33 on E4

As one door closes, another must open. In the great shake-up of late 2024, E4 became the only place to see new-to-linear-TV Simpsons in the UK, following their releases on Disney+ a few months beforehand. Season 36 became the first season to premiere on the channel in this way at the start of this year, but E4 are still playing catch-up with Seasons 33 through 35, which were first seen over here on Sky shortly after their US broadcasts.

One week after their debut of S36 concluded, the first of these seasons entered the fray. Season 33 aired on FOX in the US from 26 September 2021 to 22 May 2022; was first seen in the UK on Sky with "A Made Maggie" as a Christmas special on 24 December 2021, then weekly from 21 January to 5 June 2022; and now it has completed its cycle with its first run on free-to-air TV, which occurred in double-bills from 1 March to 3 May of this year (with one or two little wrinkles we'll come to soon). After E4's premieres of Seasons 32 and 36 were largely untampered with, how did Season 33 match up?

Shot for Shot

On 29 December 2007, the second series of the BBC's latest adaptation of Robin Hood came to an end with a highly contentious finale where Guy of Gisborne stabbed Marian to death in a jealous rage.

It's perhaps not the most interesting thing about these episodes, but although produced as two 45-minute episodes, titled A Good Day to Die and We Are Robin Hood, they ended up originally airing as one single 90-minute compilation, on account of the BBC deciding to strip their Oliver Twist adaptation across five nights from Tuesday to Saturday, meaning no episode of Hood aired on the 22nd December.

All subsequent repeats, home media releases and streaming versions presented the story as the original separate episodes, so the compilation version -- only seen on the first UK broadcast, literally in the same week BBC iPlayer was launched and off-air copies of things started becoming a bit harder to come by -- became rather obscure.¹ However, I've been furnished with a copy of that original airing by Jim Lynn of VHiStory, and I am tremendously grateful to him for making this post possible. Because it isn't quite the case that they just stuck the two episodes together.

36 on E4

06/03/26 update: If you viewed this post before that date, please check the end of the cuts section for a fairly important addendum!

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?

Sweet Potato

I've been looking for this for a while. The fabled repeat of The Simpsons episode "Two Cars in Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish" from 25 June 1992, which switched out the usual blackboard gag in the opening sequence for "'Potato' not 'potatoe'", in reference to Vice President Dan Quayle.

And, thanks to commentor Bax for hooking me up with a copy of that repeat -- for which I am immensely grateful -- we can enjoy a joke unseen for over 33 years.

Potato Man

On the 15th June 1992, then-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, on the campaign trail for that year's presidential election, visits Muñoz Rivera Elementary School and commits one of the most famous political gaffes in history when he "corrects" a 12-year-old pupil's spelling of 'potato' to 'potatoe'.

Ten days later, on the 25th June, Fox airs a repeat of The Simpsons; appropriately enough, the episode is "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish". The blackboard joke in the opening sequence is usually "I will not xerox my butt", but for this repeat, a new joke is hastily added: "'potato', not 'potatoe'".

This alternate blackboard -- seen on that repeat, and that repeat only -- has become one of the few pieces of Simpsons miscellany completely lost to time. It's frustrating, because the joke was reported in advance in newspapers, and you'd expect someone to have their VCR switched on for it. I've made more than one attempt to track it down in the past, but as of yet things haven't gone anywhere.

One thing I did think to do, though, was check alt.tv.simpsons for any contemporary posts regarding the joke. Multiple posts describe the blackboard as looking very last-minute, saying that the text visibly shimmered or moved around:

Great bit on the Simpson's tonight....
For those of you who don't watch the show, a running joke in the opening credits involves Bart writing something on the blackboard over and over. Past sentences have included "I will not expose the faculty's ignorance.". Well, though tonight's show was actually a repeat, they did change the sentence on the blackboard. Looked like a last minute thing, since the blackboard portion of the shot shimmered badly.
Tonight's slogan: "Potato" not "Potatoe".

My Way or the Driveway

Which is the first episode of The Simpsons to use the short version of the opening sequence, the one which goes from the title in the clouds straight to the driveway?

If you watch the episodes in sequence on DVD, or on Disney+, or on any other format you may care to think of, or look at any online reference list, then that will say it was "Lisa's Substitute" from late in the second season, originally broadcast in the US on 25 April 1991.

That episode was certainly the first one that was always intended to feature that intro. It was not, however, the first time it had been seen by those watching the episodes when they first aired.

32 on E4

It has been a weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil time to be a British fan of The Simpsons over the last few months, and I want in. The first clue something was up was when we hit mid-November and there was still no sign of Season 32 making its premiere on Channel 4, but nobody could have guessed the multitude of bombshells that would come our way in December. Disney+ would become the exclusive home for new episode premieres in the UK beginning with Season 36. Sky would be cut out of the picture entirely as far as new episodes were concerned, although they retain repeat rights for now. Channel 4 would move their airings of the show to E4 in the New Year, becoming the only place to see new episodes on linear television, beginning with the long-awaited arrival of the 2020-21 season on free-to-air TV.

Any fears that this would be a sideways move or demotion were quelled when we finally got a look at how the show would be scheduled in its new home: episodes were plentiful, with up to seven a day running between 4pm and 9pm, and the newbies were given a prominent slot not dissimilar to how Sky used to schedule them (and, it must be said, a far more convenient one for me): a double-bill every Sunday at 8pm, starting on the 12th January (with 7pm repeats on Thursday and Friday) and running until the Sunday before this post was published. The show also retains a presence on C4 with the daytime repeat block on weekends.

With the new episodes airing later than usual, you might expect them to be more lenient with regards to censorship (Season 31 having already been significantly less cut on C4 compared to the previous few years). Some things I'd warned about in my preview of the season back in September suddenly seemed like they might not be issues at all. (For effect, try reading back the fourth paragraph of that post with "The Eve of the War" playing in the background.) Was that to be the case?

35 on Sky

Between January 14th and June 2nd of this year, Sky Showcase brought the abbreviated 18-episode Season 35 of The Simpsons to British viewers... with one exception. Yes, for the second year running, the annual Treehouse of Horror -- number XXXIV -- was held back to Halloween, specifically October 27th at 7.30pm. I have to assume the only reason for this is, after they had no problem with airing the first thirty-two Halloween specials out of season, Sky want to make sure they'll be seen on Halloween itself or near enough. Heaven knows how they will cope with Season 36, which has two spooky specials, the usual Treehouse and "Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes", a trilogy based around the works of Ray Bradbury.

There were two scheduled repeats: Wednesday 30th at 10pm, and Halloween itself at 7.30pm. I would be 99.9% sure that late-night repeat on the 30th reinstated all of the material cut from the earlier screenings, but in testament to my professionalism I forgot to make a recording of that one. Because, yes, there were cuts, all of which were to the second segment, "Ei8ht":

• When Nelson and Lisa enter the slaughterhouse, Nelson is killed by the unseen murderer right after his line "Hey, meat hooks, hook meat much? Haw-haw!"; in the uncut version a meat hook then bursts through the back of his head and out through his mouth, but Sky cut away just as the impact is beginning, so we see a tiny bit of blood but no more
• When Lisa plays this back on the security footage about half a minute later, a similar edit happens, so the viewer gets the gist but there is no actual impact.
• When Lisa gets thrown into Sideshow Bob's cell about a minute later, there's a montage of all the other murders she committed; Martin's death seems to be trimmed, and the Spuckler kid and Sherri's removed entirely.

Whilst these edits certainly reduce the amount of violence, this is an incredibly graphic segment and a huge amount of blood, gore and lingering shots of corpses were left in, with only the actual killings getting censored! This was the only episode of Season 35 Sky cut at all, with even the dreaded word "bastard" being left in on multiple occasions in other episodes that premiered at 6.30pm. Whilst Sky dealt with this specific episode pretty well, I find their red lines and approach to scheduling more than a little baffling.

32 on 4

In the autumn of 2020, television production crews all over the world were beginning to cope with a new normal. Whilst non-scripted series were starting to return to our screens with socially distanced sets, reality show contestants in social bubbles and Perspex barriers in place, fiction was another matter, and production on prestige series including Better Call Saul, Stranger Things and Succession was only just starting to spin up again.

Animated shows, however, were a third kettle of fish. Many cast members of The Simpsons had already been recording their lines remotely for some time before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and animators were able to continue working on the show from their homes. If anything, production got a little ahead of schedule, and the 22 episodes that made up Our Favourite Family's thirty-second season -- including the landmark 700th episode -- hit US screens as normal between 27 September 2020 and 23 May 2021, with British viewers treated to a similarly familiar schedule by Sky One: the festive episode "A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas" was aired as an, er, Christmas special on 24 December, with the remainder of the run following on a weekly basis from the 15th January.

One major change this season, however, was made in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests: In June 2020, it was announced that white actors would no longer voice non-white characters, with several new recurring voice artists brought in as a result. The most prominent of these is Alex Désert, who has gone on to appear in the majority of episodes since then as Carl Carlson, Lou and other miscellaneous roles, but other new voices in this season include Eric Lopez as Bumblebee Man, Kimberly Brooks as Lewis (and other parts including Janey Powell in later seasons), Tony Rodriguez as Julio and Jenny Yokobori as Kumiko, whilst Kevin Michael Richardson, already a semi-regular, took over as the voice of Dr. Hibbert, and occasional guest star Dawnn Lewis took a more prominent role as his wife Bernice.

At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring these episodes to free-to-air TV: the twenty-first season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the seventeenth consecutive one to do so in the tried-and-true weekday early evening slot. Last year our world was rocked as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks meant The Simpsons moved back half an hour in C4's schedule to 6.30pm, and more recent developments make you wonder how much longer the model to which the show's UK broadcasts have adhered to for so long will last. But for now, it's business as usual, including this, my sixth annual forecast of what might not be seen on C4 when these episodes reach it; as ever, keep an eye on Wesley Mead's scheduling page at the Simpsons Archive to know exactly when that happens.

31 on 4 2

"All the latest from Channel 4 News at 7 tonight, after Homer discovers an outlet for the sound of his own voice. Add Bart, and it's an algorithm for a viral sensation. Season 31 of The Simpsons starts now on Channel 4!"

-- Continuity announcement into "The Winter of Our Monetized Content"

* * *

The start of November seems to be the established time for Channel 4 to run their new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, give or take a week, and Season 31 kicked off on Monday 6th November; avoiding all of that starting-on-Tuesday nonsense from last year, and also becoming the first season the station has debuted in Our Favourite Family's new timeslot of 6:30pm (and I have to say, I do find something preferable to the show leading into the news rather than Hollyoaks; between that and no longer clashing with House of Games, it just seems a nicer bit of scheduling, somehow). So, with the run having wrapped up earlier this week, just how much of it escaped C4's scissors, and how does that match up to my predictions from back in September?

34 on Sky

Between 24 December 2022 and 4 June 2023, Sky Showcase (as the channel formerly known as Sky One has recently rebranded as) brought Season 34 of The Simpsons to the UK, at least on pay TV: "Top Goon" aired as a festive special on Christmas Eve (in spite of this particular episode's questionable links to the festive season, this has become a tradition for Sky dating back to Season 30's "'Tis the 30th Season"), and the rest of the season followed on a weekly basis from 15 January. With one exception: the annual trilogy of terror, "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII", was not aired as part of this season, and we were left waiting until the Sunday just gone, the 22nd October, for its Sky debut... which it made at 4:45pm.

31 on 4

Between 29 September 2019 and 17 May 2020, Donald Trump was impeached for the first time, the United Kingdom held a general election to decide who out of the two worst people eligible for the position would become Prime Minister, then went on to leave the European Union, the primaries for the 2020 US election got underway, that actress from Casualty referred to Greta Thunberg as "Sharon" on Celebrity Mastermind, and then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the planet.

With all that going on, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that between those two dates Fox aired the 22 episodes that make up Season 31 of The Simpsons, which began airing in the UK on Sky One on 24 December 2019, and then weekly from 17 January to 29 May 2020... although there are a few little footnotes on those broadcasts we'll get onto in due course. At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring those episodes (or at least nearly all of them) to free-to-air television; the twentieth season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the sixteenth consecutive one to debut in the tried and trusted early evening slot on weekdays -- but that looks like it might be changing just a bit, as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks means that from Monday 25th September, Our Favourite Family moves back half an hour to 6.30pm. Time will tell if this is a permanent change, I suppose.

For the fifth year running, then, I present my guide to possible cuts, censorship and outright cancellations to watch out for; as ever, I advise you to keep an eye on Wesley Mead's UK Scheduling Information page at The Simpsons Archive for news of when exactly these episodes will arrive on C4, and I'll be back with a full list of edits and whatnot after they do.

Black and Grey

Here's something that really does live up to this blog's name. I was looking through the archives of the newsgroup alt.tv.simpsons -- an amazing history of contemporary fan opinion on the show, stretching back to 1990! -- when I came across this post by Matt Garvey, regarding a 2012 repeat of "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire" on Fox:

At around 12 minutes, when Homer asks when he gets paid, the Santa school instructor barks "not a dime till Christmas Eve!" In the version just broadcast tonight, there's a funny cloudy coloring over that line (see some of the original takes for 7G01), and the right arm is noticeably lighter, with the suit close to black. The entire suit snaps to the lighter gray in the same shot as he gathers himself and continues. On the DVD, it looks like a retake, perhaps from a later (1989-90-91-93-94, though I'd suspect 89 or 90) repeat... it seems unlikely to have been done at the DVD stage. The only other copy of the episode I have is from a tape of unknown origin (full-length, possibly an airing or the retail VHS), and it does have the glitchy take. I don't know about syndication.

I am able to go one better than Matt's description, and provide visual comparison of the two. This is from the DVD version of the episode:

And this is the erroneous version, taken from the old The Simpsons Collection UK VHS from 1992 (the one with "Bart Gets an 'F'" on the same tape):

30 on 4 2

Channel 4's terrestrial premiere of Season 30 of The Simpsons in the UK began on Tuesday 1st November. A Tuesday. I ask you.

Anyway, it wrapped up earlier this week; back in September, I predicted which episodes might be cut, dropped altogether or otherwise moved around for the fourth year in a row, and here we see how the battle of expectations versus reality panned out.

30 on 4

You know the drill by now: sometime this Autumn, most likely at some point in November based on the last few years (owing to Season 29 being one episode shorter than normal due to a last-minute pre-emption, Season 30 is an episode longer, which might tip the balance slightly, especially if there's no episodes skipped which seems possible), Channel 4 are going to show a new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, originally shown by Sky a little under four years ago; the 30th season of the show overall, the 19th to debut on C4, and unless something truly seismic happens, the 15th consecutive season to debut in the familiar weekdays-at-6pm timeslot. I'll be back once they've wrapped up with a list of cuts and other oddities, but for now here's a list of things worth watching out for, including any episodes that might be dropped from the 6pm slot altogether.

29 on 4 2

So, Channel 4's terrestrial debut of Season 29 of The Simpsons began slightly later than it normally does on the 22nd November, and wrapped up on 17th December. Here, then, are several thousand words examining the various episodes they censored, as well as other notes of interest mostly concerning cases where there are alternate versions of certain episodes, compared to my earlier notes on potentially problematic/interesting-for-other-reasons episodes made before the run started.

Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie & Fred & Wilma & Pebbles

Here is one of the sillier, yet strangely intriguing, mysteries surrounding The Simpsons. "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", as well as being correctly considered one of the greatest episodes the show ever did, was also the 167th episode to be broadcast -- meaning it overtook The Flintstones as the world's longest-running prime-time animation.

Most versions of the episode use the Sgt Pepper's parody couch gag -- this was definitely the version used on the original US broadcast on 9 February 1997, and it is also the version used on the Season 8 DVD. However, an alternative version of the episode exists, which uses the couch gag from the Season 4 episode "Kamp Krusty", where Our Favourite Family run in to find the Flintstones already on the couch -- obviously done in reference to the episode's record-breaking nature. However, this has obviously been hastily done, since the audio from the Sgt Pepper's couch gag is still playing over it. ("Kamp Krusty" also featured a screen in the end credits saying the Flintstones appeared courtesy of Hanna-Barbera, which is presumably not found in the alternate edit.)

There are two known places where this alternate edit is or was seen -- US syndication, and Sky One's original UK broadcast of the episode, which was on 13 April 1997. A theory is that after the original broadcast, people suggested that they should have used the Flintstones gag, and someone went back and made the edit to the network copy so future broadcasts could mark the milestone. (The fact that the alternate version was seen in the UK at all indicates that it was not done specifically for the syndicated version -- copies of episodes for overseas broadcasts tend to be copies of what the network had, not anything that was done for syndication.)

Now, look at this video someone's made of all the Season 8 couch gags. At 47 seconds in appears the alternate Flintstones-visuals-Sgt-Pepper's-audio gag... with the Fox Network logo in the top right corner. Is this from the one and only US network repeat (which was on 25 May 1997)? Because that would seem to go an awfully long way to validating the above theory, although it does raise the question of why the DVD uses the original version when they generally go with revised versions -- perhaps someone on the commentary team noticed the oddity and decided to get the "correct" visuals restored?

29 on 4

At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will begin airing a new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, first screened in the UK by Sky One around four years ago; the eighteenth season of the show they've premiered, and, in all probability, the fourteenth consecutive season to make its debut in the tried-and-true weekdays at 6pm timeslot. Based on the last few years' form, this will probably start early in November, but it could start at any point from September so it's good to get this in now: for the third year running, the blog's guide to potential censorship cuts for those watching along. As ever, keep an eye on Wesley Mead's UK schedules page to find out exactly when.

Before we get started, a general note: When these episodes were first aired by Sky One between December 2017 and May 2018, they were shown in a new, later-than-usual regular timeslot of 8pm on Fridays, which has stuck for every season since. This means that Sky's original broadcasts of these episodes were, with one notable exception, completely uncut, even the Treehouse of Horror; I cannot say the same for any repeats they made in earlier timeslots.

28 on 4 2

Channel 4's premiere of Season 28 of The Simpsons began on Monday 2nd November, and wrapped up earlier this very week... so here, then, is a hopefully comprehensive guide to their censorship and other points of interest regarding the season, compared to my predictions as to those matters back in September.

28 on 4

In the ever-changing and increasingly uncertain world in which we live, here's one thing we can rely on: at some point between now and mid-November, Channel 4 will have the terrestrial premiere of Season 28 of The Simpsons, first shown in the UK on Sky One four years ago. Last year's post predicting what episodes might be cut or even dropped together, and the subsequent comparisons of my guesswork against reality, seemed to go down quite well, so they're back for a second year running. As ever, keep an eye on the Simpsons Archive's UK & Ireland Schedules page for exact scheduling details.