The Fox Broadcasting Company officially launched in October 1986, but didn’t expand into primetime programming until April the following year with sketch series The Tracey Ullman Show airing on Sunday nights. Producer James L. Brooks wanted to include animated shorts before and after each commercial break, and approached cartoonist Matt Groening to pitch an idea after being impressed by his Life in Hell comic strips.
Groening was unwilling to rescind the publication rights for Life in Hell so instead proposed a series of shorts focused on a dysfunctional American family. A number of different versions of the origin story exist, but Groening himself claims he created the characters while waiting in the lobby of Brooks’s office for the pitch meeting to begin. He named the characters after members of his own family, although Bart was an anagram of the word ‘brat’.
American animation company Klasky-Csupo were contracted to produce the cartoons in a short space of time, while voices for the characters were provided by Ullman Show cast members Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner alongside Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith.
The Simpsons made their television debut in the third episode of The Tracey Ullman Show, broadcast on 19 April 1987. Beginning with the short “Good Night”, the Simpsons were initially featured on only an occasional basis. However, an overwhelmingly positive reaction in season one meant that Simpsons shorts were featured in every episode of the next two seasons before being spun off into a standalone half-hour series in 1989.
