36 on E4

Cast your mind back, if you will, to December 2024. In one fateful press release, Channel 4 destroyed all we had known about British broadcasts of The Simpsons for the last few decades. Sky would no longer be the home for new episodes of Our Favourite Family, for Season 36 would be the first season to debut exclusively on Disney+; henceforth, Sky would only carry repeats. Channel 4 would move their broadcasts of the show to E4 in January, becoming the only place to see new episodes on linear television.

And so it came to be that on 28 December 2025, Season 36 became the first season to make its linear debut in the UK on E4, a little over nine months after it started being added to Disney+ on a weekly basis (and almost exactly fifteen months since the season started on FOX). Obviously a longer delay between the episodes' premieres in the US and Sky than we were accustomed to, but -- disregarding BBC Two's special dispensation to air "The Trouble With Trillions" on Cuba Night back in 1999 -- a record for an episode making its debut on free-to-air television in the UK.

As with their premiere of Season 32 at the start of last year, E4 ran the episodes in double-bills on Sunday nights at 8pm. In week 4, "Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes" and "Convenience Airways" were pushed to 5:30pm by live sports coverage.

As we might have expected, this run did not include the four Disney+-exclusive episodes (the double-length "O C'mon All Ye Faithful", "The Past and the Furious" and "Yellow Planet") -- it seems pretty certain that these, and future Mouse-trapped instalments, will indeed remain exclusive to the platform. With S36 running to just 18 episodes that premiered 'normally', this meant the entire run was over and done with in just nine weeks.

But enough of all this. What about the cuts?

Durations, Dedications and Denouements

Narrative repeats were in a double-bill on Friday at 8pm for week 1; a double-bill on Thursday at 7pm for week 2; and consistently one episode on Thursday at 7pm and the other on Friday at the same time from week 3 onwards. Fair enough. (As before, I won't be covering cuts made to the repeats except in special cases, but regular commenter Rick has us covered.)

The following episodes featured dedications on their FOX broadcasts, all of which are missing on all other known versions (including, of course, E4's copies):

Premiere of 36ABF04 "Bottle Episode" -- originally dedicated to Carolyn Omine's writing partner William 'Billy' Wright

Premiere of 36ABF10 "Full Heart, Empty Pool" -- originally dedicated to Jill Sobule, who wrote and performed the original song in Season 31's "Marge the Lumberjill"

13 July 2025 repeat of 35ABF16 "Shoddy Heat" -- dedicated to George Wendt, who reprised his role of Norm Peterson in Season 6's "Fear of Flying"

With one exception which is just around the corner, all end credits were shown in full, with no voiceover or pushback, provided something apart from the standard theme was going on; for "Women in Shorts", which has an extra scene over the first half of the end credits but then the normal theme for the second half, there was both as soon as the nonstandard stuff ended.

Bastards Bastards Bastards

A loose end from the Season 32 post tied up: In "Shoddy Heat", Lisa's penknife has the words 'Ms. Li'l Bastard' on it, and in "Abe League of Their Moe" Matt Lauer introduces himself as Senior Baseball Correspondent for BetBastards.com, both of which were left intact in the premieres, so I am presuming C4's policy is indeed that this word is now OK after 8pm. (On the 7pm repeat of the former, the text was digitally painted out.)

35ABF17 Women in Shorts

At Luanne van Houten's intervention (thanks to Rick for noticing this one):

MISS HOOVER: How about, "proud slut"?

LUANNE: Hmmm... mmm... I love it!

MOM GOODS MANAGER: And here is your very first merch!

[Luanne is handed a T-shirt which reads "Got MILF?"]

This is the end of the segment, and it looks a bit odd once you know what's missing. It looks odder still in the repeat, which lops out the "proud slut" part too, leaving the sketch without an ending. The Mom Goods manager is also voiced by the episode's writer, Christine Nangle, which makes the edit seem even more of a shame, and a few weeks later 'MILF' was left in "P. S. I Hate You" (when Jimbo describes Marge as such when he discovers her secret letters). Kind of comforting that despite everything, we still have a blatant case of double standards to report.

35ABF14 Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes

As mentioned, this episode was bumped forwards to 5:30pm by coverage of the Africa Cup of Nations final... without which the following cut would presumably not have been made. During the fight between Skinner, Chalmers and their robot duplicates in the Marionettes, Inc. segment:

CHALMERS: You like feelings, huh? How does my fist feel?

[They go rolling across the floor; Chalmers' ray-gun flies out of his grasp. The real SKINNER grabs it and aims at his robot duplicate.]

SKINNER: Go to hell, you bionic bastard!

[He fires, destroying the duplicate.]

This does give me room to note two issues with presentation on this episode: the ad break was placed really sloppily, cutting off the start of the second half, despite the break being placed at a point where there was one in the original episode, and credits pushback started during the tag (after the executive producer screens but before the credits), obscuring the final scene.

(The 6pm premiere of "Convenience Airways" right afterwards featured multiple references to sex acts, drugs and prison shankings, all of which were absolutely fine, obviously.)

36ABF04 Bottle Episode

Just a quirky note, but there are two different versions of this episode. The one originally broadcast on American network television has a deleted scene during the end credits which was originally meant to open act 3, when Marge and Smithers arrive in Wine Jail; this is also the copy serviced to E4. The Disney+/Hulu version moves this scene back into the episode, with the credits instead featuring a reprise of the "Cover it Up" song.

See also the note about dedications earlier, and note that any American or streaming copy of this episode is somehow different to all the others.

* * *

So the upshot is: had it not been for sports coverage, this article would've consisted of a single cut, to a single episode. The fact we can now view the latest season on free-to-air TV so soon after its US debut, in 88.8% of cases totally unexpurgated, is obviously to be welcomed. But it's still strange to think that when I published my post on Season 31's premiere on Channel 4 back in 2023, I was unwittingly getting the last word (or at least the last full paragraph) on British censorship of not just The Simpsons, but perhaps American exports in general, a subject which has fascinated the internet for decades.

As I suspected they might, E4 are going straight from this run into their premiere of Season 33, which kicks off in the same slot this Sunday at 8pm. Which seems like a good call -- it makes for four-and-a-half straight months of new episodes. I'll be back in mid-May with all the details.

If you've not seen S33 before, it not only marks the point at which Matt Selman more or less takes over as showrunner full time, with Al Jean only being in charge for a few episodes per season -- a number which drops to zero in Season 37, with Jean only being credited as a consultant from thereon out -- but it also introduces the concept of 'co-runners'; all the Selman-produced episodes are co-produced with another of the show's writers, who creatively supervises the story from creation to broadcast. An episode's co-runner can be identified by their name being the first to appear on the producer credits at the start. This era is often claimed as being a return to form, or at least a significant step up from previous seasons; whilst I'm less sure on my own views, S33 does have "Lisa's Belly", the two-part 'prestige drama' spoof "A Serious Flanders", and "Pixelated and Afraid", all of which are on the higher rungs of what the show has accomplished this side of the millennium.

The season premiere also has the word 'shit' in it, so we're guaranteed at least one cut.