American animated series about the everyday life of the Simpson family

Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie live in Evergreen Terrace in the typical American town of Springfield. Homer is a safety inspector at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Marge is the mother of the family and usually stays at home looking after Maggie, the baby of the family. Bart is an impressionable ten year old boy, who is often getting into trouble, and Lisa is the brains of the family.

The Simpsons was hugely successful when it started in 1990, and repeats of the early series are still broadcast all over the world. The success of the programme can, at least partly, be attributed to the sheer number of jokes in each episode of the programme. There are often so many that it is impossible to notice all of them at the first viewing of an episode.

The jokes themselves range from simple slapstick humour that a five year old could laugh at, through topical jokes about forthcoming elections, to jokes about highly technical things that require relatively obscure knowledge before they can be understood.

In recent years, The Simpsons has received criticism that it is not as funny as it used to be, and the ratings today are not as high as they were in the early 1990's. Matt Groening, the inventor of The Simpsons has expressed that he no longer wants the programme to carry on. However, the ratings are still stable, and 20th Century Fox, who make the programme are still willing to carry on with the programme.

In the UK, The Simpsons was broadcast on BBC 2 from the mid-nineties till 2004, when it moved to Channel 4 after a fierce bidding war caused the price per episode to rise to millions of pounds.

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The Simpsons Season 1 (DVD)