The Simpsons

• 1. Introduction

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  The Simpsons premiered on the 17th of December 1989, and within months it had done something no animated show had managed since the 1970s: it cracked American prime-time and stayed there. Time magazine would eventually name it the greatest television series of the entire 20th century. A single fictional family from a town called Springfield became, according to linguist Mark Liberman, a more fertile source of catchphrases and idioms than Shakespeare and the Bible combined. How did a collection of sketches drawn in a lobby waiting room become the longest-running scripted primetime series in American television history? And what does it mean that a show celebrated for its early brilliance has now been on the air long enough to spark a decades-long debate about its own decline?

• 2. Born in a Lobby

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  James L. Brooks was producing The Tracey Ullman Show in the mid-1980s when he decided he wanted short animated segments to bracket the commercial breaks. He had seen Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic strip and invited Groening to pitch a concept. Groening arrived intending to pitch an animated version of his comic strip. But in the lobby outside Brooks's office, he realized that animating Life in Hell would require him to sign away the publication rights to his own life's work. He changed course on the spot. Sitting in that waiting room, he sketched out a dysfunctional family and named its members after his own relatives, swapping his own name for Bart, an anagram of "brat". He chose the surname Simpson because, as he put it, it sounded similar to "simpleton" and struck him as funny. The family first appeared as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show on the 19th of April 1987. Groening submitted basic sketches and assumed animators would refine them. Instead, they traced his drawings directly, which is why those early characters looked so crude. It was colorist Georgie Kovacs Peluce who made the family yellow. Because Bart, Lisa, and Maggie have no hairlines, she believed flesh tones would look strange on them. Groening's response upon hearing the idea: "Marge is yellow with blue hair? That's hilarious, let's do it!"

• 3. The Springfield Universe

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  Springfield is a town that exists precisely because it refuses to be pinned down. Groening has said he named it after Springfield, Oregon, and after the fictional Springfield in the television series Father Knows Best. He picked the name because Springfield is one of the most common city names in the United States, reasoning that every viewer would assume it referred to their own town. The state the town sits in is never revealed, which is a deliberate choice. Its geography shifts from episode to episode: Springfield might have coastlines, or deserts, or mountains, depending entirely on what the story requires. Homer works as a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant, a job suited for skewering environmental policy. Bart and Lisa attend Springfield Elementary, which lets the writers address education. The town has enough television channels to satirize the entire media industry. Groening has acknowledged that Springfield shares much with Portland, Oregon, where he grew up, down to specific street names. The show adopted its approach to a sprawling supporting cast from the comedy series SCTV. Characters like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Principal Skinner, and Ned Flanders were often conceived as one-time jokes or plot utilities, but many gained expanded lives and eventually starred in their own episodes. The recurring structure allows one of the show's stranger rules to hold: characters never age. The series uses what it calls a floating timeline, in which episodes take place in the year they are produced. A 1991 episode placed Homer and Marge as high schoolers in the 1970s. A 2008 episode placed them as a childless couple in the 1990s. A 2021 episode placed Homer as an adolescent in that same decade. Writer Matt Selman explained that "they all kind of happened in their imaginary world."

• 4. The Writing Room

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  Sam Simon, described by former Simpsons director Brad Bird as "the unsung hero" of the show, assembled the original writing team. That first group included John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, George Meyer, Jeff Martin, Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jay Kogen, and Wallace Wolodarsky. Meyer stayed active in writing sessions until 2004. According to writer Jon Vitti, Meyer usually invented the best lines in any given episode, regardless of who received the script credit. Swartzwelder holds the record for most credited episodes at sixty. Conan O'Brien contributed to several episodes in the early 1990s before leaving to host Late Night. Ricky Gervais wrote the episode "Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife" and became the first celebrity both to write and appear as a guest in the same episode. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote "Homer the Whopper", with Rogen voicing a character in it. Each episode takes approximately six months to produce, which explains why the show rarely addresses current events while they are actually happening. Simon himself left the production in 1993 under constant conflict with Groening, Brooks, and Gracie Films. Before he left, he negotiated a deal that granted him a share of profits and an executive producer credit every year until his death in 2015, even though he had not worked on the show since he walked out the door.

• 5. Voices and Contracts

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  Nancy Cartwright is the only one of the six main cast members who had formal voice-acting training before joining the show. She was originally brought in to audition for Lisa, but found that Lisa at the time was described simply as the "middle child" with little personality. Bart was described as "devious, underachieving, school-hating, irreverent, and clever". Cartwright asked to read for Bart instead, and Groening gave her the part on the spot. Yeardley Smith had been asked to audition for Bart, but casting director Bonita Pietila felt her voice was too high, and Smith was offered Lisa. Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner were already part of The Tracey Ullman Show cast; rather than hire new actors, producers simply gave them Homer and Marge. Fox and the production team deliberately concealed the cast's identities in the early years, closing recording sessions and refusing to publish photos of the actors. They eventually revealed the cast's roles in the episode "Old Money". Castellaneta says he borrowed Homer's grunt "D'oh!" from actor James Finlayson, who used a longer, more drawn-out version in Laurel and Hardy films. The show's staff told Castellaneta to shorten it, and the abbreviated version became one of the most recognized sounds in television history. The salary history of the main cast tracks the show's rise and reflects how dramatically its fortunes changed. The six lead actors earned $30,000 per episode until 1998, when a pay dispute briefly had Fox preparing to recast every role. The standoff resolved, and by 2004 the cast was earning between $250,000 and $360,000 per episode. In 2011, facing a Fox threat to cancel the series unless production costs were reduced, the cast accepted a 30 percent pay cut, bringing their per-episode salary down to just over $300,000.

• 6. Language and Legacy

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  "D'oh!" now appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, listed without the apostrophe. Groundskeeper Willie's phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" entered the political press in 2003 when National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg used it to describe France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. The words "cromulent" and "embiggen", coined in the episode "Lisa the Iconoclast", have since been published in Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon and appeared in scientific journals. "Kwyjibo", a fake Scrabble word Bart invented in "Bart the Genius", was later used as an alias by the creator of the Melissa computer worm. The dismissive expression "Meh" entered the Collins English Dictionary in 2008, with the show widely credited for popularizing it. Kent Brockman's line "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" from "Deep Space Homer" became a snowclone, with variants appearing in media including New Scientist magazine. On the 14th of January 2000, the entire Simpson family received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bart was the only fictional character included in Time magazine's list of the century's 100 most influential people. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has stated that The Simpsons "basically re-invented the wheel" and "created what is in many ways a wholly new medium". The show's success directly prompted a 1990s boom in adult animated prime-time programming, including Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park, Family Guy, King of the Hill, and Futurama, the last of which was itself created by Groening.

• 7. Controversy and Decline

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  On the 27th of January 1992, President George H. W. Bush said in a speech that he wanted American families to be "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." Three days later, the show aired a short reply in which Bart said: "Hey, we're just like the Waltons. We're praying for an end to the Depression, too." The nuclear power industry also objected to the show's early seasons, and producer Sam Simon sent a letter that read, in part: "I apologize that the Simpsons have offended a lot of people in the energy industry. I agree with you that in real life, Homer Simpson would not be employed at a nuclear power plant. On the other hand, he probably wouldn't be employed anywhere." By the late 1990s, around the time of season nine, critics began describing the show as "tired". Some longtime fans pointed to what they saw as a shift away from character-driven stories toward celebrity cameos and zany setpieces. Jim Schembri wrote in 2011 that the show "has gone from commanding attention to merely being attention-seeking." Showrunner Mike Scully, who oversaw seasons nine through twelve, drew particular criticism. When asked in 2007 how the show had maintained its longevity, Scully offered a wry answer: "Lower your quality standards." The controversy over perceived decline intensified around Harry Shearer's reaction to the season nine episode "The Principal and the Pauper", in which the recurring character Seymour Skinner is revealed to be an impostor. Shearer told the writers: "That's so wrong. You're taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason." On the 2nd of April 2025, the show was renewed for four additional seasons in what Fox and Disney described as a "mega deal", extending the series through the 2028-2029 television season and the show's 40th anniversary.