“We can’t say we saved the world,” Selman said at an Annecy Film Festival panel honoring creator Matt Groening this week, per The Hollywood Reporter. “We sort of destroyed it, actually,” he continued. “Would there be a Fox News without The Simpsons?”
That may seem like a leap at first, but there’s some real weight behind Selman’s suggestion. Fox, which was founded in 1986, was still a relatively new network when The Simpsons premiered in 1989, and had struggled to hold its own against the previously established “big three” (ABC, NBC, and CBS) in its first three years. That changed when it struck animated gold with Groening’s show, which became the first-ever Fox show to land in the Nielsen Top 30.
We hardly need to recap The Simpsons’ cultural impact in the years since. The series has won 37 Primetime Emmy awards and currently holds the titles for both longest-running American sitcom and longest-running American animated series. It also became a real money-maker for the fledgling Fox Network, which decided to compete against CNN when it launched Fox News in 1996.
But despite this potential society-altering butterfly effect, Selman also thinks the series has done some good in the world. “So many of our fans now are young people, like really young people, like between the ages of, like, 8 and 12, watching it on Disney+, and it becomes their favorite show for like four years before they move on to harder and crazier stuff,” he said. “They watch every episode, and it kind of informs their worldview… we get a chance to teach them our worldview, to show them how to look at the world with skepticism and curiosity and also empathy.”
