The Simpsons:
Season:     11     / Episode:     16    
Pygmoelian
(Television Episode)

An American Daytime Soap Opera.

When it debuted, the show originally focused on the personal and professional lives of two core families in Genoa City: the wealthy Brooks family and the poor Foster family. After a series of recasts and departures in the early 1980s, most of the original characters were written out and the show shifted to the Abbotts, the Newmans, and the Winters families. The Young and the Restless is one of the very few TV shows to successfully write out their original cast, and to replace them with new ones. One basic plot that has run throughout almost all of the show's history is the rivalry between Jill Abbott and Katherine Chancellor as well as the bitter rivalry between Victor Newman and Jack Abbott.

Pygmalion is a play based on the Greek myth of the same name. It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics (based on phonetician Henry Sweet), who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class accent and training her in etiquette. In the process, Higgins and Doolittle grow close, but she ultimately rejects his domineering ways and declares she will marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill – a young, poor, gentleman. Pygmalion, the George Bernard Shaw play, is based on Pygmalion, a sculptor from Greek Mythology.

Janet Tyler has undergone her eleventh treatment (the maximum number legally allowed) in an attempt to look like everybody else. The details of the treatment are not given, but Tyler is first shown with her head completely bandaged, so her face cannot be seen. She is described as being "not normal" by the nurses and doctor, whose own faces are always in shadows or off-camera. The outcome of the procedure cannot be known until the bandages are removed. Tyler pleads with the doctor and eventually convinces him to remove the bandages early. After a climactic buildup, the bandages are removed, revealing to the audience that she is beautiful. However, the reaction of the doctor and nurses is disappointment; the operation has failed, her face has undergone "no change — no change at all". At this point, the doctor, nurses and other people in the hospital, whose faces have never been seen clearly before, are now revealed to be horribly deformed by our perspective, with large and thick brows, sunken eyes, swollen and twisted lips, and misshapen, pig-like snouts. Distraught by the failure of the procedure, Tyler runs through the hospital as the disfigured faces of everyone she runs into, the norm in this society, are revealed. Large screens throughout the hospital project an image of the State's despotic leader giving a speech calling for greater conformity. Eventually, a handsome man (by our standards) afflicted with the same "condition" arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her "own kind", where her "ugliness" will not trouble the State. Before the two leave, the man comforts Tyler with the "very, very old saying" that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".