Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Simpsons first aired on the 19th of April 1987 as a crude, hastily drawn animation of a dysfunctional family on The Tracey Ullman Show. This three-minute sketch launched a cultural phenomenon that would eventually become the longest-running American scripted primetime television show.
Matt Groening created The Simpsons and named the children after his own siblings while substituting his own name with Bart, an anagram of brat. He chose the surname Simpson because it sounded like simpleton, and the animation style was so rough that the studio traced his original sketches without cleaning them up.
Six voice actors have provided the voices for the main cast since the show's inception, with Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, and Harry Shearer becoming synonymous with their characters. Every main cast member has won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.
On the 2nd of April 2025, the show was renewed for four additional seasons on Fox, with 15 episodes and two Disney+ specials each. This renewal will take the show through the 2028 to 2029 television season, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the show.
China banned The Simpsons from prime-time television in August 2006, and Venezuela barred the show from airing on morning television in 2008. Several Russian Pentecostal churches also demanded that The Simpsons be removed from broadcast schedules in 2008, though a court decision later dismissed this request.
The series streams exclusively on Disney+ after Simpsons World was discontinued on the 12th of November 2019. On the 28th of May 2020, Disney+ made the first 19 seasons available in both 16:9 and the original 4:3 aspect ratio, with Season 31 arriving on the 2nd of October 2020.