![]() The early seasons averaged over 20 million viewers per episode, including Bart Gets an “F”, the first episode of season 2, which is still the most-watched episode in the show’s history with an estimated 33.6 million viewers. I don’t know the reason for the switch-it might have something to do with Nielsen’s measurement or reporting-but without any other data sources it’s difficult to confirm.Īside from that bump, which is most likely a data artifact, not a real trend, it’s clear that the show’s ratings are trending lower. Viewership appears to jump in 2000, between seasons 11 and 12, but closer inspection reveals that’s when the Wikipedia data switches from reporting households to individuals. Historical Nielsen ratings data is hard to come by, so I relied on Wikipedia for Simpsons episode-level television viewership data. Dialogue share might not tell the whole story about a character’s prominence, but the fact is that Homer has always been the most talkative character on the show. I’ve heard this argument before, that the show was originally about Bart before switching its focus to Homer, but the actual scripts only seem to partially support it.īart accounted for a significantly larger share of the show’s dialogue in season 1 than in any future season, but Homer’s share has always been higher than Bart’s. While later seasons would focus on Homer, Bart was the lead character in most of the first three seasons ![]() ![]() The location data is a bit messy to work with-should “Simpson Living Room” really be treated differently than “Simpson Home”-but nevertheless it paints a picture of where people spend time in Springfield: at home, school, work, and the local bar. The scripts also include each scene’s setting, which I used to compute the locations with the most dialogue. I did not collect data on which writers wrote which episodes, but it would make for an interesting follow-up to see if the episodes written by women have a more equal distribution of dialogue between male and female characters. If we remove the Simpson nuclear family, things look even more lopsided: women account for less than 10% of the supporting cast’s dialogue.Ī look at the show’s list of writers reveals that 9 of the top 10 writers are male. ![]() Women account for 25% of the dialogue on The Simpsons, including Marge and Lisa, two of the show’s main characters. Krabappel, and only 5 of the top 50 supporting cast members are women. If we look at the supporting cast, the 14 most prominent characters are all male before we get to the first woman, Mrs. The colors of the bars in the above graphs represent gender: blue for male characters, red for female. Burns speaks the most words among supporting cast members, followed by Moe, Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders, and Krusty rounding out the top 5. If we exclude the Simpson nuclear family and focus on the top 50 supporting characters, the results become a bit less predictable, if not exactly surprising. Marge, Bart, and Lisa-in that order-combine for another 26%, giving the Simpson family a 47% share of the show’s dialogue. Of course Homer ranks first: he’s the undisputed most iconic character, and he accounts for 21% of the show’s 1.3 million words spoken through season 26. If you want to quiz yourself, pause here and try to name the next 5 biggest characters in order before looking at the answers… The top four are, not surprisingly, the Simpson nuclear family. I wrote code to parse the available episode scripts and attribute every word of dialogue to a character, then ranked the characters by number of words spoken in the history of the show. In addition to streaming every episode, the site includes episode guides, scripts, and audio commentary. Simpsons World provides a delightful trove of content for fans. The Simpsons characters who have spoken the most words All code used for this post is available on GitHub. It’s easier for an animated show to scale to hundreds of recurring characters without live-action actors to grow old or move on to other projects, the denizens of Springfield remain mostly unchanged from year to year.Īs a fan of the show, I present a few short analyses about Springfield, from the show’s dialogue to its TV ratings. The show’s longevity, and the fact that it’s animated, provides a vast and relatively unchanging universe of characters to study. At 27 seasons and counting, it’s the longest-running scripted series in the history of American primetime television. ![]()
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