Simpsons Started — Year The

So raise a Duff Beer (root beer for the kids) and remember: It all started in a year when the Berlin Wall fell, the World Wide Web was born, and a ten-year-old in a red shirt told the world to eat his shorts.

That Christmas of ’89, viewers got a present they didn’t know they wanted: a family more dysfunctional, more loving, and more human than anything else on television. And they’ve been watching ever since.

Thirty-seven years later (as of 2026), The Simpsons is the longest-running primetime scripted series in history. But in that first season—1989—it was just a strange, lumpy experiment. A cartoon with a drunk dad, a blue-haired mom, a sax-playing middle child, and a baby who never talked but somehow stole every scene. year the simpsons started

It was weirdly tender. And then, a week later, the second episode—the one with the family road trip, a runaway pariah, and Bart famously telling Homer, “You’re a sad, strange little man”—proved the show had teeth. Bartmania exploded. “Eat my shorts,” “Don’t have a cow,” and “Ay caramba!” became playground scripture. Teachers shuddered. Parents worried. President George H.W. Bush would later declare that American families should be “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.”

Behind the scenes, 1989 was chaos. Voice actors—Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith—recorded in a cramped studio. Animators in South Korea worked from rough storyboards. The show’s budget was modest; the jokes were razor-sharp. No one expected it to last past one season. So raise a Duff Beer (root beer for

Groening had been summoned by producer James L. Brooks, the genius behind The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Terms of Endearment . Brooks wanted Groening to pitch an animated short for The Tracey Ullman Show . Groening panicked—he didn’t want to lose the rights to his Life in Hell comic strip characters. So, in the lobby before the meeting, he scribbled a family named after his own parents and sisters: Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie.

Here’s a short feature story on the year The Simpsons began—1989—and what that moment meant for television and culture. D’oh! The Year America Met Its First Family Thirty-seven years later (as of 2026), The Simpsons

That act of desperation became a series of 48-second bumpers on The Tracey Ullman Show starting in 1987. They were crude, sloppy, and brilliant. Viewers wrote letters. Fox, a fourth-place network launched just three years earlier and often mocked as the “coat-hanger network,” needed a hit. Brooks pushed for a full half-hour series. Network executives were terrified. Animated shows were for Saturday mornings, not prime time. The last adult cartoon to try— The Flintstones in the 1960s—was a fossil.