A new episode of The Simpsons called "Yellow Mirror" streams on Disney+ on 26 August 2026.1 Earlier this year the show passed its 800th episode.2
So the show is a museum piece and a new release in the same year. That is what makes it hard to file: a list of the best television of the nineties and a list of shows that stayed on too long each have a fair claim on it.
Seventeen rankings below contain The Simpsons. A few are about animation. Several are about television that never stopped.
A show that has run thirty-seven seasons ends up on the lists that celebrate television and the lists that complain about it.
The Simpsons vs The Sopranos: the show that outlasted the golden age
Ask which television show is the best ever made and the field fills with limited runs: six seasons, seven, nine at the outside. The Simpsons is on the same list of sixty-four shows, and it is the only one that never stopped making them.
It also holds 37 Primetime Emmy wins from 106 nominations, more than any drama here.5 That is the strongest form of its case, and it is a career total rather than a claim about any single season.
The Sopranos makes the opposite case with a tenth of the material. Eighty-six episodes, one decade, an ending people still fight about, and no thin late period to defend, because David Chase stopped.
Breaking Bad, The Wire and Band of Brothers are all here on those same terms: finite, planned, over. Weighing them against The Simpsons is less a comparison of two shows than of two ideas about what television is for — a novel with a last page, or a town you can visit on a Sunday for thirty-seven years.
Longevity is the one thing The Simpsons brings that none of the others can. It is also why a lot of viewers will not put it first: the run that produced "Last Exit to Springfield" produced the seasons those same viewers stopped watching.
Seinfeld left in 1998. The Simpsons never has to age
The sitcom category is where The Simpsons stops being an animation entry and competes on the same terms as live action: one town, a fixed cast, a joke every twenty seconds.
Animation hands it a structural advantage nobody else here has. Bart has been ten years old since 1989, so nobody ever had to write around a child actor growing up or a lead renegotiating a contract.
Seinfeld took the other route and left, after nine seasons between 1989 and 1998.
Cheers, Frasier and The Office are all on this list, and all of them finished.
SpongeBob, Arcane and the animation list where age counts against you
Animation is the category The Simpsons is supposed to own, and it is also where the competition has changed most since 1989.
SpongeBob SquarePants started in 1999 and built an empire out of a sponge. Arcane, Attack on Titan and Avatar: The Last Airbender each give the list another definition of what animated television is for.
The Simpsons has one claim none of them can make. Guinness lists it as the longest-running animated sitcom by episode count, and prime-time animation was not a commercial category before it.9
Whether that makes it the best animated series or only the most important one is the whole disagreement.
Fox in the 1990s: The Simpsons and The X-Files on the same schedule
Both of these shows were Fox's 1990s, and both are on this list of that decade.
The Simpsons spent those years in the run most critics still treat as its peak, roughly seasons three to eight, which is where nearly every quoted line comes from.
The X-Files ran from 1993 to 2002 and turned a network known for cartoons and Married… with Children into somewhere a conspiracy drama could headline.
Seinfeld, The Sopranos and Twin Peaks are on the same list, which makes this the rare ranking that judges The Simpsons on one decade instead of all thirty-seven seasons. It is also the decade its own viewers would choose.
Breaking Bad vs The Simpsons: the century that holds most of its episodes
This ranking begins in 2000, and that line cuts the show in half.
Almost every episode people quote was made before it. Almost every episode made since falls inside it — The Simpsons has been on air for the whole of the window this list covers, and its own fans mostly point somewhere else.
Breaking Bad, The Wire and Succession were designed for exactly this century: one plan, a fixed length, an ending negotiated in advance.
The case for The Simpsons here is not a season. It is that nothing else on the list had to keep inventing a Springfield story every autumn for twenty-six straight years while those shows arrived, ran and finished.
Still in production: the only show here that hasn't stopped
The Walking Dead, Supernatural, Dexter and Glee are all here because people wished they had stopped. The Simpsons is the only entry that has not.
Fox renewed it in April 2025 for four more seasons, 37 through 40, carrying it into the 2028–29 television year.4 The renewal was signed roughly two decades after the point most viewers name as the drop-off, which is the part that makes this ranking awkward rather than cruel.
The complaint has a specific shape, and it is not that the late episodes are unwatchable. It is that a viewer starting at season thirty finds a competent sitcom where the reputation promised a landmark.
The counter-case is that nobody has to watch the late seasons for the early ones to exist. A show cancelled in 1998 would have a tidier reputation, several hundred fewer episodes, and not one better one.
There is also an answer with nothing to do with quality: a network with a Sunday animation block to fill has no reason to switch off the show that fills it.
Topping a list like this says less about a show's quality than about its age. Nothing younger has been around long enough to qualify.
Homer Simpson vs Philip Banks: the father who has been forty for thirty-seven years
Homer Simpson has been a television father for longer than most of the men on this list were on air in total. He first appeared in a sixty-second segment on The Tracey Ullman Show on 19 April 1987, two and a half years before the family got a half-hour of its own.9
He is also the least competent candidate in the field by a wide margin, which is the point. The category rewards fathers who are funny about failing at it.
Philip Banks, Ward Cleaver and Andy Taylor are written to be admired at least once an episode. Homer is written to be forgiven.
Mr. Burns vs Azula: the villain who signs the protagonist's paycheque
Charles Montgomery Burns owns the nuclear plant that employs the show's main character, so the threat he poses is not a scheme. It is an employment contract.
Azula, Skeletor and Plankton were built for children's television, where the villain loses weekly and resets.
Burns does not reset. Springfield still needs the electricity.
"D'oh!" in the Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary added "doh" in 2001, without the apostrophe, and noted that the interjection was already in use in the 1950s.7
So Homer did not invent it. He used it often enough that the dictionary recorded where readers had heard it.
Joey Tribbiani's "How you doin'?" is what the rest of this list looks like: a written line an actor delivered. This one is a grunt.
Danny Elfman vs Cheers: two of the most recognisable bars in American television
Theme songs are the category where thirty-seven seasons stop mattering and eight bars start.
Danny Elfman wrote the Simpsons theme in 1989 as a deliberately old-fashioned carnival fanfare, and it has played over a different couch gag ever since.
"Where Everybody Knows Your Name" is the opposite kind of theme: a slow piano ballad about being a regular, written for a show set in one bar.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Addams Family, Hawaii Five-O and Mission: Impossible are here too, which is what makes the category hard. Every entry is something the reader can already hum.
The couch gag Banksy storyboarded
Most opening sequences on this list are fixed pieces of film that play identically for a whole run.
The Simpsons is built the other way. The couch gag, the chalkboard line and the length itself change week to week, which is how the show came to hand the sequence to an outside artist: Banksy storyboarded the October 2010 opening, the first time an artist had been invited to.8
Mad Men's silhouetted adman falls past Manhattan billboards for the same thirty-six seconds across seven seasons and never varies once.
Game of Thrones, True Detective and Severance all take the fixed-statement approach. The Simpsons treats the sequence as a slot to refill.
Family Guy vs The Simpsons: what Fox built its Sunday night on
Fox has broadcast The Simpsons since 17 December 1989, when the first half-hour episode went out.9 Season 38 is scheduled for 27 September 2026 at 8 p.m., in the same slot.3
The network was three years old when the show started, running fourth behind ABC, CBS and NBC. Animation Domination, the Sunday block Fox still schedules, was built around one programme.
Other Fox shows here ran longer than critics expected or stopped sooner than viewers wanted: The X-Files, Married… with Children, 24, Family Guy.
None of them are still setting the network's Sunday schedule thirty-seven years after being commissioned.
810 guest stars, and almost none of the best lines are theirs
Quotability resists measurement, so here is a proxy: Guinness World Records counts 810 guest cameos on The Simpsons as of April 2020, more than any other television series.10
Almost none of the surviving lines are the celebrities'. They are the throwaways, one of which put "embiggen" into Merriam-Webster's dictionary.
The Office and Seinfeld get quoted from scenes people can name. The Simpsons gets quoted from episodes people cannot place.
The Simpsons Movie vs South Park: the television spin-off that took $536 million
Films made from television usually arrive once the series is over. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is the exception that proves the rule, and The Simpsons Movie is the other one: it came out in 2007, in the middle of season eighteen, with the show still in production.
It took about $536 million worldwide, which is more than most of the entries on this list and more than the studio needed to justify a sequel.6
It also had a problem no other film here shares: it had to be worth paying for, against a free half-hour of the same show airing the same season.
The solution was a dome over the town and a pig, and it worked well enough that a second film is now dated.
Treehouse of Horror, an anthology inside a sitcom
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was made once, in 1966, and has been repeated every October since. That is what most of this list looks like: one episode, made once.
Treehouse of Horror is a format. Three unconnected horror parodies, no continuity with the series around it, characters killed off and back the following week, once a season since 1990.
The Television Academy's 2023 award for animated programme went to Treehouse of Horror XXXIII, which is the thirty-third of them.5
Being an annual tradition is what makes this entry hard to rank against a single famous special: the reader is not comparing episodes, they are comparing a one-off to an institution.
Homer, Marge, Lisa or Mr. Burns: ranking Springfield from the inside
The other rankings in this article put The Simpsons next to other shows. This one is the show against itself.
The cast is unusually deep for a sitcom, because thirty-seven seasons need somewhere to put stories: a bartender, a police chief, a comic-shop owner and a school superintendent have all carried episodes.
The family still tends to dominate the argument, and the split is generational. Bart was the merchandising face of 1990; Homer had become the show's centre by the mid-nineties.
Which one is best depends entirely on which seasons the reader grew up with, which is a question about the reader rather than about Springfield.
"Cape Feare" vs "Homer's Enemy": picking one episode out of thirty-seven seasons
This is the narrowest ranking in the article and the one Simpsons viewers will spend longest on: a single episode out of a run this long.
"Marge vs. the Monorail" is the usual place these lists start. Conan O'Brien wrote it before he had a talk show, and it throws out plot logic for a musical number about public transport.
The same handful of titles surrounds it every time. "Cape Feare", where Sideshow Bob keeps standing on the same rake. "Homer's Enemy", which drops a man who has worked for everything into a town where Homer has been to space. "You Only Move Twice", which hands Homer a supervillain for a boss and lets him fail to notice.
They share a date range. Almost every nominee falls between seasons three and nine: seven seasons out of thirty-seven, made by a room that had worked out what the show was and had not yet lost its writers to other shows.
So an honest version of this ranking is a ranking of one era. Every complaint about the late seasons is a backhanded compliment to that one.
Springfield in 2027: still no ending to rank
The Simpsons is not going to settle any of this by finishing. Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie return to cinemas on 23 July 2027, twenty years after the first film, and the series is scheduled well past that date.6
Which leaves the rankings where they are: not verdicts, but questions answered one pair at a time. That is the method behind the 1000-point score on every ranking above.
If your own answer to one of these is obvious, the quickest way to prove it is to build the ranking you think is missing.
More rankings, more angles
- Star Trek Turns 60. No Two Lists Agree Where It Belongs — cancelled in 1969, still ranked
- Death Note: Thriller, Shonen, or Best Cartoon Ever? — 37 episodes, four different genres
- How Rankings Are Scored: The 1000-Point System — why the leader always reads 1000
- Game of Thrones: 59 Emmys, One Ending Nobody Agrees On — 59 Emmys and a disputed finale
Sources
- Disney+ Press — three all-new Simpsons episodes streaming exclusively in 2026, with "Yellow Mirror" on 26 August: press.disneyplus.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- The National Desk — The Simpsons reaches its 800th episode, "Irrational Treasure": thenationaldesk.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- TVLine — Fox's fall 2026 premiere dates, with The Simpsons season 38 on Sunday 27 September at 8 p.m.: tvline.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- UPI — Fox renews The Simpsons for four more seasons, 37 through 40, on 2 April 2025: upi.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- Television Academy — The Simpsons' Primetime Emmy record of 37 wins from 106 nominations, including the 2023 animated programme award for "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII": televisionacademy.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- ABC News — The Simpsons Movie sequel dated 23 July 2027 from 20th Century Studios, and the 2007 film's $536 million worldwide gross: abcnews.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- ABC News — the Oxford English Dictionary adds Homer Simpson's "doh" in 2001, without the apostrophe: abcnews.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- Chortle — Banksy storyboards the opening sequence of "MoneyBart", the first time an artist was invited to, October 2010: chortle.co.uk (checked 4 August 2026)
- Guinness World Records — The Simpsons as the longest-running animated sitcom by episode count, with its 19 April 1987 debut on The Tracey Ullman Show and its first half-hour episode on 17 December 1989: guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 4 August 2026)
- Guinness World Records — most guest stars featured in an animated TV series: 810 cameos as of 22 April 2020: guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 4 August 2026)