The first two seasons of “The Simpsons” established much about what people still know and love about the show.

That idea that a well-meaning action can go horribly awry became a foundation of “Simpsons” humor.ĪLSO WATCH: “The Pacifier,” “Burping Contest,” “Jumping Bart,” “Making Faces,” “World War III”Įpisode to Watch: ‘Bart the Daredevil’ (2.8) We watch as Homer and Marge try to put their kids to bed, but instead of comforting the kids, they traumatize them all three children wind up shivering in Marge and Homer’s bed. However, even in “Good Night,” you can see the roots of the Simpsons’ quirky subversion of the modern American TV family. ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.‘Dickinson’: The Apple TV+ series is a literary superheroine’s origin story that’s dead serious about its subject yet unserious about itself.‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. (FXX has a website with every episode of “The Simpsons” but not the original shorts a subscription to cable or FXNOW is required. We’ve also recommended the episodes that best represent each era. Almost thirty years after its premiere, “The Simpsons” still matters.īelow, we’ve broken down the history of “The Simpsons” into six distinct eras, based on the ways its humor has changed over the years.

And while Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie have stayed the same age, what the world finds funny has changed - in no small part because of those characters’ influence. The first family of Springfield has witnessed five American presidents, the dawn of the internet age, the end of the Cold War, at least two prolonged conflicts in the Middle East, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and more. Neither “The Simpsons” nor history has stood still since the show debuted in 1989. 30, it’s a good time to reflect on how “The Simpsons” has evolved during its unparalleled run, and how each era in that evolution has reflected - or failed to reflect - the state of comedy, and of the culture, as a whole. For the past three decades, there has been one constant in America’s comedy landscape: “The Simpsons.” With that animated sitcom now approaching the start of its 30th season, on Sept.

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