Yeardley Smith has been the unmistakable voice of Lisa Simpson for almost 750 episodes. But she still also finds time to host a hit true crime podcast with her husband ‘Detective Dan’
There’s a reason Yeardley Smith is conducting our Zoom call sitting among piles of silk scarves and frilly tops in her wardrobe, interrupted by her cats Zipper and Petunia, who want to jump on her lap. “It’s a busy day at my house on Thursdays,” says the actor who has voiced Lisa Simpson for the past 34 seasons. “The gardeners are here with the leaf blowers. My housekeeper and her two sisters always come on Thursdays. The guy is also here to fix the microwave. And when Detective Dan moved in, I gave him my office, a bedroom upstairs. So I’m in the closet today.”
Detective Dan is one half of the two ex-cops Detectives Dan and Dave (surnames unknown), identical twin co-hosts of true-crime podcast Small Town Dicks, which explores everything from bank robberies to murder, kidnap and gun rage. The podcast began in 2017; Smith joined as a host a couple of years later. Smith started dating Detective Dan in 2014. And whenever she visited his home, she would eavesdrop on the twin brothers, both of whom were cops, offloading their crime-sodden weeks to each other. “I was like: ‘You what?’” Smith recalls of overhearing their stories. “You couldn’t believe that that was somebody’s day-to-day.”
