The Fox Television Network has renewed Matt Groening's The Simpsons for two more seasons assuring that the long-running cartoon series will be broadcast through the 2007-2008 season during which it will air its 400th episode.  The 2007-2008 will be the 19th season for the longest-running entertainment primetime series currently on the air.  If Fox renews The Simpsons for the following 2008-2009 season, the animated series will match Gunsmoke's 20-year run (though it will take quite a few more seasons for The Simpsons to equal Gunsmokes 635 episodes).

Although not the licensing behemoth it once was, The Simpsons remains a powerhouse with a major publishing component, Bongo Comics, which publishes both periodicals and trade paperback collections of Simpsons comics.  The Simpsons trade paperbacks (distributed to the bookstores by Harper Collins) remain one of the best-selling lines of non-manga graphic novels in the book trade -- and the most recent Simpsons Page-a-Day Calendar was a monster hit.  McFarlane Toys is producing some of the best Simpsons toys ever (especially designed for the collector market), and The Simpsons DVDs are among the top three performers in the popular (and crowded) TV-on-DVD marketplace.

Fox also renewed Mike Judge's King of the Hill for an eleventh season.  The series had been on a production hiatus while the network aired all the episodes bumped from broadcast by the NFL and the World Series, but Fox wisely decided to order another season's worth of episodes and keep the character-driven 'realistic' humor of King of the Hill on the air.