On paper, 'New Kid on The Block' feels like a monumental episode, for various reasons. We know from the outset that Bart is setting himself up to have his callow heart broken, so there is tremendous pathos in his efforts. Like a lot of the Bart classics, it gets its mileage from showcasing his hidden vulnerabilities, Bart being at once self-conscious about how out of his depth he is around Laura, but steadfast in his eagerness to impress her. The way she chokes out 'I please to aim' when Bart goes to meet Laura inside the treehouse. The whole premise is off theĬharts in its adorableness, and one of the absolute best things 'New Kid on The Block' has to recommend it is Nancy Cartwright's suitably endearing performance as the artless puppy lover - I particularly love And now here he is, falling head over heels in love - check that, falling in love with his babysitter, an authority figure it would ordinarily be within his nature to mercilessly obliterate. This is, after all, the same Bart who, just last season, had struggled to comprehend those very feelings emerging in his best friend Milhouse, and who'd insisted, of the opposite sex, 'They all look alike to me'. Like the season's other great outlier, Selma's Choice, it's a story that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in one the show's earlier seasons, but feels all the more convincing for having come along slightly later down the line in Bart's development, when we'd seen him play the irrepressible hellion for long enough to know what a bombshell it is to see these strange new feelings in him. It offers (on Bart's end of the story, anyway) an honest and relatable exploration of a pre-adolescent rite of passage - the faint awakening of sexual curiosity, and the withering realisation that being a child means that nobody takes you particularly seriously.

And yet few of the changes it implements were of particular consequence in the long run. It is, in many respects, about the inevitability of change, something that seems to permeate the episode all over (the title is a nod to the 1980s boy band New Kids on The Block, although it might also be a little meta, in that this was the first script from Conan O'Brien, who came in just as some of the older writing staff were moving on). There's a lot going on, yet it's a relatively quiet episode, relaxed in its pace. Debuting on November 12th 1992, around the middle of the show's fourth season, it tells an uncharacteristically modest story for its era, one that's small in scope but, when you pick it apart, actually quite high in ambition. 'New Kid on The Block' (aka 9F06) is a real oddball episode of The Simpsons, but it's oddball in deceptively low-key ways.

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