Despite The Simpsons‘ Season 36 premiere being dubbed the “series finale,” the long-running animated show has no plans to go away anytime soon. However, showrunner Matt Selman has some ideas in mind for how things should end when the time comes.
Season 36 premiered on September 29, 2024, with an episode that explored the question of how the iconic Fox sitcom should end. This included scenarios such as Mr. Burns dying, Moe’s Tavern closing down, and Principal Skinner retiring. In the end, it turned out to be all part of Bart’s A.I.-generated illusion.
Speaking about the episode to the New York Post, Selman said, “The discussion that it would be so hard to do a last episode is what led to the fake series finale. That it’s sort of an impossible thing.”
“The show isn’t meant to end,” he added. “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.”
Selman shared similar sentiments earlier this year in an interview with People, where he explained, “I always felt like there was no good answer to that question [how the show should end] because the show was never meant to end. It was meant to go on forever. It was meant to make fun of the idea of last episodes and everything we do, every episode is both a first and a last episode of the show.”
With that in mind, Selman has his own ideas of what a last episode of The Simpsons would look like, telling the Post it would just be “a regular episode.”
“The characters in this crazy show don’t age… 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,” he shared, adding that he’d like the last episode just to be “a really good story about the family.”
Carolyn Omine, an Emmy-winning writer on the show, also spoke to the Post about an eventual series finale, stating, “I’ve heard a few people say ‘I think it should be this’ or ‘I think it should be that.’ And it’s hard, because what the show is kind of keeps changing. So it can’t be the idea you’ve had in your pocket for a while.”
Selman noted that many people have ideas about the series finale “based on having watched other last shows… And I don’t think it should be a response to the litany of last shows that already exist. We covered that area.”
“[The last episode will be] a parody of A Christmas Carol with [Mr. Burns] as Scrooge. The laziest idea!” he quipped.
The Simpsons, Sundays, 8/7c, Fox