The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. It is a satirical parody of the middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its titular family, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield, and it lampoons many aspects of the human condition, as well as American culture, society as a whole, and television itself.
The family was conceived by Groening shortly before a pitch for a series of animated shorts with the producer James L. Brooks. Groening created a dysfunctional family and named the characters after members of his own family, substituting Bart for his own name. The shorts became a part of The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987. After a three-season run, the sketch was developed into a half-hour prime time show and was an early hit for Fox.
Since its debut on December 17, 1989, the show has broadcast 416 episodes and is currently in its nineteenth season. The season 18 finale, which aired on May 20, 2007, was the show’s 400th episode, and 2007 marked the 20th anniversary of The Simpsons franchise. The Simpsons Movie, a feature-length film, was released in theaters worldwide on July 26 and July 27, 2007, and has grossed approximately US$526.2 million worldwide to date.
The Simpsons has won dozens of awards since it debuted as a series, including 23 Emmy Awards, 26 Annie Awards and a Peabody Award. Time magazine's December 31, 1999 issue named it the 20th century's best television series, and on January 14, 2000 it was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Simpsons is the longest-running American sitcom and the longest-running American animated program. Homer's annoyed grunt "D'oh!" has been adopted into the English lexicon, while The Simpsons has influenced many adult-oriented animated sitcoms
Origins
Groening conceived of the idea for the Simpsons in the lobby of James L. Brooks's office. Brooks had asked Groening to pitch an idea for a series of animated shorts, which Groening initially intended to present as his Life in Hell series. However, when Groening realized that animating Life in Hell would require the rescinding of publication rights for his life's work, he chose another approach and formulated his version of a dysfunctional family. He named the characters after his own family members, substituting "Bart" for his own name.
Characters
The Simpsons are a typical family who live in a fictional "Middle American" town of Springfield. Homer, the father, works as a safety inspector at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant—a position at odds with his careless, buffoonish personality. He is married to Marge Simpson, a stereotypical American housewife and mother. They have three children: Bart, a ten-year-old troublemaker; Lisa, a precocious eight-year-old activist; and Maggie, a baby who rarely speaks, but communicates by sucking on a pacifier. The family owns a dog, Santa's Little Helper, and a cat, Snowball II. Both pets have had starring roles in several episodes. Despite the passing of yearly milestones such as holidays or birthdays, the Simpsons do not physically age and still appear just as they did at the end of the 1980s.
The show includes an array of quirky characters: co-workers, teachers, family friends, extended relatives, townspeople and local celebrities. The creators originally intended many of these characters as one-time jokesters or for fulfilling needed functions in the town. A number of them have gained expanded roles and subsequently starred in their own episodes. According to Matt Groening, the show adopted the concept of a large supporting cast from the comedy show SCTV.
Setting
The Simpsons takes place in the fictional American town of Springfield, without any geographical coordinates or references to U.S. states that might identify which part of the country it represents. Nevertheless, fans have tried to determine the town's location by taking the town's characteristics, surrounding geography, and nearby landmarks as clues. As a response, the show has become intentionally evasive in regard to Springfield's location. The name "Springfield" is a common one in America and appears in over half of the states. Springfield's geography, and that of its surroundings, contain coastlines, deserts, vast farmland, tall mountains, or whatever the story or joke requires. Despite this, Groening has said that Springfield has much in common with Portland, Oregon, the city where he grew up.
Influences on culture
A number of neologisms that originated on The Simpsons have entered the popular vernacular. Mark Liberman, director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, remarked, "The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions." The most famous catchphrase is Homer's annoyed grunt: "D'oh!" So ubiquitous is the expression that it is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, but without the apostrophe. Dan Castellaneta says he borrowed the phrase from James Finlayson, an actor in early Laurel and Hardy comedies, who pronounced it in a more elongated and whining tone. The director of The Simpsons told Castellaneta to shorten the noise, and it went on to become the well-known exclamation in the TV series.
Other Simpsons expressions that have entered popular use include "excellent" (drawn out as a sinister "eeeexcelllent…" in the style of Charles Montgomery Burns), Homer's triumphant "Woohoo!" and Nelson Muntz's mocking "HA-ha!" Groundskeeper Willie's description of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" was used by conservative National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg in 2003, after France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. The phrase quickly spread to other journalists. "Cromulent", a word used in "Lisa the Iconoclast" has since appeared in the Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English."Kwyjibo", a fake Scrabble word invented by Bart in "Bart the Genius", was used as one of the aliases of the creator of the Melissa worm. "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords", was used by Kent Brockman in "Deep Space Homer" and has seeped into popular culture to describe a number of events. Variants of Brockman's utterance are used to express mock submission, usually for the purpose of humor. It has been used in media, such as New Scientist magazine. The dismissive term "Meh" has also been popularized by the show.
Influence on television
The Simpsons was the first successful animated program in prime time since Wait Till Your Father Gets Home in the 1970s. During most of the 1980s, pundits considered animated shows as appropriate only for children, and animating a show was too expensive to achieve a quality suitable for prime-time television. The Simpsons changed this perception. The use of Korean animation studios doing in-betweening, coloring, and filming made the episodes cheaper. The success of The Simpsons and the lower production cost prompted television networks to take chances on other animated series. This development led to a 1990s boom in new, animated prime-time shows, such as South Park, Family Guy, King of the Hill, Futurama, and The Critic. South Park later paid homage to The Simpsons with the episode "Simpsons Already Did It".
The Simpsons has also influenced live-action shows like Malcolm in the Middle, which debuted January 9, 2000 in the time slot after The Simpsons. Malcolm in the Middle featured the use of sight gags and did not use a laugh track like most sitcoms. Ricky Gervais has called The Simpsons a major influence on his British comedy The Office, which also dispenses with a laugh track
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