Until late February 2022, The Simpsons season 33 is going on hiatus, news that may come as a surprise to loyal fans. Few things are certain in the world of television but, with 717 episodes aired, it is fair to say that the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons is a dependable institution. However, The Simpsons season 33 will not air another new episode until February 27, 2022.
While the show has landed itself in hot water before (and even mocked its own censor notes), The Simpsons has rarely had to shelve entire episodes or halt production. As a result, the news of this hiatus may come as a surprise to some long-time fans who have come to expect The Simpsons to air a new episode every week since September. However, the reasoning behind The Simpsons season 33’s hiatus does add up upon further inspection.
Thanks to the NFL playoffs, the award show season, and the 2022 Winter Games, Fox has plenty of live content that the network does not want The Simpsons to compete with. The long-running animated sitcom is a reliable (if modest) ratings hit, and the network has thus opted to air the remaining episodes of this season when they are least likely to draw attention away from the live events listed above. As such, fans hoping for more of The Simpsons season 33 will need to wait until late February when episode 12 (“Pixelated and Afraid”) is set to arrive on screens.
This episode’s February 27 air date was tweeted by the veteran Simpsons producer Al Jean, so the odds are good that it will stay in place come the end of the month. However, that does leave a nearly two-month hiatus in the middle of The Simpsons season 33, with the most recent episode airing on January 2. However, viewers can rest assured that this is unlikely to change the stories of the season, as the anarchic show has disregarded its air dates entirely in recent years. The Simpsons aired three recent Christmas specials in early summer and mid-spring respectively, and the show no longer seems concerned with ensuring that the chronology of Springfield lines up with the time that each new episode releases.
This gives the writers more flexibility when it comes to The Simpsons telling stories set during Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, but the evident lack of concern for chronological consistency has also annoyed some fans. The “flexible continuity” of The Simpsons (particularly in recent seasons) has led to some fans complaining that the show’s titular lead characters no longer have consistent backstories or origins and are less compelling as a result. While some fans of the series prefer this loose approach to canon, some were unimpressed by The Simpsons season 33 retconning one of the show’s most-loved outings. It is impossible to know whether this continuity-ignoring trend will continue in the sitcom’s newest episodes, but fans of The Simpsons will need to wait over a month to find out.