The Simpsons Was 'Almost Cancelled' Before First Episode Aired, Former Producer Admits

With The Simpsons currently gearing up for its 38th season, the beloved animated show continues to extend its record as the longest-running sitcom in American TV history.

After premiering at the end of the 1980s, it didn’t take long for the show to ascend to TV phenomenon status, and is now considered one of the most iconic and influential shows of all time.

But what might fans might not realise is how close The Simpsons came to being axed before it even aired.

It’s well-documented that The Simpsons got off to a bit of a bumpy start, with its planned debut episode Some Enchanted Evening being nowhere near ready for broadcast, resulting in the show launching with the Christmas special Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire instead.

But former producer Mike Reiss has now revealed that the situation was so disastrous, the show came to close to being “cancelled” altogether.

Speaking on the podcast My Roman Empire, Mike admitted: “It’s a famous story, they sat down and watched the first episode of The Simpsons – and it was catastrophic.

“Here’s all the Fox brass sitting down to see what they just spent $13 million on – and it wasn’t funny, the animation was bad, the animators had stuck their own jokes in the background, and the show was almost cancelled before it came on the air.”

“Luckily, the next week the second show came back fully animated, and it was great,” Mike continued. “But it was now too late to put the show on the air. We were supposed to come on in September, and instead we waited for episode nine, our Christmas show, and we debuted with a Christmas episode, and that gave us four or five months to fix all the other episodes.”

Mike added that Fox execs had “so little faith in our show” that the launch party took place – fittingly – in a bowling alley. 

Back in 2024, Simpsons creator Matt Groening shared his version of the story during a conversation to mark the show’s 35th anniversary.

He claimed: “We were supposed to debut in the fall of 1989 and we got back the animation for the first episode, and it was so horrendous.

“We lied to Fox and we said we hadn’t gotten the animation back. We delayed the premiere of the show from a fall premiere to December 17, 1989. We took that very first episode and we buried it until we made it airable. It was quite dramatic in those months before the show actually came on.”

Last year, The Simpsons was renewed for four more seasons, meaning it will run until at least 2029.

A second big-screen adventure for the Simpson family is also due for release next year, marking two decades since the first Simpsons Movie hit cinemas.