 In its original American broadcast, "Bart the Daredevil" finished 20th in Nielsen ratings for the week of December 3 – 9, 1990, making The Simpsons the highest-rated television series on the Fox television network that week. To promote The Simpsons Sing the Blues, the music video for the album's lead single, "Do the Bartman", premiered shortly after this episode's first broadcast. In an interview conducted by Entertainment Weekly in 2000 celebrating the show's tenth anniversary, Groening named "Bart the Daredevil" his favorite episode of the series, and chose the scene in which Homer is loaded into an ambulance and then falls out of it as the funniest moment in the series.
