The Simpsons returns tonight with "The Children's Book Job," written by Dan Vebber, anchoring Fox's Animation Domination block. It is overall episode 810.
Which raises a question with three answers: when was episode 800?
Three 800th episodes, all of them real
- 7 December 2025 — "Guess Who's Coming to Skinner," the 800th episode by overall air order.
- 15 February 2026 — "Irrational Treasure," the 800th Fox-produced episode, aired alongside the season finale. Fox attached its 800th-episode logo to this one.
- 17 June 2026 — "Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition," released on Disney+, the 800th episode by production code.
None of these is a mistake. They are three different counting systems that used to agree and stopped agreeing the moment the show started making episodes that air but never air on Fox. Production codes run out of broadcast order. Streaming exclusives count toward the total but not toward the network's tally. So the milestone forked, and the network picked the one that landed on a finale night.
Season 37 ran nineteen episodes — fifteen on Fox and four on Disney+ — covering overall episodes 791 to 809. As of 26 August 2026, 809 episodes had aired. Tonight makes 810. That arithmetic is clean; it is only the word "800th" that is not.
The longest-running show on American television is not The Simpsons
The claim as usually written is flatly false, and two shows beat it.
America's Funniest Home Videos has 835 episodes across 36 seasons as of May 2026, against The Simpsons' 809. It also premiered first — 26 November 1989, against 14 January 1990. It wins on episode count and on start date.
60 Minutes has more than 2,500 episodes and has been running since 24 September 1968, twenty-one years longer.
The accurate formulations are: longest-running American primetime scripted series, longest-running American sitcom, longest-running American animated series. All three are genuine records. The word that keeps falling out of headlines is "scripted," and without it the sentence is simply wrong.
The renewal figure gets quoted wrong too
In April 2025 Fox ordered four more seasons — 37 through 40 — at fifteen Fox episodes each plus Disney+ exclusives. The commonly repeated version specifies two streaming exclusives per season.
Season 37 delivered four. That is where the nineteen-episode total came from, and it is why the "two per season" figure describes an order rather than what shipped. Season 38 is currently listed at seventeen.
Tonight and after
- 27 September — "The Children's Book Job," overall episode 810, written by Dan Vebber. Fox lists it as the season 38 premiere, 8pm Eastern.
- 4 October — "Diary of a Chimpy Kid."
- 25 October — "Treehouse of Horror XXXVII," overall episode 813.
- Season guest voices include Emma Thompson, Henry Winkler, Rachel Bloom and Gustavo Dudamel, with no episodes yet attributed.
- Matt Selman remains showrunner; Gracie Films and 20th Television Animation produce.
What is still unknown
Fox's own release does not state the half-hour slot boundary, only the date and the block, so the 8:00–8:30 framing is secondary. Nobody has said which milestone Fox will recognise when episode 900 forks the same three ways. And nobody has published the methodology that decides whether a Disney+ exclusive counts toward the show's headline total — which is the entire reason this happened once and will happen again.
A show that has outlasted four decades of American television cannot agree with itself about which of its own episodes was the eight hundredth. It managed to have three of them, and gave the logo to the one that fell on a finale.