This Was the First ‘Simpsons’ Joke to Run Afoul of the Fox Censors

The Simpsons has seemingly had a pretty bumpy relationship with Fox’s Standards and Practices Department over the decades. Network censors literally tried to stop the show from using the word “gay” in Season Eight’s “Homer’s Phobia.” And for some reason, they weren’t big fans of the “Treehouse of Horror” episode that began with a Fox censor being brutally stabbed to death.

Well,  it turns out that the show was beefing with censors as far back as Season One. But the earliest complaint about content had nothing to do with Bart’s potty mouth or The Itchy & Scratchy Show’s unrelenting cartoon carnage, but rather, Homer and Marge’s marital relationship.

While guesting on WTF with Marc Maron, Simpsons creator Matt Groening addressed the show’s status as a pioneering work of adult animation. “I think one of the reasons why The Simpsons got on the air is because there were finally TV executives (in the ‘80s) who were young enough to have remembered The Flintstones and The Jetsons and Johnny Quest,” Groening explained.

When asked about his willingness to “cross lines” in the early days of the show, Groening revealed that network censors were even more conservative than he would have thought. “I figured that kids would watch,” Groening noted. “We called it an adult show because we knew kids would watch no matter what it was, but if we called it a show for adults then we could get away with more wild jokes.”

“Back at the very beginning, it’s amazing how uptight even a network as loose as Fox was,” the cartoonist continued. “We had a line, I think it was in the first episode (or) one of the early episodes, in which Homer says to Marge, ‘Hey Marge, tonight will you wear your blue thing with the things?’ And they said, ‘You can’t say that.’ We said, ‘Well, what does it mean?’ They couldn’t say why.”

The writers won the argument, and the line made it into Season One’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” the episode that was intended to be the series premiere, but ended up being delayed due to some major behind-the-scenes problems. 

The episode finds Bart and Lisa battling the notorious “Babysitter Bandit” while Homer and Marge spend a romantic evening together, eventually ending up in a swank hotel room where Marge decides to “slip into something more comfortable” prompting Homer’s inquiry about the “blue thing with the things.” So the scene was intended to be sexual in nature, but Homer’s description of Marge’s negligee doesn’t seem too scandalous, even by 1989’s standards.

And if the censors hated that line, they must have really hated all the subsequent episodes full of “hardcore nudity.”