Year The Simpsons Started [TESTED]

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.

To understand the shockwaves, you have to remember 1989. The top-rated show on TV was The Cosby Show —warm, safe, family-values comedy with a sweater-wearing dad who was also America’s favorite doctor. The No. 2 show? Roseanne , which was already pushing boundaries with its working-class grit. But neither had prepared audiences for what Matt Groening, a quirky cartoonist from Portland, Oregon, had cooked up in a Hollywood office.

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. year the simpsons started

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.

But on December 17, 1989, after months of hype (“The Simpsons are coming!” read T-shirts and billboards), the Christmas special “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” aired. No one was killed. No nuclear meltdowns. Instead, Homer, desperate for Christmas cash, lost his bonus and ended up at a dog track. He bet on a losing greyhound named Santa’s Little Helper. The dog lost. Homer took him home anyway. That act of desperation became a series of

It was the end of a decade that had given America big hair, shoulder pads, Wall Street greed, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But on this chilly Sunday evening, something far stranger—and far more lasting—was about to happen. Families across the United States settled in front of their bulky CRT televisions, remote controls fresh with batteries, and flipped to Fox. At 8:30 PM Eastern, a yellow-skinned, four-fingered, chronically underachieving nine-year-old in a red shirt uttered a single word: “Ay caramba!”

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. Fox, a fourth-place network launched just three years

We did. And we’re still hungry.