The Simpsons

Creation
When producer James L. Brooks was working on the television variety show The Tracey Ullman Show for the fledgling Fox network, he decided that he wanted to include small animated sketches before and after the commercial breaks. Having seen one of cartoonist Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic strips, Brooks asked Groening to pitch an idea for a series of animated shorts, which Groening initially intended to present as his Life in Hell series. Groening later realized that animating Life in Hell would require the rescinding of publication rights for his life's work, and passed on the offer. Richard Sakai contacted Groening to see if he had any other characters he would be willing to let Fox merchandise, and, in short, Groening developed a dysfunctional family that became the Simpsons. Garth Ancier contends that Groening created the characters at home and brought them the next day, while Phil Roman claims Groening sketched out the characters on the drive to Fox. Groening's account states he hurriedly formulated The Simpsons while waiting in the lobby of Brooks's office for the pitch meeting, which is the most common and famous story. He named the characters after his own family members, substituting "Bart" for his own name, adopting an anagram of the word "brat"

Fox negotiated a deal that would prove extremely lucrative for Groening, in which he retained a large portion of revenue from merchandising. To animate the short segments, Brooks and company settled on Klasky Csupo, a small animation house who offered to produce the cartoons cheaply. Brooks initially just wanted to animate the shorts through the basic line drawings, and Klasky-Csupo offered color for the same cost. The studio only employed three young animators—CalArts graduates Bill Kopp, Wes Archer, and David Silverman—who adapted Groening's scripts for animation in one week, doing layouts, animation, and inbetweening by hand in the very short amount of time. Groening submitted only basic sketches to the three, and assumed that the figures would be cleaned up in production. However, the animators merely re-traced his drawings, which led to the crude appearance of the characters in the initial short episodes. Colorist Gyorgyi Peluce was the person who decided to make the characters yellow.

Appearing initially alongside cartoons by M. K. Brown, the Simpson family first appeared in short subjects in The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987, and were featured the first three seasons. The actors who voiced the characters would later reprise their roles in The Simpsons.

Show
The main characters are the Simpson family, who live in a fictional "Middle America" town of Springfield. Homer, the father, works as a safety inspector at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, a position at odds with his careless, buffoonish personality. He is married to Marge a stereotypical American housewife, and mother. They have three children: Bart, a ten-year-old troublemaker and prankster; Lisa, a precocious eight-year-old activist; and Maggie, the baby of the family who rarely speaks, but communicates by sucking on a pacifier. Although the family is dysfunctional, many episodes examine their relationships and bonds with each other and they are often shown to care about one another. Homer's dad Grampa Simpson lives in the Springfield Retirement Home after Homer forced his dad to sell his house so that his family could buy theirs. Grampa Simpson has had starring roles in several episodes.