Reception
In its original American broadcast, "I Love Lisa" finished eighteenth in the ratings for the week of February 6 to February 12, 1993, with a Nielsen rating of 14.9. The episode was the highest-rated show on the Fox network that week. Since airing, it has received many positive reviews from fans and television critics. Entertainment Weekly's Dalton Ross said the episode was both touching and humorous. He added that in the scene where Bart runs a videotape in slow motion to show Lisa how "you can actually pin-point the second when heart rips in half", the audience does not really know "whether you're shedding tears of laughter, empathy, or both—you just know that it's damn good any way you slice it." The Arizona Republic's Bill Goodykoontz named the episode one of his five favorites and highlighted Ralph's line "and my doctor said I wouldn't have so many nosebleeds if I kept my finger out of there" as one of the best lines in the history of the show. In a review of The Simpsons season four, Lyndsey Shinoda of Video Store cited "Brother from the Same Planet" and "I Love Lisa" among her "personal favorites" from the season.
Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, said their favorite scenes from the episode include Principal Skinner's flashback to Valentine's Day in Vietnam, the scene in which Chief Wiggum chases a duck to get his badge back, and the one where Bart and Milhouse play John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln at the school pageant. They added that those scenes were "just the icing on the cake of the main plot." In 2003, Entertainment Weekly placed the episode twelfth on their top 25 The Simpsons episodes list, and in 2008 placed the episode second on their top "25 New Classic Holiday TV Episodes" list.
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
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“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)