Are You an Expert on The Simpsons?

Thirty-five years. That's how long a jaundiced family from a town called Springfield has been on the air, making it the longest-running scripted primetime series in American television history. It has outlasted presidents, recessions, and countless shows that thought they'd be around forever.

And somehow, it's still going.

The Simpsons began not as a show at all, but as a set of crude animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987. Matt Groening reportedly sketched the whole family in the lobby minutes before a meeting, naming most of them after his own relatives. The plan was to protect his real comic strip. The doodles took over his life instead.

Here's a detail that still trips people up: those famous yellow characters were colored that way on purpose. The animators wanted something that would make viewers flipping channels stop cold. It worked. There is nothing else on television that looks quite like it.

The writing room has always been the secret weapon. Over the years it has been stacked with Harvard graduates, former mathematicians, and comedy minds who slipped mathematical jokes, literary references, and dense background gags into scripts that most viewers never fully catch on a single watch. Freeze-frame the show and entire second layers of jokes appear.

Then there's the prophecy problem. The series has an uncanny habit of predicting real events years before they happen, from certain political outcomes to tech products to strange cultural moments. Coincidence, obsessive writing, or something stranger? The debate never quite dies.

So what separates the casual viewer from the genuine devotee? Anyone can quote a line about donuts. But the real fans remember the deep cuts, the one-episode characters who broke everyone's heart, the guest stars, the odd little town details, and the running gags buried across decades of episodes.

This quiz digs into the corners. It covers the family, the town, the workplace, the neighbors, and the guest appearances that turned into legend. It rewards people who paid attention to the strange, specific stuff, not just the catchphrases.

Springfield has kept its secrets for over three decades. Time to see how many of them stuck.

Take the quiz below and find out where true fandom ends and expert territory begins.