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!”
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.
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. year the simpsons started
It was weirdly tender. And then, a week later, the second episode—the one with the family road trip, a runaway pariah, and Bart famously telling Homer, “You’re a sad, strange little man”—proved the show had teeth. Bartmania exploded. “Eat my shorts,” “Don’t have a cow,” and “Ay caramba!” became playground scripture. Teachers shuddered. Parents worried. President George H.W. Bush would later declare that American families should be “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.”
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. It was the end of a decade that
December 17, 1989
But the kids knew. The college students knew. Even some parents secretly knew: The Simpsons wasn’t mocking family—it was mocking everything. Consumerism, religion, network TV, marriage, work, school, the environment, and above all, itself. It was All in the Family drawn in canary yellow. They were crude, sloppy, and brilliant
We did. And we’re still hungry.