The Simpsons has a floating timeline that allows it to explore different scenarios, especially set in the future, but it also makes way for a lot of inconsistencies and retcons. Among those is Homer and Marge’s backstory, which has been retconned a few times throughout the series. Created by Matt Groening, The Simpsons made its official debut on Fox in 1989 after having its start as a series of animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987. The Simpsons has since become the longest-running American sitcom as well as one of the most popular and beloved animated shows.
The Simpsons follows the daily adventures of the title family and other notable citizens of Springfield, both friends and enemies. The show has also taken some time to explore the future (though all those episodes are considered non-canon) and the past, especially how Homer and Marge met and how they began building their family. As mentioned above, The Simpsons has a floating timeline, which makes it possible for the characters to never age, but it has also left some big questions about their lives, especially Homer and Marge’s backstory.
In the episode “The Way We Was”, Homer and Marge met in high school in 1974 when Marge was sent to detention after attending a feminist rally, and Homer and Barney were there for smoking in the boy’s restroom. Homer pretended to be a French student in order to be tutored by Marge and thus get close to her, but she found out he was lying. She then agreed to go to prom with Artie Ziff instead of Homer, but he tried to force himself upon her at the end of the night, and she demanded to be taken home. Marge then took her car and went after Homer, who was walking home alone. Since then, Homer and Marge have been inseparable, but the story of how they met was changed in season 15’s episode “The Way We Weren’t”, where it was revealed that they met way earlier, at summer camp when they were kids, but Homer used a fake name and she didn’t know it was him until many years later.
The summer camp story is not properly considered a retcon and more as an addition to their story, but The Simpsons has made other changes to Homer and Marge’s backstory that don’t add up, mostly revolving around the time when she got pregnant with Bart. In "I Married Marge", Marge accidentally got pregnant in 1980, after which Homer proposed and they got married in a small wedding chapel, with Marge visibly pregnant. Later on, in “Lisa’s First Word”, a young Homer and Marge, along with baby Bart, were living in an apartment on the Lower East Side of the city in 1983, and it’s after learning that Marge was pregnant again that they bought a house – however, in another episode, they were shown already living in the house when Marge told Homer she was pregnant with Bart, after which Homer ripped out his hair. Some seasons later, in the episode “That ‘90s Show”, The Simpsons made the timeline of Homer and Marge’s backstory all the more confusing with a big retcon.
The episode showed the young couple living in an apartment at Springfield Place in the 1990s, and Marge found out she had been accepted into Springfield’s University – of course, this was a Bart-free era, which doesn’t match with the above-mentioned events, more so after Lisa did the math and concluded that her parents had Bart around 10 years after graduating high school. It had been established that Marge got accidentally pregnant not long after they finished high school in the early 1980s, so showing them getting ready for college and with no kids in the 1990s doesn’t make sense. This particular episode has been heavily criticized for ignoring past events, especially those from “The Way We Was”, and it’s considered among the worst episodes of The Simpsons.
As The Simpsons shows no signs of stopping soon, and with a lot more stories to tell (in different points in time), this might not be the only changes and retcons to Homer and Marge’s backstory, but the writers should be more careful when addressing their story, as fans of the show are quite attached to it and won’t be accepting of big changes like the ones done in “That ‘90s Show”, which ultimately didn’t add anything interesting to it (unlike the summer camp storyline, for example) and just made it all more confusing.