Matt Groening's The Simpsons, the longest-running scripted show on American television, centers on a single yellow family in Springfield: bumbling father Homer, patient mother Marge, and their three children — mischievous Bart, brilliant Lisa and perpetual baby Maggie. Around this core sits a full extended family the series has fleshed out across decades.
The tree reaches in every direction. Homer's side gives us cantankerous Grandpa Abe (Abraham) and the long-lost mother Mona; Marge's side, the Bouviers, brings her chain-smoking twin sisters Patty and Selma, forever hostile to Homer. Marge's maiden name and her sisters' open disdain for the man she married are running structural jokes — in-law tension made permanent.
For a genogram the Simpsons are a gift precisely because the family never ages and never changes, so the relationships stand out with unusual clarity: the eternal Homer-and-Bart friction, the Lisa-alone-among-them intellect, the Marge who holds the whole thing together. Every character's place in the family map is fixed, which is exactly why the emotional geometry reads so cleanly.
Behind the gags is one of the most complete fictional families ever drawn — four generations, both parents' extended lines, in-laws who cannot stand each other. Mapping the Simpsons shows how much a "typical" family really contains once you chart it: not just five people on a couch, but a whole web of grandparents, aunts and grudges.
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