A President Will Never Move to Springfield Again, Says ‘Simpsons’ Showrunner Matt Selman
Nearly 30 years after the Bush Clan came to Springfield, legendary Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman says that his team will not make another former President move in next door to the show's titular family — so long as no other First Lady starts a beef that she can’t finish.
In the iconic Season Seven episode “Two Bad Neighbors,” The Simpsons settled a score that stretched back to 1990. In an interview with PEOPLE, soon-to-be First Lady Barbara Bush called Fox’s hot new animated comedy “the dumbest thing I had ever seen,” because she hadn't yet watched her son start two unwinnable wars and tank the international economy. And, while Lady Bush would quickly walk back her initial criticism of The Simpsons, two years later, while on the presidential campaign trail, George H.W. Bush expressed his goal “to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons,” thus setting the stage for the greatest political fistfight in the history of animated comedy.
But while The Simpsons never shies away from a fight with a political figure, as Selman explained in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, “it’s not our mission statement” to stay politically topical in every season, nor does he feel that there’s any more political pressure on the show in 2025 than in 1996. Put simply, Selman says that, in Season 37, “We’re not gonna do a big show where the president comes to town.”
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Notice how he didn’t say anything about the Commander-in-Chief showing up in sewers underneath Springfield.
“We did do that, but he was George Bush and he’d been out of office for quite some time,” Selman clarified of his assurance to Simpsons fans that President Donald Trump will not become a main character in the show’s upcoming season. “And, you know, we just don’t do big topical things, ‘cause the topical is so chaotic and nuts. So we have to look at the bigger trends.”
Selman continued of The Simpsons’ relationship with the political landscape of modern America, “Ideally, I would like to think that people on both sides of our divided nation can watch The Simpsons and feel that, like America, Springfield is a town of people who are good, but easily misled. Whatever your definition of misled is, you can apply that to the show.”
Of course, the events of “Two Bad Neighbors” don’t appear to be commenting on the gullibility of the average American more than they look like a knockout blow in a years-old beef against one particular President. Still, Bush’s appearance on The Simpsons would be a poor precedent for a Season 37 episode, since it’s hard to imagine that the MAGA crowd would be anything besides apoplectic at the insinuation that their God-King would ever live in a house that small and un-gilded.
Ultimately, having a sitting president garrote Homer Simpson in a sewer simply isn’t what The Simpsons is about, and, for all his transgressions, neither Trump nor his wife have personally and repeatedly antagonized the show and its writers. However, if Melania ever decides to pick a fight she has no chance at winning, I’m sure the Simpsons animators would be happy to draw up another showdown underground — Trump’s going to have to scrounge up some CIA tricks of his own if he wants a fighting chance.
