It’s been an up and down week for The Simpsons fans.
On one (four-fingered) hand, The Simpsons: Tapped Out mobile game is being shut down after an extremely profitable 12-year run. I guess making hundreds of millions of dollars ain’t what it used to be. That’s bad. But on the other (left) hand, another season of The Simpsons premieres soon. That’s good!
Here’s everything we know about The Simpsons season 36, including plot details, guest stars, and the premiere date.
Plot
The Simpsons season 36 kicks off with “Bart’s Birthday,” which co-showrunner Matt Selman described as a format-breaking episode. “The logline is Bart celebrates his birthday, but it’s a little more than that,” he told Animation Scoop. “If you like the more experimental episodes we’ve been doing lately, like ‘Lisa the Boy Scout’ and some of the crazier ones, this would fall into that category.” There will tons of guest stars, too, as seen below.
Beyond the premiere, there will be a spoof of The White Lotus entitled (what else?) “The Yellow Lotus” and two Halloween-focused episodes. The first is the annual “Treehouse of Horror” installment, featuring animation from the Robot Chicken team Stoopid Buddy in a parody of Venom, followed by the Ray Bradbury-inspired “Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes,” in which “a tattooed man at a mysterious night circus transports Lisa into three strange stories from the innocent 1950s, the chilling retro-present, and a brutalist future where prestige TV rules the world.”
The Simpsons will also do something unprecedented in the show’s long history this season: four new episodes will be made available exclusively on Disney Plus, not Fox (it appears they’re not technically considered part of season 36, but rather standalone episodes). That includes the Christmas-themed double episode “O C’mon All Ye Faithful,” which premieres on December 17, 35 years after the first aired episode of the show, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.” It’s unclear when the other episodes will debut.
Cast
It’s 36 seasons (and counting!) with Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, and Hank Azaria. The voice cast also includes — I’m only going to list their most well-known character or else this list will get very long — Pamela Hayden (Milhouse Van Houten), Tress MacNeille (Agnes Skinner), Maggie Roswell (Helen Lovejoy), Alex Désert (Carl Carlson), Kevin Michael Richardson (Dr. Hibbert), Jenny Yokobori (Kumiko Nakamura), Grey DeLisle (Martin Prince), and Eric Lopez (Bumblebee Man).
The announced guest stars so far for this season are Conan O’Brien (returning for the first time since season 5’s “Bart Gets Famous”), John Cena, Tom Hanks, and Joel McHale, all as themselves in the premiere; Danny DeVito as Homer’s brother Herb Powell; Chloe Fineman; Richard E. Grant; Andy Serkis; and of course, Kelsey Grammer as Sideshow Bob, who will also feature prominently in the next Disney+ short, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
Release Date
The Simpsons returns for season 35 on September 29. Meanwhile, “Treehouse of Horror XXXV” will supposedly air on November 3. Why not until after Halloween? As always, blame baseball (unless Apu’s favorite squadron makes it to the World Series, then please root for them).
Trailer
You can watch a promo for the season 36 premiere here. Or better yet, watch the first-ever The Simpsons short from The Tracey Ullman Show, “Good Night,” which debuted 37 years ago this year.