Simpson family
family of fictional characters from The Simpsons franchise
The Simpson family are the titular main characters featured in the animated television series The Simpsons. The Simpsons are a dysfunctional nuclear family consisting of married couple Homer and Marge and their three children, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. They live at 742 Evergreen Terrace in the fictional town of Springfield, United States. They were created by cartoonist Matt Groening, who conceived the characters after his own family members, substituting "Bart" for his own name. The family debuted on Fox on April 19, 1987, in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" and were later spun off into their own series, which debuted on Fox in the United States on December 17, 1989, and started airing in Winter 1990.
Alongside the five main family members are Homer's father Abraham "Grampa" Simpson, Marge's sisters Patty and Selma Bouvier, and the family's two pets, Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II; all of them feature in major supporting roles. Other, less prominent relatives that appear infrequently include Marge's mother Jacqueline Bouvier, Homer's mother Mona Simpson, his half-brother Herb Powell and minor relatives.
Concept and origins
Creation
Groening conceived of the idea for the Simpsons in the lobby of James L. Brooks's office. Brooks had asked Groening to pitch an idea for a series of animated shorts, which Groening initially intended to present as his Life in Hell series. However, when Groening realized that animating Life in Hell would require the rescinding of publication rights for his life's work, he chose another approach and formulated his version of a dysfunctional family.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9762. VIAF identifies the subject as 5809904. The Library of Congress control number is sh99002789. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1989 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simpson family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.