"22 Short Films About Springfield" is the twenty-first episode of the seventh season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.

[1][2] The episode depicts brief incidents experienced by a wide array of Springfield residents in a series of interconnected stories that take place over a single day.

[7] The first draft was 65 pages long and needed to be cut down to just 42, so numerous scenes were removed for time or because they did not fit into the overall dynamic of the episode.

[3] To solve this problem, a scene before the second act break, where the townspeople go to the Simpson house to provide advice of how Lisa can get the gum out of her hair, was created to include every character that did not appear anywhere else during the course of the episode.

[3] Weinstein and writing supervisor Greg Daniels were responsible for ordering and linking together the episodes, and director Jim Reardon had the challenge of segueing between each section in a way that did not make the change seem abrupt.

[8] Those that were hard to link were put before or after an act break or were given a theme song, one of which was cut from the Apu story, but was included as a deleted scene on The Complete Seventh Season DVD.

The main reason he loved him was that, until Frank Grimes was created for the season eight episode "Homer's Enemy", Chalmers was the only character that "seemed to operate in the normal human universe".

The policemen's conversation about McDonald's parallels the famous "Royale With Cheese" discussion,[1][11] and the music played during the segment's beginning was also taken from the film.

Snake runs over Wiggum at a red light, alluding to the segment of the film where the character of Butch Coolidge did the same to Marsellus Wallace, before crashing into a fire hydrant and beginning an on-foot chase.

[17] Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, called it "an untypical episode, and a very good one", naming the Skinner and Chalmers story as the best.

Club, Emily St. James praised the episode: "22 Short Films is fundamentally an experiment, an attempt by the series to do something different at a time when coming up with stories must have started to get exhausting.

[24] According to Bill Oakley, the show was not just going to focus on secondary and minor characters, but also in other things that were outside the normal Simpsons universe, with the episodes being "free-form", but Josh Weinstein recalls that executive producer James L. Brooks "didn't go for it".

Starting in 2016, over two decades from the episode's premiere, the scene gained renewed popularity in Facebook groups and pages relating to The Simpsons.

[27][28] In 2016, 20 years after the episode aired, around 1,000 people commented on the Facebook page of Australian supermarket chain Woolworths inquiring about "steamed hams".

"[32] Oakley responded immediately on Twitter, writing "[I'm] not a fan of fairly big companies like GameSpot having famous actors perform scripts I wrote, verbatim, without giving me any sort of credit whatsoever."

[33] In an April 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Oakley, Weinstein, animation director Jim Reardon, voice actor Hank Azaria and current Simpsons showrunner Al Jean shared their thoughts about the popularity of "Steamed Hams".

[35] The DVD boxset for season seven was released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in the United States and Canada on December 13, 2005, nine years after it had completed broadcast on television.

[36] The episode 22 Short Films About Springfield features an optional audio commentary track featuring Richard Appel, David X. Cohen, Matt Groening, Bill Oakley, Rachel Pulido, Jim Reardon, David Silverman, Yeardley Smith and Josh Weinstein.