Way We Was” leans more on emotion than some Simpsons episodes. It’s on the “sweeter” side of things. And yet, those elements work quite well from a storytelling perspective. Plus, the show was filling in some blanks. How did Homer and Marge get together, anyway? Well, now everybody got to know, and the story was worth telling. They even managed to bring Artie Ziff back a few times.
