TELEVISION; Overacheiver - and Learning to Deal With It, Man

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Not long after ''The Simpsons'' became the television sensation of the year and Bart Simpson T-shirts began turning up across America, Matt Groening, the syndicated cartoonist and the creator of the show, received an affectionate letter from Mrs. Hoover, his first-grade teacher back in Portland, Ore. ''She said she remembered me and that I was not a good listener,'' Mr. Groening remarked as he sat in his cluttered office at 20th Century Fox, a Bart Simpson pinata hanging in one corner near a pinball machine.

Over the years, Mr. Groening has heard that complaint many times. He didn't listen when his teachers told him to stop doodling and daydreaming in class. He didn't listen after college, when he was told cartooning was no occupation for a grown man. Most of all, he didn't listen when one television executive after another told him that an animated series could never survive in prime time.

Thanks to that contrariness, Mr. Groening (pronounced GREEN-ing) now finds himself presiding over a full-fledged if unlikely pop-culture phenomenon as the inventor of a family of cartoon misfits struggling desperately to appear normal and inevitably failing. ''The Simpsons,'' which grew out of a recurring sketch on the Fox Broadcasting Company's ''Tracey Ullman Show,'' will begin its second season on Fox this Thursday. The amiable, bearded Mr. Groening is taking a child's delight in every aspect of the program's success, from the Emmy Award it won this September to the criticism it provokes from offended authority figures.

''I've been waiting since I was a kid to have a chance to do a prime-time animated TV show, and I was surprised that I was the one to have to do it,'' he said as he tinkered with a talking Bart Simpson doll that will soon go on the market. ''I kept on expecting it to show up on the TV schedule every year, but it never did.''

For a man who just a few years ago was known only to readers of ''Life in Hell,'' a weekly syndicated cartoon featuring a pair of buck-toothed rabbits named Binky and Bongo who blunder their way through one existential dilemma after another, the overnight success of ''The Simpsons'' means there is a lot to absorb, most of it amusing. Bart Simpson's punch lines - ''Don't have a cow, man'' in particular - have passed into the language, and Mr. Groening has been besieged with offers to merchandise the images of Homer and Marge Simpson and their three maladjusted children.

''It's not our fault,'' said a laughing Mr. Groening, who is 36 years old, married and the father of a 1-year-old son named Homer, when asked about the proliferation of Simpson towels, toys, lunch boxes and clothes. ''I apologize to America. But a Bart Simpson air freshener that is smell-o-rific? That's one of those things which when they ask you, how can you not?

''Back when I was in college and studying more serious stuff, like philosophy and literature, I realized that I loved all this dumb crass trash culture that we're surrounded by,'' he continued. ''I wanted to participate on the lowest and the highest levels.

''So much of television and the rest of pop culture is about glamour and envy,'' he said. '' 'The Simpsons' isn't, and I love having us as an alternative to the rest of what you are bombarded by.''

For Mr. Groening and the creative team behind ''The Simpsons,'' the only cloud on the horizon is the program's new time slot, Thursdays at 8 P.M., directly opposite NBC's ''Cosby Show,'' the most popular television comedy of the 1980's. That sets up a direct confrontation between two very different visions of the American family, and the results thus far have been lopsided: when both shows were shown in reruns prior to the start of the new season last week, ''The Cosby Show'' won consistently and ''The Simpsons'' suffered a large drop in audience. (Further competition on Thursdays will come later this month when ''The Flash,'' a new CBS show based on the comic book character, returns to the 8 P.M. slot after an experimental run at 8:30.) ''Well, it's no fun,'' Mr. Groening said when questioned about the shift. ''The prospect is not something we are looking forward to. The specifics of it still confuse me, but I do detect that Cosby is going to hurt our ratings.''

Mr. Groening and the program's executive producer, the television veteran James L. Brooks, made it clear that they would have preferred the show to remain in its original Sunday-night time period, from which it became the first program on the fledgling fourth network to crack the Nielsen Top 10. But Fox needed a strong program to anchor an expansion of its programming to Thursday nights, and ''The Simpsons'' was chosen, despite the creators' protests.

''We have no control over it,'' Mr. Brooks said. ''We didn't volunteer; we were drafted.''

Should ''The Cosby Show'' prove an invincible competitor, a demand to be switched to another slot is not out of the question. ''If we start to feel like sacrificial lambs, we will bleat louder,'' Mr. Brooks said. ''We won't go like lambs to the slaughter.''

To retain the huge following ''The Simpsons'' acquired almost overnight, Mr. Groening and company have developed new char acters and story lines. In episodes to be broadcast this fall, Bart is hit by a car and experiences the afterlife, Homer meets a long-lost half-brother whose voice is supplied by Danny DeVito, and Marge's two disgruntled and gravel-voiced sisters get a moment in the spotlight.

''The first season of the show, we were basically working in the dark,'' Mr. Groening said. This year, he added, there is ''a conscious attempt not to repeat other shows, but we are also attempting not to repeat ourselves. In the first 13 shows there are some very offbeat stories with some hairpin turns.''

Among them is the episode ''Itchy Versus Scratchy Versus Marge,'' in which Mr. Groening pokes fun at those who argue that ''The Simpsons'' is vulgar and sets a bad example for America's youth. The episode is, Mr. Groening said, a ''sendup of all those ultraviolent cat-and-mouse cartoons. Marge writes letters of protest and takes on the cartoon makers. It's very funny when the cartoons are cleaned up, for it does indeed change society. It makes it better and kids stop being bad.''

Real life, as Mr. Groening has discovered, is much more complicated. From the start, his show has been criticized by education and parent groups - even former United States Secretary of Education William Bennett - largely because of Bart's jaundiced view of schooling and those who provide it. There are reports that principals at some schools have even forbidden pupils to wear their Bart Simpson ''Underachiever and Proud of It, Man'' T-shirts.

''It's the highest compliment, I guess,'' Mr. Groening, clearly amused, said of the complaints. ''I think it comes down to people who lie awake in bed worrying about other people having a good time. There is always somebody around to say, 'Wipe that insolent smirk off your face.'

''Bart is sort of like Groucho Marx, puncturing the pomposity of the situations he is in. I think everybody appreciates that except Margaret Dumont and William Bennett.

''When I was in fourth grade, I read a World War II prisoner-of-war book,'' he recalled, ''and I said, 'Yeah, this is like my grade school. There's guards, and you can't do anything.' It was just like 'The Simpsons.' '' To those who know Mr. Groening best, it is obvious that Bart's irreverent attitude, like his left-handedness, is largely derived from his creator. ''Matt is Alvin of Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is what Bart is, too,'' said the cartoonist and playwright Lynda Barry, a college classmate of Mr. Groening's at Evergreen State College in Washington and one of his closest friends. ''That was there even in high school and before. It's amusing that he's managed to take maximum advantage of his problems with authority figures.''

When he was a kid, Mr. Groening confessed, ''I basically wanted things to be livened up at school. So many of my classmates were bored and passive. I was bored and annoying, but I was also doing interesting stuff, and I thought that having my cartoons confiscated and ripped up was gratuitous.''

Mr. Groening encountered much the same stodginess during his early forays into the world of television. ''Just saying 'Rocky and Bullwinkle' was enough to get them nervous,'' he said. ''My feeling is that the reason 'The Simpsons' got on the air, among other things, is that finally there are network executives young enough to remember watching cartoons and enjoying them as kids.''

Though no longer a kid himself, Mr. Groening seems to have preserved his sense of amazement at the ordinary, and he derives considerable pleasure from harmless pranks, like sneaking references to Diane Arbus or Susan Sontag into the show. So when ''The Simpsons'' returns this week, he will, in all likelihood, be right in front of the tube with the show's millions of other fans, exactly as he was last season.

''Just seeing my drawings, which don't move and are very flat, animated is like a hallucination come to life,'' he said. ''To see the curve of my line move is just the most amazing thing. I used to get a thrill out of doing flip books back in grade school. But this, this is a different level.''