Year The Simpsons Started |top| Review

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.

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 year the simpsons started

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. That Christmas of ’89, viewers got a present

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. D’oh

The Simpsons had arrived.

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.