alt.tv.simpsons (called "a.t.s." by regular readers) is a usenet newsgroup dedicated to discussing the American television program The Simpsons. Created in 1990, the newsgroup became a popular community in the early 1990s. It is known for reviewing episodes and nitpicking minor details on the show.
The writers of The Simpsons knew about the forum and have on several occasions read the comments made on it. The character Comic Book Guy is often used in the show to lampoon and respond to the newsgroup's fans. In interviews some writers have admitted that they do not like being scrutinized, but other writers participated in the discussions on the forum. Independent commentators called the forum an example of an "active audience" and have claimed The Simpsons is tailor-made for such a forum.
History
The newsgroup was created by Gary D. Duzan during the third week of March 1990, four months after the first airing of a regular episode of the program, which was the episode "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" – a Christmas special that aired on December 17, 1989. At the time Duzan was in his third year, studying computer science, at the University of Delaware.
The newsgroup was created before there was a World Wide Web, which emerged in 1993, so those earliest discussions were held on text-only platforms. According to Chris Turner, a Canadian journalist and writer of the book Planet Simpson, the newsgroup was among the most trafficked newsgroups of the early 1990s. In that period it became a popular community on the Internet. According to Brian Reid, a computer scientist who has been tracking newsgroup traffic since 1985, alt.tv.simpsons was the most popular television newsgroup in May 1994, ahead of a discussion newsgroups about general television (rec.arts.tv), Monty Python (alt.fan.monty-python), the Late Show with David Letterman (alt.fan.letterman) and soap operas (rec.arts.tv.soaps). Since there is no official method for measuring newsgroup traffic, the list is considered unofficial.
Discussions
From its inception, users used the newsgroup to discuss the quality of the episode, as well as to talk about continuity errors and trivia. The writers inserted many secret clues into the episode and implemented a contest in which whoever first discovered the shooter would be animated on an episode of the show. Although the alt.tv.simpsons community debated this mystery to an extreme degree, no one officially guessed the right answer, and therefore no one was ever animated on the show. Due to contest regulations, a winner had to be selected out of a random sample of entries. The sample did not contain any correct answers, so the winner who was chosen did not have the right answer and was paid a cash prize in lieu of being animated. and David S. Cohen decided to use this fan response to lampoon the passion and the fickleness of the fans.
The catchphrase further appears in the eleventh season episode "Saddlesore Galactica," and as the title of the twelfth season episode "Worst Episode Ever." The catchphrase can also be used for describing other things by saying, "Worst. (Noun). Ever." The equation that appears is 1782<sup>12</sup> + 1841<sup>12</sup> = 1922<sup>12</sup>. Although a false statement, it appears to be true when evaluated on a typical calculator with 10 digits of precision. If it were true, it would disprove Fermat's Last Theorem, which had just been proven when this episode first aired. Cohen generated this "Fermat near-miss" with a computer program. After the episode aired, Cohen lurked on the newsgroup to see the response; at first there was astonishment when users tested it, but later there was despair when they found out it was only accurate to eight decimal places when expressed in scientific notation. Writer Bill Oakley used to respond to select Simpsons fans through e-mail in a friendly manner, but by 1996 claimed "[t]here are people who take it seriously to the point of absurdity". In a 1994 Life in Hell cartoon, Matt Groening implied that he read the newsgroup.
In the chapter "Who Wants Candy" in the 2004 book Leaving Springfield, Robert Sloane finds alt.tv.simpsons an example of an "active audience ... who struggle to make their own meaning out of the show". He mentions that in this context, the fans nitpick the show to an extreme and allow no room for error, where the writers believe that nitpicking leads to an under appreciation of the show's qualities.