‘The Simpsons’ Won’t Make a Big Deal Out of Its Series Finale
The Simpsons has been on the air for nearly four decades, and many of the characters, despite their perpetually youthful appearances, are beginning to sound conspicuously old and haggard. So, not surprisingly, the show’s creatives are being asked about how and when the show is going to call it quits.
Showrunner Matt Selman recently weighed in on this topic during an interview with The New York Post. While the matter of when the series will conclude is yet to be determined, Selman did outline his ideas for what he thinks a Simpsons series finale might realistically look like — and it’s a tad more understated than some fans might be expecting.
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Selman argued that the idea of making an epic Simpsons series finale is “sort of an impossible thing,” and recalled how discussions around this exact conundrum inspired Season 36’s fourth-wall-breaking premiere. As we’ve mentioned before, “Bart’s Birthday” parodied familiar TV finale tropes while also reaffirming that The Simpsons will continue to ignore the passage of time and keep chugging along for as long as it can.
Judging from Selman’s recent comments, this episode’s mission statement very much aligns with his view of how The Simpsons should really conclude. “The show isn’t meant to end,” Selman told The Post. “To do a sappy crappo series finale, like most other shows do, would be so lame. So we just did one that was like over-the-top.”
So if it won’t be an “over-the-top” television event, what will the real last-ever installment of The Simpsons be like? According to Selman, likely just “a regular episode.”
“I think later we’ll just pick an episode and say that was the last one. No self-aware stuff. Or, one self-aware joke,” Selman claimed, adding that it should just be “a really good story about the family.”
Selman isn’t the first Simpsons writer to float ideas for a hypothetical finale. Al Jean has previously suggested that the show could end with the Simpson family driving to the same Christmas pageant that we saw in the very first episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.” According to Jean, this would turn the whole series into one big “continuous loop.”
While Jean’s idea is a little more high-concept, both his and Selman’s pitches accomplish the same goal: ensuring that, however The Simpsons ends, it can’t be in a way that fundamentally changes anything about the series as a whole.
The Simpsons has resisted narrative progress in most (but not all) respects, so to artificially inject a sense of narrative resolution into one episode, as we saw in “Bart’s Birthday,” would inevitably clash with the body of the series. Regardless of when the show ends, The Simpsons will still live on thanks to reruns and streaming.
Of course, it’s always possible that the writers will change their minds and end the show with Homer waking up from a dream in Bob Newhart’s bed.
