Matt Groening's The Simpsons, the longest-running American scripted primetime television series, 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 core family generally does not age and most episodes restore the status quo, 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. The canon does admit permanent change — deaths, adoptions, marriages, newly introduced relatives — but the emotional geometry underneath holds still enough to read 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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