"22 Short Films About Springfield" is the twenty-first episode of the seventh season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox Network in the United States on April 14, 1996. It was written by Richard Appel, David X. Cohen, Jonathan Collier, Jennifer Crittenden, Greg Daniels, Brent Forrester, Dan Greaney, Rachel Pulido, Steve Tompkins, Josh Weinstein, Bill Oakley, and Matt Groening, with the writing being supervised by Daniels. The episode was directed by Jim Reardon. The staff loved the concept and attempted to fit similar scenes into other episodes, but none were short enough to require one. Show runners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein decided to make an entire episode of linked short scenes involving many of the show's characters, similar to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Originally there were more scenes, but several of them had to be cut out for time. Brent Forrester wrote the Krusty Burger scene,
The first draft was 65 pages long and needed to be cut down to just 42, so numerous scenes were removed for time or because they did not fit into the overall dynamic of the episode. Those that were hard to link were put before or after an act break or were given a theme song, one of which was cut from the Apu story, but was included as a deleted scene on The Complete Seventh Season DVD.
In the Mr. Burns story, every word he yells at Smithers is real and used correctly. To maintain accuracy, the writers used a 19th-century slang thesaurus. Ian, the very tall man, was a caricature of writer Ian Maxtone-Graham The writers were pleased that Herman already existed, as otherwise they would have had to create another character just for this scene. The Dr. Nick segment is a parody of ER. After passing the board, Dr. Nick exclaims "Free nose jobs for everybody!"; Jasper Beardsley says "Give me a Van Heflin." It is Bill Oakley's personal favorite episode, but he claimed that it is hated by two prominent (and unnamed) figures within the running of the show.
Entertainment Weekly, in 2003, placed the episode 14th on their top 25 The Simpsons episode list, praising the episode's structure and finding the Pulp Fiction references "priceless". The episode is the favorite of British comedian Jimmy Carr who, in 2003, called it "a brilliant pastiche of art cinema".
In 2004, Empire named the episode's Pulp Fiction parody the seventh best film gag in the show, calling Wiggum and Snake bound and gagged with red balls in their mouths "the sickest visual gag in Simpsons history".
Gary Russell and Gareth Roberts, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, called it "an untypical episode, and a very good one", naming the Skinner and Chalmers story as the best. Entertainment.ie who named it among the 10 greatest Simpsons episodes of all time; The Guardian who named it one of the five greatest episodes in Simpsons history; and, in early 2010, IGN named "A Fish Called Selma" the best episode of the seventh season, adding that "22 Short Films About Springfield" was "good competition" for the crown. When The Simpsons began streaming on Disney+ in 2019, Oakley named this one of the best classic Simpsons episodes to watch on the service.
Emily St. James praised the episode: "'22 Short Films' is fundamentally an experiment, an attempt by the series to do something different at a time when coming up with stories must have started to get exhausting. But it's also a wonderful reminder of how everybody on this show was the protagonist of some other, weirder show. The Simpsons might have been the center of the series, but they didn't need to be the only thing in it anymore. Springfield had ceased to be a solar system with them as the sun. Instead, everybody else had become stars of their own, and the show expanded into a galaxy."
Legacy
Unproduced spin-off
The episode sparked the idea among the staff for a spin-off series entitled Springfield Stories or simply Springfield. By 2006, the staff maintained that it was something that they would still be interested in doing,
In 2018, Bill Oakley, the writer of the segment, posted the original draft for the segment on Twitter. He said he believed it was the most famous thing he had written, and that it was also one of his favorites. Oakley responded immediately on Twitter, writing, "[I'm] not a fan of fairly big companies like GameSpot having famous actors perform scripts I wrote, verbatim, without giving me any sort of credit whatsoever." The video was taken down within days.
In a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Oakley, Weinstein, animation director Jim Reardon, voice actor Hank Azaria and Simpsons showrunner Al Jean shared their thoughts about the popularity of "Steamed Hams". Azaria said he was confused about how popular the segment had become. Reardon became aware of it when his daughters pointed it out a few years prior. They shared their favorite "Steamed Hams" parodies, including one made with Lego animation, one animating the characters in the style of the music video for the song "Take On Me" by A-ha, and one with the dialogue synchronized to the vocals of "Basket Case" by Green Day. Weinstein said that Groening also enjoyed the phenomenon. A series of short film pastiches in 2025 recreate the scene in the style of the Soviet film The Glass Harmonica, the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and the 1981 comedy-drama film My Dinner with Andre.
Availability
On March 12, 2002, the episode was released in the United States on a DVD collection titled The Simpsons Film Festival, along with the season eleven episode "Beyond Blunderdome", the season four episode "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", and the season six episode "A Star Is Burns".
The DVD boxset for season seven was released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in the United States and Canada on December 13, 2005, nine years after it had completed broadcast on television. The episode 22 Short Films About Springfield features an optional audio commentary track featuring Richard Appel, David X. Cohen, Matt Groening, Bill Oakley, Rachel Pulido, Jim Reardon, David Silverman, Yeardley Smith and Josh Weinstein.