also its own ending, which in reality was not the end of anything

The current showrunner from the oldest series on television, Matt Selman, has made it clear: the series will never end. Or at least, it won’t end with a typical episode, like all series. In fact, ‘The Simpsons’ also predicted the ending, as they do with so many things, and about a year and a half ago they advanced their own series finalecertifying that when the series ends, it will end and that’s it. Although at the moment he has no intentions.

All endings. On September 29, 2024, Fox aired what appeared to be the final episode of ‘The Simpsons’. However, it was the premiere of season 36, the 769th episode of the series, and it was an exquisite joke. It had been conceived by showrunner Matt Selman shortly after the writers’ strike ended from the WGA in September 2023, and in it he tried to answer the eternal question of: when and how will ‘The Simpsons’ end?

The narrative mechanism chosen was HackGPT, a ChatGPT parody AI that had analyzed all the episodes of the series and all the endings in television history to generate the perfect closure. and it was a string of commonplaces: Mr. Burns died, Moe closed the bar, Krusty canceled his show, Milhouse moved to Atlanta, Skinner retired, and to top it off, Maggie finally spoke. All the clichés of the final episode trope condensed, with Conan O’Brien (former series writer) as master of ceremonies and a cast of guest stars that included Tom Hanks, Seth Rogen and John Cena.

The antifinal as a declaration of intentions. In a recent interview, Selman confirmed that what he was looking for was to reboot, in a sense, the series: “we put all the possible concepts of a series finale in a single episode, to say in some way that we are never going to do a series finale.” In addition, there was a background: the Hollywood writers’ strike had just ended and one of its workhorses had been the use of AI. This episode satirized what a contrived screenwriter would do in a final episode: a melee of meaningless clichés. The satire worked because the episode became one of the best rated by viewers on IMDB in years.

Timeline. None of this matters, really, because ‘The Simpsons’ has no canon: Selman claims that a show that has been on the air for 37 years with characters that do not age cannot, structurally, maintain a fixed canon. The series works with what is known as floating timeline o floating timeline: the year of birth of the characters is updated every time the plot requires it, so that the adults are always in their forties regardless of the historical moment in which the action takes place. In your own words: “It seems to me that story and character should come first, and the rules of the cinematic universe of a show that has no rules should come a distant second.”

Valid satire. The anti-AI satire of the fake final episode of ‘The Simpsons’ is increasingly pertinent: although legislation on the use of AI tools in environments such as writers’ rooms is being refined, the adoption of tools such as Sudowrite or ChatGPT does not stop. An analysis July 2025 documents that tools of this type are already used to generate everything from first drafts to commercial viability analyses. But its use in professional production series under agreements such as the one signed after the WGA strike continues to be conditioned by the restrictions of each contract.

Still, there are professionals like John August, screenwriter and co-host of the ‘Scriptnotes’ podcast, who have mixed positions: August, for example, considers that AI is useful for summarizing or doing auxiliary work, but not for replacing the writing process. Dilemmas that point to the future. Maybe by the time ‘The Simpsons’ turns a thousand episodes?

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