The Simpsons

No doubt all of you have heard of the animated TV sitcom called The Simpsons. With seasons 31 and 32 confirmed, The Simpsons is now the longest running TV show in the world. It follows the life of a middle-class family of five living in the fictional city of Springfield and it often parodies American culture and society. From the start, the show has been very highly acclaimed (Time Magazine named it the 20th centuries best TV series) and today it generates millions of dollars of revenue. But there has been a widely perceived decline in recent years.

Matt Groening - a cartoonist, writer, and producer in his mid 30's - was already the proud producer of the Life in Hell comic strips when he conceived the idea of the Simpsons. He named every family member after his own family, replacing himself with Bart. His goal was to comedically parody an over-the-top and dysfunctional American family. Its initial release on the Tracey Ullman show was not a tremendous hit but after Fox Broadcasting Company adapted the show it quickly became a worldwide phenomenon.

One of the distinguishing traits of the show is the yellow skin-color of most characters. Groening initially wanted the show to stand out and grab a viewers attention, so he decided to make the characters yellow. Furthermore, it has been biologically and psychologically been proven that the color yellow quickly stands out and it is most readily picked up by our eyes (that is why warning signs are yellow).

The timeline and setting of the show are both very open to analysis. Although each season seems to be set in the year the season was released, the characters do not age between episodes. Each episode is also its own distinct packet, meaning a viewer does not have to view the show in order to understand the plot of an episode. The setting is even more ambiguous as "Springfield" is a very common name in the US and it appears in 29 distinct states.