The Guys Who Go With the 'D'oh!'

"And you said?" This is Jean.

Brooks said the product was an expletive.

"And one of animators said, what do you mean?" says Jean.

"And I said it is a foul substance which causes disease," says Brooks.

But the next episode -- different director -- came back from the animators a week later just fine and because they never showed the first to Fox ("We hid it from them," says Brooks), "The Simpsons" premiered in 1989 as the highest-rated show in the then-history of Fox.

To what do the creators credit the long and successful run of "The Simpsons" -- and its persistence in American culture?

Every television show has what the writers call "the bible," a set of principles and rules. "Matt said, this is a television family that watches television," says Brooks. "There were seasons we had absolute rules and then we'd break them," Silverman says. Like? "We had a rule of never going to space."

"We obeyed the laws of conventional physics," Silverman says. "For a while."

"Then physics changed," Groening says.

But seriously. "The two biggest rules were to follow Jim's great shows, where emotion is at the center," says Jean. "And we never said, it's a kid's show. It was the first cartoon where it was written for adults. 'The Flintstones' was a really terrific show, but it was for kids, and this wasn't."

There is a lot of sly humor in the Simpsons. In the movie, for example, Homer and his pig (it's a long story) create a toxic nightmare, which allows the evil Harvard-educated head of the Environmental Protection Agency to place a giant bubble over Springfield and then plot its destruction. So, for example, huddled in church, Flanders tells Bart, "Doomsday is family time." Or, "Why does everything I whip leave me?" Does a kid get it?

"No," says Groening. "But the 8-year-old is going to get it later when he's 16 years old. And when he's 23 years old, he or she will come write for the Simpsons."

Brooks: "It's written for an adult audience and children are invited."

Jean: "I also think no matter what age you are, you enjoy seeing someone get hit on the head."

In olden times, the Simpsons writers were viewed as liberals, which they admittedly are, mostly. They've inserted politics and social commentary into many episodes. Evolution. Gay marriage. American exceptionalism. Etc. "But when we discuss an idea, you see two points of view," says Jean. Kinda. "You have to throw a pie in the face of evenhandedness because there's a trap there, too," says Brooks.

"I think the best comedy has a strong sense of humor," Groening says. "You don't have to agree with it." Brooks says, "That's why it's good for us to make the face of ultimate evil the head of the EPA. We're poking fun at our own progressive attitudes."

Where the Simpsons were once more daring, they are now quite quaint -- if still hilarious. In fact, the Simpsons have been embraced by some religious leaders. The series has been praised by England's archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as "generally on the side of the angels and on the side of sense." A Church of England book compares Bart's impatience to meet Krusty the Clown with the Christians' wait for the Second Coming.

Ahem. Okay. In the movie, family and loyalty are challenged. A marriage does hang in the balance. A son's love is up for grabs. "The stakes have never been higher," says Brooks.

"Great family entertainment," the veteran producer explains, "is nobody gets talked down to. You don't look for a common denominator that brings everybody in, you just have something entertaining for every segment. And if you want a really funny pig, we're going to give you one."