Lisa the Pre-Empted

This started out as a Twitter thread, but I reckon I can summarise it better over here...

For the ninth season of The Simpsons, a few episodes were held over from the previous production line, as is the standard practice. For some reason, however, one of the holdovers - "Lisa the Simpson" - seems to have been delayed for an unusually long time.

Here is, as far as I can tell, what happened, and the reason for the apparent delay.

The episode was originally scheduled for broadcast on October 5 1997, following live baseball coverage. However, the baseball coverage over-runs. It is possible that the episode was "joined in progress" once the coverage was over and only part of it was seen. What could also have happened, and seems to have happened, is that the episode was seen in full on some Fox affiliates that weren't showing the baseball.

For one or both of those reasons, Fox considers the episode to have been broadcast on October 5, even though most of America has only seen part or none of it. Hence, the March 8 1998 airing is considered by Fox to be a repeat, even though it is the first time the majority of people have seen it, and that is why the second airing is considered to be the premiere by virtually everywhere.

Fox may have later realised their mistake, and officially designated March 8 as the episode's premiere. If you look at the Simpsons Archive's master list of all Fox network broadcasts, you will see the episode was repeated in November 1998, after Season 10 had started; the only other Season 9 episode to be repeated once Season 10 had begun was the Christmas episode, "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace". The conclusion I draw from that is that Fox realised their error at some point before then and decided to repeat the episode again to make up for the 'missing' October 1997 airing, although this is just supposition.

(Note: If you have more information, or even a correction, do let me know. I initially thought there was a possibility that the episode might have run in the UK before the March 1998 airing, but I've been informed by the excellent Wesley Mead that this episode premiered on Sky on May 31, so we didn't get it first. Any information on other countries that might have showed The Simpsons not long after the US airdates at the time would still be welcome, of course.)