9 Ways The Simpsons Could End

When will The Simpsons end? That's a question that fans have been asking since the turn of the millennium when everyone's favourite animated series took a turn into embarrassed ridiculousness. It feels like every six months or so some story or another turns up with a tangentially-related executive vaguely mentioning the show's end, even though the show itself shows no sign of halting.

Of course, if you ask some fans, the show ended years ago and has been stumbling around a mere husk of itself for two decades (for a very interesting, and incredibly thorough analysis of how things tanked check out this enlightening essay entitled Zombie Simpsons).

But regardless of how you feel, an even more exciting question is how will The Simpsons end? The show has been running for longer than any other scripted prime-time series, and even though there's been a massive quality dip in its latter half (well, two-thirds now), ending it poorly would be a much bigger mar of the series' overall legacy.

So what are the possibilities? Well, here are nine of the most intriguing, from big plot to turns to rather depressing inevtiabilities.

Here's one for you; we are now further from The Simpsons Movie than The Simpsons Movie was from good Simpsons. It came out a full decade ago and is still remarkable for not being total bullplop, evidenced by the constant question of whether we'll eventually see a sequel. The latest word is "if we get a good enough script", which is almost as non-committal as Marge's worried grunt (and nowhere near as reassuring).

At this point, it'd be hard for The Simpsons Movie 2 (The Simpsons Sequel?) to not wind up coming at the latter end of the show's run, so why not embrace that and make it the very end.

In terms of plot, this would need to be something that honours the show's whole run and acts as an actual end-point (so could crib from any of the other suggestions on this list), but the event alone would make it noteworthy. Maybe get the likes of Conan O'Brien and Bill Oakley to come back in advisor roles to really get the hype going and you have a trillion dollar bill in the making.