The Simpsons end date: Bart's voice actress just named a season — the showrunner sees it differently
Nancy Cartwright has voiced Bart Simpson since 1987 and was asked a direct question about how much longer the show runs. She gave a direct answer, and almost nobody else involved agrees with it.
The number was 40. Speaking on Michael Rosenbaum's Inside of You podcast, Cartwright was asked how long The Simpsons would last and answered with a season, not a year. Pressed on it, she flagged that she was speculating rather than briefing.
"Yeah... It's my opinion," Cartwright said in 2026.
She also made clear she isn't the one angling for an exit. Asked whether she'd keep going as long as producers wanted, she said absolutely, with the caveat — delivered as a joke — of whether the cast is still alive by then.
What's actually been ordered
Cartwright's number isn't arbitrary. In April 2025, Fox handed The Simpsons a four-season renewal covering seasons 37 through 40, alongside comparable pickups for Family Guy and Bob's Burgers. That order runs through the 2028–29 broadcast season. Season 38 premiered in September 2026.
So season 40 is the edge of the current paperwork. It is not an announced ending, and Fox has renewed the show past its apparent expiry date repeatedly since the 1990s.
Groening's answer, delivered at D23
Matt Groening was asked about it at Disney's D23 event in Anaheim and did not treat it as news.
"My guess is that was a tossed off remark made by Nancy, I don't know. But no, we're never going to end, come on!" Groening said in August 2026.
He prefaced that with a line about not believing what you read online about the show, which is a reasonable position for a man whose series has been reported as ending roughly once a year for three decades.
Selman's position is the interesting one
Showrunner Matt Selman isn't arguing about which season. He's arguing that the question has no finale-shaped answer at all. He told TheWrap the show is never going to do a series finale, and that the episodic reset is the entire structural point.
"If the show ever did end, there's no finale, it would just be a regular episode that has the family in it," Selman said.
The show already burned the concept on purpose. "Bart's Birthday," the season 36 premiere that aired September 29, 2024, was titled The Simpsons Series Finale on screen — a fake ending engineered by an AI chatbot called Hack-GPT, with John Cena, Danny DeVito, Tom Hanks, Conan O'Brien, Seth Rogen, and Joel McHale turning up to see it off, and Amy Sedaris giving Maggie a speaking voice. Bart notices the happy endings don't add up, goads Homer into strangling him, and the reset holds. It picked up Emmy and Annie nominations.
Three positions, then: an actress naming season 40, a creator saying never, and a showrunner saying the ending won't look like an ending regardless. The paperwork only covers one of them.
For the record: the 800th episode aired February 15, 2026. The 400th aired in 2007, which means the second half of the run took about as long as the first.
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