Caroline is a journalist with around 15 years covering consumer tech, smart home, and digital entertainment. She started out as a film journalist in London before moving into B2B technology at IT Pro, then spent years in affiliate and buyer's-guide journalism, reaching editor at Top Ten Reviews. She tests products hands-on and writes to help readers spend well, translating specs into what they mean in everyday use rather than reciting them. Away from work, she's usually deep in film, TV, and music, with her black cat, Jet.
For the past eighteen months, a real draw for people to Disney+ has been The Simpsons, purely because you didn't have to navigate an episode guide to watch it. The Simpsons Stream simply continued, and you could drop in wherever it happened to be in the run, but now reports say it's been replaced by a playlist that behaves like one. In other words, you have to press play and start from the beginning.
Disney+ still runs live feeds where it suits, with ABC programming coming to the platform, and the 24/7 ABC News stream remains. But I’m not convinced a playlist can fill the same gap, because the stream’s appeal was never really about The Simpsons themselves.
How The Simpsons Stream worked
Its appeal had little to do with the episodes
Disney launched the stream in March 2025 as a US-only perk for Premium subscribers, with 767 episodes from the first 35 seasons running in chronological order and a lineup it said would be refreshed monthly. That equaled roughly 300 hours of television, and showrunner Matt Selman pitched it as a marathon running all day, every day. By November 2025, Disney had opened it up to every subscriber, including those on the cheaper ad-supported plan.
As with the other Streams Disney+ added in late 2024 (Hits & Heroes, Throwbacks, Real Life), episodes kept moving whether you were in front of the screen or not, so opening the app meant dropping yourself into whatever Springfield was up to at that moment in time. You didn’t pick 'Lisa’s Substitute' or 'Marge vs. the Monorail,' you just got what was on, and no subscription service has come closer to the feeling of flipping over to a syndicated rerun at 6pm.
That’s how plenty of people have always watched the show, of course. The Simpsons spent years as the rerun local stations reached for around dinnertime, and FXX once ran every episode back-to-back over twelve days. Disney’s stream was the same thing, just with an app-shaped wrapper.
The playlist starts when you press play
But someone still has to press it
The replacement playlist runs along a fixed sequence, with each session following the same order, with some regulars saying they keep landing on the same familiar stretches of episodes. Disney’s own description of its Playlists feature, which rolled out globally on 15 September, mentions shuffled playback, so it’s not entirely clear how much variety you’ll actually get.
Now, I'm the kind of viewer who'll happily put on a Buffy episode I've seen a hundred times just to avoid the tedium of picking something new, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. Choice introduces work a lot of us have become resistant to, and after a long day, wading through thirty-six seasons of a show is enough to send you back to doomscrolling on your phone.
A live feed takes that overwhelm away entirely, and adds the sense that the TV was already on before you got there, something a playlist can’t quite fake. Broadcast TV always felt like joining a communal experience that was already in motion, and that’s a huge part of why reruns made such good comfort viewing. If the stream dropped you into a weaker episode from season twenty-four, that was just what was on, and you either stuck with it or wandered off.
With a playlist, you’re the one with your finger on the button, so the clock (and, in a small way, the responsibility) lies with you, and if the order really does repeat, the illusion of a channel with a life of its own falls apart the moment you recognize the third episode in a row.
Background viewers who just want Springfield humming along while they make dinner probably won't mind too much. The ones who'll be upset are those who liked not knowing which decade of the show they might land in on any given night, and they're exactly the viewers the stream was built for.
Why Disney might have done it
It’s mostly guesswork
Disney hasn't explained the change, and the timeline doesn't make it any easier to understand. When subscribers reported the Simpsons channel missing back in July, a spokesperson told Cord Cutters News it hadn't been removed and suggested restarting the app. Then, when Playlists launched in September, Disney said they wouldn't replace its live offerings, though the only live feeds it named were the ABC News livestream and eight local ABC station streams.
So, from here on out, everything is my own take, not anything Disney has said. Disney seems content to keep live programming for news and, increasingly, sport, which some argue could keep Disney+ afloat, while a comedy with more than 750 episodes can be served just as well from a list. Reports in July that Disney was weighing a free Disney+ tier make playlists look like a tidy fit, too, since a run of old episodes is easy to personalize and easy to break up with ads. I could be wrong about the motive, but the direction seems fairly clear.
The case for playlists
Even if control was never what we wanted
Playlists have their upsides, of course. You can pause, skip, rewind, and fast-forward, so you won’t miss a joke you talked over, and you’ll never switch on with a few minutes left of an episode you've been waiting to see. They also reach every subscriber worldwide, while The Simpsons Stream never made it out of the US. Channel surfing hasn’t vanished from streaming, either, with free ad-supported services like Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Samsung TV Plus still running plenty of linear channels.
But those free services aren't really where people go for something like The Simpsons, and as a platform we pay for every month, Disney+'s stream was a rare example of a modern streamer conceding that not every viewer wants to browse. The industry has spent the best part of fifteen years teaching us that mindlessly scrolling is just part of the process, and this was one of the frighteningly few places where you didn't have to.
If you’re already wondering whether Disney+ is worth it, I’d carefully consider the loss of one of the things that made it feel different.
I doubt this alone will push many people to cancel, and Disney may well be right that most won’t notice. If you did use it, the closest thing to the old experience might, oddly, be the format streaming was meant to replace. A box set and a physical media library won’t run all day (you'll be up swapping discs every few episodes), but at least nobody can take them out of the lineup.