20 Best ’90s Cartoons, Ranked

As the decade in which cel animation reached its arguable peak of large-scale sophistication before the CGI takeover of the 2000s, the ’90s are nothing short of a platinum era for television cartoons. Even a list of the best 50 animated series of the 1990-99 period would still have to leave out plenty of sturdy, significant stuff.

Ergo, to narrow it down a bit, this list focuses only on American shows, and strictly considers the ’90s presence of any eligible candidates — meaning that we’re leaving out titans like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “South Park,” “Family Guy,” “Futurama,” “Home Movies,” and “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” which technically began in the ’90s but hit their creative stride in the following decade. Even with so much off the table, you’ll find that every entry on this ranking of the 20 best ’90s cartoons is pretty much an unimpeachable classic.

Created by Joe Murray and featuring several then-up-and-coming creatives who would later work together on “SpongeBob SquarePants” (including its creator Stephen Hillenburg and star Tom Kenny), the 1993-96 Nickelodeon series “Rocko’s Modern Life” follows Rocko (Carlos Alazraqui, also making his debut), a wallaby from Australia living in the United States and experiencing the ups and downs of urban life in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals.

Despite its fanciful setup, the show moves rather like a droll “Seinfeld”-esque frustration sitcom: Rocko’s daily life consists mostly of mundane adult tasks and mounting responsibilities, which he faces down with trust in the ostensible normality of it all, only to get yanked into absurd, maddening circumstances. As the title indicates, this conga of daily indignities becomes a commentary on modern life as experienced by real-world humans, with moments of scorching relatability.

“Rocko’s Modern Life” became legendary for its singular ability to get grown-up humor and narrative content past the Nickelodeon censors. But, even with that layer now depreciated in the wake of all the adult-friendly kids’ cartoons that have followed in its footsteps, the show remains a stunningly smart, prescient, and hilarious example of allegorical satire, with the rubbery cartoon antics of a bunch of talking critters standing in for the surreal crannies of late capitalism, office culture, and suburban life in the United States.

Klasky Csupo, founded in 1982 by Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó, has had an influence on American animation that cannot be overstated. From animating the first three seasons of “The Simpsons” to launching cult shows like CBS’ “Santo Bugito” and USA Network’s “Duckman” (one of the most underrated animated shows of all time, and one that almost made this list), the Los Angeles-based studio essentially defined the look, rhythm, and comedic philosophy that many to this day intuitively associate with ’90s cartoons.

On Nickelodeon, Klasky Csupo helped invent the institution of the “Nicktoon” from the ground up — and the single most important show in that process, arguably, was “Rugrats.” Created by Klasky and Csupó themselves alongside Paul Germain, “Rugrats” uses highly expressive and idiosyncratic animation to imagine the inner lives of a group of toddlers between two and three years old, while simultaneously charting the lives of their put-upon parents.

By wittily and resourcefully realizing a bisected structure — with one half of the show taking place within the babies’ expansive imaginations as they discover the world, while the other half observes the humdrum suburban realities that frame their adventures — “Rugrats” charted an entirely new path through kids’ television, revealing it as a realm in which age-appropriate reveries and lessons could very much coexist with trenchant, audience-expanding comedic writing.

“Dexter’s Laboratory” is still one of the best Cartoon Network shows of all time. The first big auteur work from the great Genndy Tartakovsky, this blue-hued, deadpan-heavy, and utterly singular-looking sci-fi comedy set the parameters for a dainty aesthetic space that its subsequent network cousins would continue to occupy well into the 2000s. On top of that, it was maybe the decade’s most successful revival of the pure, direct ethos of golden-age American cartoons, with their focus on stretchy movement and ridiculous sound design as conduits for unbound slapstick.

In classical form, each episode of “Dexter’s Laboratory” as aired in the U.S. would consist of three shorts. The first and last would follow the exploits of the titular mini-mad scientist (Christine Cavanaugh and Candi Milo) and his unending conflict with his older sister Dee Dee (Allison Moore and Kat Cressida), in short, lean, perfectly-timed outbursts of visual comedy with a delightful edge of suburban satire. Acting as interstitials would be shorts focused on Dexter’s lab pet and secret superhero Monkey, and on the crimefighting roommates known as the Justice Friends.

As conceived by Tartakovsky and frequently directed and storyboarded by the equally brilliant Craig McCracken, the show refined its own simple, joke-driven self to perfection, stacking perfect gags like it was nothing and slowly unveiling an epic gallery of fascinating cartoon creations. Even the underwhelming, sans-Tartakovsky revival it got in the early 2000s wasn’t quite enough to dull its glow.

“Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” was the first animated series from Comedy Central, which alone places it in the annals of cartoon history. But, equally significantly, it was also the first TV series by Tom Snyder Productions (later known as Soup2Nuts), the studio that inaugurated a new era for adult animation by introducing the “Squigglevision” digital animation technique.

With Tom Snyder’s Squigglevision, which lent dynamism to static shots and smoothed over the roughness of even the most simplistic tracings, production was liberated from the typical financial cumbersomeness of cel animation, thereby allowing each show to worry less about mass audience appeal and take its writing into wilder, more radical places. The test tube for this model was “Dr. Katz,” a show co-created by Snyder and Jonathan Katz, and as inventive in content as in form: With Katz’s titular psychotherapist at the center, each episode would give guest comics the opportunity to repeat their stand-up routines as though they were chaise longue confessions (Marc Maron was once on, among many others), with Katz cutting in to provide curt, comically additive commentary.

In between sessions, “Dr. Katz” moved through pre-outlined sitcom scenarios by way of heavily improvised — and, as a result, strikingly raw and organic-sounding — dialogue, in a signature Tom Snyder Productions process that would become known as “Retroscripting.” Resulting from all this novelty was one of the funniest, smartest, and most visibly influential sitcoms of the ’90s, animated or otherwise.

“Space Ghost Coast to Coast” was a revolutionary series twice over. For starters, following the channel’s early existence as a repository for Turner vault shorts, it inaugurated the entire concept of a Cartoon Network original series by testing out one nifty trick: Taking cels from an old Hanna-Barbera series now under Turner ownership, and using editing, voiceover, and original animation to transform them into an entirely new thing. Not content to effectively kickstart Cartoon Network as we know it, the show also paved the way for Adult Swim: It was the first production under the banner of what would later become known as Williams Street, and it got the ball rolling on the style of scruffy absurdist comedy that would become the studio’s signature.

But, as historically significant as “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” may be, it deserves mention first and foremost as a triumph of creative excellence. It’s one thing, inspired and giddily amusing enough, to even think to take bits and pieces from the ’60s superhero toon “Space Ghost” and retrofit them into a dry backstage comedy about a talk show host bickering with his crew. It’s another thing entirely to pull it off as handsomely as this series does, turning its own limited resources into a meta-joke of endless reiterative potential, and offering up such nimble, whip-smart writing and such phenomenal voice acting that its comedy gets to feel more dynamic than most fully live-action sitcoms.

MTV was a hub for passionate, envelope-pushing, auteur-driven TV animation in the ’90s, and few shows illustrate that better than “Downtown.” Energized by Ralph Bakshi’s restless New York City time capsules of the ’70s and ’80s, Chris Prynoski set out to make his own version of a loose-limbed street-level Big Apple cartoon — and the result was a series that, at just one season and 13 episodes, left a bigger mark on the medium than most shows do across multiple years.

Set in the East Village and centered around an ethnically diverse group of twentysomething friends and acquaintances, “Downtown” manages to be both a daunting feat of craftsmanship and a testament to the sheer power of authenticity. The scripts, penned by a canny writers’ room with Prynoski as the showrunner, ably turn everyday young adult dramas and uncertainties into fodder for zippy situational comedy, and let the action unfurl delectably across long, magical, unpredictable New York nights.

Add in the mostly non-professional team of voice actors given space to riff and improvise, and the show becomes a jazz suite of relatable human behavior, moving through the corners of life that whole decades of U.S. cartoon history had once deemed off-limits. Sadly short-lived though it might have been, it’s a show that’s integral to the story of American animation at the turn of the 21st century.

The presence of “The Powerpuff Girls” on any list of the most significant animated series of the past three decades is a no-brainer — so let’s preface this by emphasizing that the show’s placement here refers only to its run from November 1998 to November 1999, corresponding to Season 1 and the first seven episodes and 14 segments of Season 2.

Even so, it says something about the monumental size of “The Powerpuff Girls” as a cultural artifact that even a narrow stretch of episodes (the show’s ’90s presence accounts for just over a quarter of its overall run) still demands to be cited among the finest works of its decade. From the instantly iconic target-eyed designs of its three heroines, down to the peculiar pastels of the color scheme, the futuristic synth VFX, the pithy and geometric animation, and the unmistakable strut of the drum ‘n’ bass score, everything about the show immediately evinces a degree of vigor and control over the audiovisual medium that leaves most television in the dust — as though Craig McCracken had somehow arrived from the future knowing just how and where to steer pop iconography.

On the level of writing and world-building, meanwhile, “The Powerpuff Girls” is simply one of the best superhero shows ever, with even its earlier, more tentative seasons exhibiting a refined understanding of the conventions and preconceptions ripe for loving subversion within the genre. Season 1 alone introduces a wealth of villains and predicaments at once so compelling they have no right to be that hilarious, and vice-versa.

If “The Powerpuff Girls” achieves a rarefied exuberance by melding savvy satire with straightforward immersion into the emotional possibilities of superhero fiction, Fox Kids’ “The Tick” arrives in a similar place by committing to the parody element wholeheartedly — so wholeheartedly, in fact, that almost every other film and TV work made under the same satirical pretense looks tame by comparison.

Created by the same Ben Edlund who birthed the eponymous New England Comics character, the 1994 TV version of “The Tick” stars Townsend Coleman as the Tick, a supe coated in full-body blue spandex with two antennae, who crashes a superhero evaluation at the National Super Institute in Reno, NV and then gets assigned to the City. With help from his sidekick and roommate Arthur (Micky Dolenz and Rob Paulsen), a mild-mannered accountant-turned-superhero who wears a moth costume, the Tick sets out to protect the City from a succession of ridiculous villains, while frequently giving in to his flair for speechifying and melodrama.

What follows is the most rambunctious send-up of superhero tropes ever committed to the small screen — a feat of cascading anything-goes absurdism so surreally unbound and disarmingly hilarious that you barely have time to take conscious notice of the intelligence and knowledge underlying its genre mockery. Its status as an enduring cult classic is a nigh-inevitability.

“Animaniacs” brought the tradition of bundled multi-protagonist cartoons roaring back into American television, with bouncy slapstick-driven shorts that consciously recalled the best of vintage Looney Tunes, and centennial Warner Bros. iconography slapped on everything from its opening titles to its characters’ names. With such a gleefully retro disposition at the forefront of its packaging, it’s a testament to the show’s singular genius that it also managed to be one of the most brazen and forward-looking animated series of the ’90s.

Created by Tom Ruegger and famously executive produced by Steven Spielberg, “Animaniacs” is primarily centered around Yakko (Rob Paulsen), Wakko (Jess Harnell), and Dot Warner (Tress MacNeille), a trio of taxonomically unspecified (but vaguely cat-like) anthropomorphic critters who, in the show’s chaotic mythology, simply leapt from the page after being drawn by Warner cartoonists in the 1930s, and were ultimately locked up in the studio’s iconic water tower before escaping and wreaking havoc in the ’90s. Interspersed with the Warner siblings’ adventures are shorts featuring a number of other rotating characters — Pinky (Paulsen) and the Brain (Maurice LaMarche) the most notorious among them.

The watchword, especially in the Warner siblings’ segments, is anarchy: Anything at all can happen on “Animaniacs,” be it hyperspecific pop culture eviscerations, inexplicable trips through time and space, expeditious fourth-wall demolitions, mind-bogglingly adult jokes, or breaks with the show’s own established format. Buoyed by writing and animation on equal levels of quicksilver brilliance, it was the show that first gave cartoons the electric charge that would power them throughout the postmodern 2000s and 2010s.

If ever an animated series proved that great comedy could be wrought from the most modest of setups, it was “Beavis and Butt-Head.” Mike Judge’s iconic MTV (later Paramount+, and currently Comedy Central) slacker sitcom wore its own lowbrow status as a badge of honor, and promptly galvanized American culture as a result, turning a mirror to the disaffected youth of a nation rapidly sinking into the morass of consumerist alienation and intellectual disenfranchisement.

But really, all those fancy words are just post-fact rationalizations for the uncanny, irresistible thrill that “Beavis and Butt-Head” sparked in ’90s audiences just by refusing to be anything other than its own crude, amoral, uncouth self. Starring the voice of Judge himself as the titular best friends, two lazy and ambition-free teenagers who spend their days watching television and committing acts of petty vandalism around their small Texas town, the show danced on the razor’s edge between dumbness and cleverness, slipping away from the conceptual grasp of either its uncritical fans or its morally aggrieved enemies.

Beavis and Butt-Head were to some extent the butt of the joke, unleashed to ferally embody the id of a country zombified by mass media — but they were also the engineers of their own endless low-effort fun at the expense of the entire world, and their chaos-goblin charisma dared viewers not to laugh with instead of at. From TV critics to general audiences to righteous social commentators, nobody could quite get a handle on them, but everybody was watching.

If “The Simpsons” dominated ’90s television by showcasing an intensely familiar cross-section of Middle America, “The Critic,” its informal sibling series, captured a small but enormously devoted following by doing the diametrical opposite. Created by former “Simpsons” showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, “The Critic” is a series openly and unabashedly steeped in the hyper-specific rhythms of life among the New York City intelligentsia, with a protagonist whose disdain for mainstream movies is second only to his disdain for the show’s audience. But, like “Frasier,” it proved that good enough writing could turn even the most inveterate snob from the most ostensibly “unrelatable” of social milieus into a comedy icon.

Jon Lovitz stars as Jay Sherman, a New York film critic who hosts a poorly-rated TV review show in which he habitually tears down the most popular releases of the day. Belying his irascible, impossible-to-please public persona is an ongoing struggle with various life insecurities, a pervasive sense of post-divorce loneliness, and a deeply principled belief in the importance of cinematic originality. By overlaying a number of timely Hollywood parodies (including several mock sequels that ultimately came to fruition in real life), Jay’s blistering commentary on them, and the marvelously-wrought intricacies of his personal life and relationships, “The Critic” achieves a precious sitcom alchemy — at once incisive and deeply vulnerable, gritty and heightened, critical of elitism and anti-intellectualism alike, and above all, enormously funny.

Much like “The Powerpuff Girls,” “King of the Hill” continued well into the 2000s (with the 2025 revival already renewed at Hulu) and arguably served up much of its strongest material in the new century, but still made enough of a splash with its ’90s run to be basically owed a mention. Created by the auspicious pairing of Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, it’s one of those undeniable animated sitcoms that have passed into the hall of institutional heritage, alongside close successors like “South Park” and “Family Guy.” And what’s really extraordinary about “King of the Hill” is that it achieved that status without ever trying to reinvent the wheel.

As plain descriptions go, it’s maybe the simplest and most straightforward show on this list: The chronicle of an average working-class Texas family, consisting of father Hank (Judge), mother Peggy (Kathy Najimy), and son Bobby (Pamela Adlon), along with Peggy’s niece Luanne (Brittany Murphy). Stories are grounded and realistic; the humor is character-and situation-based as opposed to pyrotechnic or surreal; Hank, Peggy, and most of their acquaintances are flawed but basically decent people doing their best.

And yet, working strictly with the meat and potatoes of family sitcom writing, the show approaches transcendence in its relentless social and psychological intelligence. The Hills and their milieu are observed with such care and attention that their awkward run-ins with neighbors, relatives, and coworkers gradually snap into focus as a full-blown epic of suburban American life — not as it’s scribbled on TV, but as it’s actually lived.

There had been American animated series with a primarily adult target audience prior to “Todd McFarlane’s Spawn,” but none had ever been so willing to push the darkness, dramatic complexity, and thematic maturity to such gnarly extremes. As a matter of fact, there’s an argument to be made that we haven’t had a genuinely more “adult” animated drama series in the nearly three decades since “Spawn.” The leap taken by the show was just that big.

The best way to historically contextualize “Spawn” may be as a product of that distinct HBO medium-reinvigorating initiative of the ’90s — the very same extended to television drama via “The Sopranos” and comedy via “The Larry Sanders Show.” “Spawn” was just as much of a watershed moment within the realm of animation, thanks in no small part to the presence of Todd McFarlane as the overseer of his own creation’s transposition from comics to the small screen (compare and contrast with the dismal 1997 movie adaptation).

In McFarlane’s hands, and with an all-timer team of animators, directors, writers, and voice actors in tow, HBO’s “Spawn” was able to render the story of the titular deceased war veteran turned reluctant Hell soldier (voiced marvelously by Keith David) into a spectacle of brutal, sinewy, no-holds-barred Gothic art, full of expressionist touches as dazzling as they were emotionally and existentially cogent. Modern superhero TV could stand to learn a little more from it.

Enough about “Hey Arnold!” is cozy and soothingly familiar now, with the benefit of two decades of pop-culture-settling hindsight, that it’s easy to take for granted what a bold proposition the show was as it was originally airing. Mind you, it was only the sixth Nicktoon to come out of the gate, at a time when “Doug” and “The Ren & Stimpy Show” had concluded, “Rocko’s Modern Life” was on its way out, and “Rugrats” was in the middle of a lengthy hiatus — so you couldn’t fault Nickelodeon had they opted to play it safe.

Instead, October 1996 saw the premiere of a show that swam against the current of pretty much everything then-extant in American animated comedy, resolutely eschewing the default nuclear-family suburbia of its fellow cartoons across all networks and age brackets. In its stead, the Craig Bartlett-created “Hey Arnold!” offered a look at the absurdities, surrealities, and enthralling tragicomic possibilities of life in the big city, through the perspective of a football-headed nine-year-old (voiced by Lane Toran, Phillip Van Dyke, Spencer Klein, and Alex D. Linz) who treks through the brownstones and alleys of the fictional Hillwood like a cartographer sussing out new territory.

That element of maze-like lore exploration would be enough to make “Hey Arnold!” a riveting series. And then, on top of it, Bartlett and company layered arguably the most character texture and psychological richness of any ’90s kids’ show, peppering the screen with figures who called to mind the pungent, rhapsodic pen of a great cartoonist. Helga Pataki (Francesca Marie Smith) alone would put any show in the top 10.

The liberation that Nickelodeon’s “The Ren & Stimpy Show” ushered in was such that it felt almost illegal — like a cartoon beamed in from a different dimension in which social mores, laws of physics, and the norms of the animation industry were altogether different. For one thing, it was maybe the most willfully and proudly “ugly” TV series in modern animation history, but the creativity and elasticity with which it reveled in that ugliness made it a direct forebear to the stylistic morbidity of everything from “SpongeBob SquarePants” to “Shrek.”

For another, it was unmoored from moral, educational, or sentimental concerns to an extent that eluded even most of its era’s adult animation: As respectively voiced by series creator John Kricfalusi and Billy West, chihuahua Ren (who kind of looks like a chihuahua) and Manx cat Stimpy (who does not in any conceivable universe look like a cat) basically amount not to characters but to focal points — just two familiar figures for the viewer to latch on to in the constantly unraveling fabric of a meaningless bathroom-wall-graffiti reality.

And, to be clear, the meaninglessness is a good thing. By prioritizing nervy, expectation-twisting comedy above all else, allowing even the lines and shapes of the animation to be knotted into pretzels by the imperative of laughter and experimentation, “The Ren & Stimpy Show” scorched the Earth, and left cel-animated comedy the opportunity to reinvent itself at will. It’s no coincidence that most cartoons before it now feel like relics of a bygone era.

It has become a somewhat common refrain among animation fans that “Gargoyles” had exceptional quality for a Disney show, or other laurels to that effect. It’s not entirely accurate; between “DuckTales,” “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” “TailSpin,” and others, Disney Television Animation had already been putting out commendable, sophisticated work since the ’80s. The truth would be closer to something like “‘Gargoyles’ was exceptional for an American family-oriented cartoon from any studio.” Indeed, there’s very little you could even compare to it within the ’90s.

Following a group of Scottish gargoyles whose community suffers a genocide in the year 994, and who wind up waking from a thousand-year slumber in ’90s New York and vowing to be the city’s nighttime protectors, “Gargoyles” mines all the potential urban-fantasy excitement in its premise while diligently honoring its deep reserves of pathos. Years before hits like “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” “Steven Universe,” and the “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power” Netflix reboot made it a more widespread notion, it was the show that demonstrated, along with “Batman: The Animated Series,” that younger audiences could very much keep up with complex, highly serialized, emotionally serious dramatic cartoons featuring characters whose depth far exceeded single-line descriptions. And, despite having no single credited creator, it had the added merit of being an entirely original creation — which is pretty impressive considering the extent to which it feels like a work of whispered mythological portent.

The title “Æon Flux” is now frequently associated with the infamous 2005 film, which could have been great but for ruinous studio mangling. As in the case of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender,” the pity is all the greater because the animated series being adapted was a work of genius. But, also like “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” Peter Chung’s “Æon Flux” makes such phenomenal, deeply-considered use of the mediums of animation and serialized TV that transposing it to live-action film might have been unworkable from the start.

Even in the brief two-to-five-minute installments that made up its first two seasons, aired on MTV’s “Liquid Television” as a series of staccato shorts building to a larger whole, “Æon Flux” was a show that caught attention like a lightning rod. Set in two warring brutalist city-labyrinths nested side-by-side within a barren post-apocalyptic Earth, it sports character and production design like nothing else on TV then or now.

Its storytelling, meanwhile, twines and curls constantly away from easy apprehension, deliberately evoking sci-fi history while whipping up its references into an open-ended essay on the philosophy of power, violence, oppression, and resistance. No ’90s show makes a better case for animation’s unique potential: By sheer accumulation of viscerally astonishing imagery, “Æon Flux” makes the sexually charged cat-and-mouse game between revolutionary spy Æon (Denise Poirier) and totalitarian dictator Trevor Goodchild (John Rafter Lee) more riveting, mysterious, and intellectually stimulating than virtually any American genre show of its time.

Maybe the ultimate example of a spin-off series that became so massive in its own right as to wipe away the memory that it was ever a spin-off, “Daria” stars a character originally created by staff writer David Felton for “Beavis and Butt-Head,” but ultimately picked up on as the ideal lead for an MTV series that might win the network a then-lacking female audience. To say that the show fulfilled its market function would be a gross understatement: Created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis and starring Tracy Grandstaff as Daria Morgendorffer, “Daria” sketched out an all-timer protagonist, and then slowed down the world to the singular, hypnotic rhythm of her mind.

The wit with which the series approached its sleepy suburban setting and buffoonish high school milieu was nonpareil, as was the poignant realist lilt that slowly suffused its episodes and relationships, until it emerged as the self-evident best teen comedy and best teen drama of the ’90s. TV characters like Daria, with her agile brain and merciless perception confined to a tragically normal human who couldn’t help but slosh in complexity and insecurity, have become all too rare in the decades since the show’s 1997-2002 run — but at least we’ll always have “Daria,” the cartoon that took it upon itself to think about the real world like no live-action counterpart would.

The subject of the best animated series of the ’90s lends itself to maybe the most clear-cut and inevitable top two of any possible TV ranking subject. For starters, number two has to be “Batman: The Animated Series,” an (ahem) animated series that would most likely make #1 of any decade in which it wasn’t competing with the consensus pick for greatest American TV show ever. Throw a dart at any Western cartoon of the past 30 years with even the vaguest inklings of earnest drama, and you will hit something influenced by this Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm-created iteration of the Caped Crusader, which aired on the Fox Kids block from 1992 to 1995 yet managed to win over fans who hadn’t been kids since the Adam West days.

So rich and powerfully expressive was the show’s plunge into the Ibsenian depths of the Gotham City mythos, with such layered characterization afforded to heroes and villains both old and new, that all the billions of dollars poured into live-action film adaptations since then haven’t dethroned its best episodes ever as the ultimate onscreen iterations of Batman; furthermore, a strong case could be made for Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill’s voice work as the definitive Batman and Joker performances. Even if you don’t generally take to the superhero genre, it’s just a stunning multi-perspective urban epic.

“The Simpsons” being the greatest American cartoon of the ’90s is just plain obvious. The real questions come when you zoom out: Is it the greatest sitcom of the ’90s including live-action series? Is it the greatest show of the ’90s, full-stop? Is it the greatest show of all time? The answer to every single one of those questions may well be “Yes” — with a “Depends on whether you count the whole body of work” asterisk on the last one, if only because “The Simpsons” became such a colossal institution that it has kept going for what will soon be three decades beyond its prime.

But if post-2000 “The Simpsons” has turned into the dingy patterned wallpaper on the wall of American culture, which nobody much notices or minds but nobody is too enthused about, this shouldn’t lull us into forgetting what an unstoppable powerhouse it was, week after week after week, during its ’90s prime. To call its mockery of U.S. media and society, its construction of a sprawling comic universe, and its deployment of visual resources and gag construction techniques “brilliant” would be an understatement; it’s more like it defined the contemporary notion of what “brilliant satire” even is. Matt Groening and company were to the tail end of the 20th century essentially what Mark Twain was to the end of the 19th — a notion as instinctively preposterous to hold in one’s head as it is rather inescapably true.