What Critics Really Said When ‘The Simpsons’ First Aired
What To Know
- When The Simpsons debuted in 1989, critics from Entertainment Weekly praised its vivid, detailed characters and considered it superior to many live-action comedies of the era.
- The New York Times found the show “refreshingly different” and appreciated its likable, complex family, though it noted some unevenness in early episodes.
- TIME magazine was less enthusiastic, describing the animation as crude and the show as “off-putting much of the time,” though it acknowledged the series’ break from traditional sitcom norms.
Fox’s The Simpsons has been on the air for so long, Bart would be around 50 if he were actually aging, and Homer would be well into retirement age! After getting its start as animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons made the leap to standalone show on December 17, 1989, with the Christmas special “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,”
So, how did TV critics at the time feel about moving into a surreal suburban town called Springfield? Was The Simpsons roasting on a critical fire… or did critics think this was the kind of show that might go the distance? (Surely they couldn’t have thought that distance would be 36 years and counting.) Here’s what contemporaneous reviews tell us…
Some critics were immediately on board
Ken Tucker, a longtime TV critic for Entertainment Weekly, appreciated The Simpsons’ first season, and in a May 1990 review, he rated the show above live-action TV comedies of the era. (He gave The Simpsons a B-minus grade, which likely says something about the state of television comedy at the time.)
“As a cartoonist who’s primarily a writer, [creator] Matt Groening is the reason the Fox network’s The Simpsons, on Sundays at 8:30 p.m., is such an enjoyable show,” Tucker wrote in that review. “Groening has created a group of characters whose personalities and motives are more vivid and detailed than the vast majority of sitcoms featuring flesh-and-blood actors.”
Tucker appreciated the characters’ complexities, too. Bart is a bratty kid, sure, but he also has a sensitive side. Homer’s a bit of a doofus, but he also delivers an incisive takedown of capitalism.
“In the standard sitcom, kids are obnoxious, moms are long-suffering, and dads are dopes,” Tucker told readers. “They’re the cartoons; the Simpsons are for real. … The Simpsons are the American family at its most complicated, drawn as simple cartoons.”
The New York Times called it “refreshingly different.”
The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor also compared The Simpsons favorably over other sitcoms — observing, in a February 1990 review of the show, that the middle-class Simpsons were far more likable than the middle-crass Bundys on Married… With Children.
Like Tucker, O’Connor was won over by Bart’s antics… and, perhaps, a bit fixated on the skateboarding kid’s appearance. (The former critic said Bart’s head was “shaped like a grocery bag,” while the latter said Bart’s spiky hair “suggests he has been profoundly influenced by Jughead in the old Archie comic books.”
But O’Connor also noted that The Simpsons was uneven in that first season, saying one camping trip episode became “merely outlandish” as a pond-slime-covered Homer was mistaken for Bigfoot.
“There is, admittedly, a fine line between being hilariously perceptive and just plain, even objectionably, silly,” the critic wrote. “While habitually teetering on that line, The Simpsons has shown a remarkable ability to come down on the right side most of the time.”
Who called the show “off-putting much of the time”?
© 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection
Unlike other critics and millions of viewers, TIME’s Richard Zoglin was not on board the Simpsons train during that first season. In an April 1990 appraisal, Zoglin, too, weighed the show against other sitcoms, specifically other “anti-family sitcoms” like Roseanne and Married… With Children that dispatched with the classic-TV tropes of the all-knowing working-man father, the nurturing-housewife mother, and the mischievous-but-still-respectful children.
That tradition-bucking trend aside, The Simpsons was “strangely off-putting much of the time,” Zoglin said. “The drawings are grotesque without redeeming style or charm (characters have big beady eyes, beaklike noses and spiky hair), and the animation is crude even by TV’s low-grade standards.”
Zoglin’s opinion of the show wasn’t all bad, though. He said the show displayed “a good deal of savvy wit” and said the characters hew “much closer to recognizable human life” than characters on other shows. “Family members are not depraved or offensive, just a little dim.” (We can just hear Homer now, responding to that diss with a “D’oh!”)
Their varying estimations of The Simpsons aside, how surprised those critics would be in 1990 to learn they were witnessing the start of a record-breaking TV institution that’s nearing the four-decade mark!
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