There is a video with great analysis on this. Ultimately argues that Simpsons was a great piece of counter culture, then it just won and became culture, losing its ability to skewer mainstream comedy. Along with an upheaval in the writer's room, it just went absurd all the time. That's a sometimes brilliant move, but dull when used in place of any substance. It also forgot how to stay true to its characters. Much more here:
> Simpsons was a great piece of counter culture, then it just won and became culture
I've often mused over this as well. I remember when Simpsons was first aired in the UK, there was lots of complaints over it. The WI (Women's Institute) running campaigns again the show because its content was considered harmful. People even threatening to boycott the BBC and any high street stores that sold Simpsons merchandise. Slogans like "Eat my shorts" caused massive outrage. Yet most of those people who were angered by the very concept of the show ended up watching it with their own families. And in the end the show became a victim of it's own success; it's no longer able to surprise people without going totally random. A point South Park commented on in one of their shows where Butters keeps being reminded that all of this plot ideas have already happened in the Simpsons (this was before South Park became just as tired as the Simpsons)
At the current rate, it'll take the better part of a century for Rick and Morty to count up to a couple hundred episodes and get stale like its forebears have.
Rick and Morty has already lost its appeal to me, because the person who recommended it, and so many of the fans are assholes who think that Rick is a person to emulate and justifies their assholishness.
>we’ve all been Rick. But Rick really does have bigger fish to fry than anybody. He understands everything better than us. So you give him the right to be jaded and dismissive and narcissistic and sociopathic.
-Dan Harmon
Rick is literally designed to be the person every pretentious cynical asshole thinks they are. He exists to glamorize toxic anti-social behavior. Harmon backpedaling after the sauce thing blew up in his face isn't going to change this.
A character does not necessarily exist just to either condemn or promote certain behavior. That is a pretty one-dimentional way of looking at storytelling.
At some point though, what more can you do with characters? After a while the viewer knows everything about them and the setting they exist in. There's nothing more to flesh out.
I grew up watching the Simpsons every day. I stopped watching because I didn't like the new episodes, but also because there was nothing any of the characters could credibly do that would surprise me, or that I hadn't already seen them do.
Interesting to see him mentioned for his commentary on the Simpsons, had picked up on him before due to his Irish accent but I know him from Real Engineering -- it's light content but it's well made. Might be of more interest to HNers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzRlga2-Hho
Uncanny. My last comment, immediately prior to this one, was a link to Real Engineering, and yet somehow I had never put it together that these were the same voice, which they so obviously are in retrospect.
> Ultimately argues that Simpsons was a great piece of counter culture, then it just won and became culture, losing its ability to skewer mainstream comedy.
I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion (I've never met anyone in person who agrees with this), but I don't think South Park is good or particularly 'topical'. It's always struck me as fake, untactful and does nothing apart from making people feel smart about themselves.
The Outline (somewhat ironically imho) summed it up when they said "South Park is not subversive":
For 21 seasons, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have given fake woke white
people a sense of self-satisfaction, reassuring them that they rise
above the myopia that grips the residents of South Park; that they
are subverting the establishment, rather than perpetuating it. Much
like a joke South Park made about residents of San Francisco: They
smugly inhaled their own farts.
The only reason why South Park makes me feel smart about myself is that I watch something that sometimes contradicts my opinions.
I think the author of the Outline article just doesn't like the political stance of the show. The point about Token is in bad faith IMO - he isn't the richest guy in town as a cheap joke, but because changing a few things around from reality makes it easier to have a fresh look at the situation and have new insights. They use this technique all the time. In this case, it separates poor people problems from black people problems.
>The Outline (somewhat ironically imho) summed it up when they said "South Park is not subversive"
I'd say the Outline is the one that does exactly what it accuses South Park of: BS for "fake woke white people". It's just that they want to believe that their white people are more "woke" than the ones watching South Park.
Starting with the BS idea of "high-brow" criticizing what in final analysis is just a funny cartoon show -- this reeks of (real, not imagined) pretentiousness and taking things too seriously itself.
"The main idea that a person tries to convey to others is that he has access to much more prestigious consumption than others think about him. At the same time, he tries to explain to others that their types of consumption are much less prestigious than what they naively think. This is the goal of all social maneuvers. Furthermore, only these discussions generate strong emotions in people."
Yeah, thats why I point it out as being ironic - I often get the feeling that The Outline is contrarian just for the sake of trying to be edgy. It just so happens that this time I agree with the point.
Seems like a claim no one ever asserted about SP. Maybe Simpsons (at one point).
"Much like a joke South Park made about residents of San Francisco: They smugly inhaled their own farts."
So the non-subversive series made a subversive episode about their own smug watchers? Or smug writer found that non-subversively applicable to non-woke whites?
Please do quotes with a ">" line prefix instead of as a code snippet. I have to scroll horizontally as I read each line of text, which is really annoying.
Or, you know, is for people who enjoy the humor, in all parts of the world (I'm in Europe) and could not care less about pretending to be "the smartest person in the room".
Not sure about today's episodes (have lost touch), but that was certainly true 20 years ago when we were watching the seasons 1-10 or so.
In my experience people criticizing others for being "pretentious" etc. usually can't fathom anyone liking anything that's either not entirely mainstream or having any second level of reading.
Heck, those people would accuse someone reading e.g. literature (something that billions all over the world have done for millennia) as "pretentious" (as if anything above Stephen King is some kind of crime).
"I was in Nashville, Tennesee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, godammit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm . . . I dunno . . . I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress."
Bill Hicks would have been described as pretentious by people who disagree with what he says. They'd have also said his humour wasn't clever, it was just insulting, rude, and low-brow. They wouldn't be entirely wrong, but they'd be mostly wrong.
Same goes for South Park or Rick & Morty or The Simpsons. Those who disagree will find ways of protecting their world view against a trickle or tide of inconvenient or uncomfortable alternatives no matter how logically, reasonably, and / or cleverly the alternative is presented.
South Park has gotten to obsessed with current events lately. Every episode seems like a transparent rehash of recent political news now.
I think they are now interested in using the show to push their political opinions where it used to be about being funny and the themes and jokes were more timeless. It could also be that they just ran out of material after 21 seasons so they use current events as a writing crutch.
It seemed to jump the shark around season 6 (IIRC) when they just turned up the grossness, but became better than ever after that and more or less stayed there.
South Park is so much worse since it switched to its new, faster production schedule and a more topical focus. The show was better when it focused on the characters, like the LOTR episode or Scott Tenoman Must Die, rather than the topical episodes.
If they’ve run out of non-topical ways to explore the characters, then they should end the show.
I can still enjoy the show but the high point for me was the period between seasons 3 to 9, when the surrealism and sense of adventure in the kids learning about the world was at its highest point.
Now it is just entirely topic-of-the-week and while it can do it quite well, sometimes it just falls flat.
Someone on HN once commented that watching later seasons of The Simpsons is like visiting a loved one with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. This rings true to me.
It looks like them, but isn’t them. They occasionally have a flash of lucidity where they are back to their old selves but then that moment is gone as quickly as it came.
We cut our cord about 8 years ago and our TV has been limited to streaming and Netflix (DVDs too) My observation is that a great show seems to need 2 to 3 seasons to really find their pace, rhythm, and get it figured out. This is changing with the short season episodic content that everyone is doing now but network shows sort of need some time to find themselves. Beyond about season 7, they all fall apart in some way. I really can’t think of anything that lasted 10 plus season and wasn’t effectively a different show from s1, only the names are really the same; definitely the feelings it gives you will have changed. I really only watched Simpsons occasionally during the first 3 seasons, it’s hard to fathom it having anything in common with then now.
I really liked "Law & Order" (classic edition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_%26_Order They had 20 seasons, the cases were interesting and weird (and secretly based in real cases), they lived in a strange word were the suspect had right, but unlike "The Simpsons" they lost.
In the modern law&order versions, the CSI-whatever and other police shows, half of the suspect spontaneously confess without a lawyer and the other half confess after borderline torture. And the forensic analysis use magical methods that would not be believable even in Start Trek.
>Beyond about season 7, they all fall apart in some way.
To give a somewhat different perspective, I personally have a "5 season rule." Maybe it's more like 5 seasons +- 2 or something like that depending upon the show. Some shows aren't that interesting once their quirkiness wears off and other change things up enough to keep going longer.
But whatever the exact number, I just weary of the characters, the format, the style, etc. after a time of just about any show even if it doesn't decline in "objective" quality. I'm definitely not a person that wants some beloved series to go on forever. Generally if something has gotten a few seasons under its belt and wraps up in a reasonable way I'm very happy to let it go. (And this is truer than ever today when there are far more good shows on television/streaming than I watch.)
>A limited number of episodes of a television show may be called a miniseries or a serial or limited series. Television series are without a fixed length and are usually divided into seasons (U.S. and Canada) or series (UK), yearly or semiannual sets of new episodes. While there is no defined length, U.S. industry practice has traditionally favored longer television seasons than those of other countries.
> I really can’t think of anything that lasted 10 plus season and wasn’t effectively a different show from s1, only the names are really the same; definitely the feelings it gives you will have changed.
I don't find that surprising. The audience doesn't stay the same for 10 years either.
if you haven't seen A Fathers Watch s28e17 I highly recommend t. it is as good or batter than any "classic" Simpsons.
I think a good amount of Simpsons hate is nostalgia based, but the primary component is the writers. the writing of episodes like a fathers watch follows an almost Seinfeld-like formula. the best episodes always had a similar pattern.the pattern is great but gets repetitive and works best on nostalgia where you don't remember it
i can sympathize with a show on for 30 years wanting to switch up that formula even if it is less successful all the time.
I just watched that episode, and it was just depressing. The jokes were completely predictable (the frogs in particular were cringe worthy) and the culture criticism sounds like a bad rehash of a George Carlin sketch - and he's been dead for a decade.
By the way, I only started watching the Simpsons regularly when they were on season 15, when Fox opened up a channel in my country, so I saw the old and the new episodes at the same age. I still saw a tremendous difference, and would in fact often change the channel during the new ones.
I think nostalgia-based makes sense ... but I just decided to watch later Simpson episodes and their jokes just suck. I watched a few episodes and didn't laugh once.
I find this HN story title misleading (or clickbait-y): "Cluster analysis" is just a tool; it doesn’t show anything by itself. You can do bad and good cluster analysis, and you can probably "show" anything you want from it.
Excerpt from the blog post that explains the methodology:
> … we could consider performing cluster analysis on the data, essentially finding a way of grouping the episodes so that those with similar ratings are placed in groups together. A standard clustering approach would just group good episodes and bad episodes. However, I want to alter this slightly in that I only want a group to be made up of a single contiguous group of episodes; basically, if the episodes of season 4 are in the same group as the episodes of season 6, then the episodes of season 5 must also be in that group.
I find this HN story title misleading (or clickbait-y): <popular programming language> is just a tool; it doesn’t implement anything by itself. You can write bad and good programs in <popular programming language>, and you can probably implement anything you want from it.
How silly does that sound? Part of the explicit appeal of these kinda of articles is a toy demonstration of the tool or technique mentioned in the title.
It sounds silly if you remove the context, i.e. the title I was refering to. An analogy with a programming language would be “Python shows that the golden age of the Simpsons ended in Season 10”.
When I was younger, we always talked about being able to pick what we watched - what we wanted, when we wanted. The Simpsons being our favorite show, it was pretty natural that we just wanted to watch that all day.
Anyhow, years later adult me sought to realize that dream, via Plex and Simpsons DVDs on Ebay. I have Seasons 1-14, but Season 12 is really the end of it. The great stuff was probably Seasons 3-9, with Season 6 being my absolute favorite.
Yeah I know the article is about actual analysis on this, but screw it, I wanted to talk about The Simpsons!
TL;DR a loss of writers and voice talent from resignations and deaths combined (probably) with the show simply running out of things to say (especially as its irreverent tone took over culture; see also: DFW’s writings on TV) led to its 1) becoming exactly the thing it was originally skewering, 2) relying too much on the “homer gets a new job” gimmick, 3) shifting homer’s Characterization significantly, and not for the better, and 4) spending an awful lot more time subjecting homer to cartoon violence.
Decline is foreshadowed in S7, proceeds rapidly from there, and the show’s wholly a shell of itself (a “zombie”) past S12. Site argues its case pretty well, worth a read.
It is obvious I'm in the minority. I don't know what people expect from the show, especially for how long it's Been on the air consistently, but for what it is, I love it. It's one of the few, actually maybe only show I look forward to.
If you haven't you should listen to The Talking Simpson's [0]. I love this podcast!
Also, if you have a cable subscription you can watch every episode on The Simpson's World website [1] (it is pretty terrible to navigate and extremely buggy though).
If The Simpson's was canceled or when, it feels like at this point it would be a pretty big deal, especially for those of us who grew up on it. Like a hell has frozen over moment. Mind boggling to put it. It's a part of our culture.
We own every season through itunes. It’s still good. Complaints of its decline are like like complaints of the decline of SNL. There are good seasons and not so good seasons, and it ebbs and flows with new writers.
SNL is a sketch comedy show where Simpsons has a consistent cast. The characters used to be real and relatable but now have more in common with an SNL type sketch comedy show with no expressed identities.
Yea, the stories and characters depend on the writing and writers change over time. No one looks back to Conan O’Brian leaving as the end, Groening et al just hired a replacement.
The Simpsons suffer from a problem that's rather unique to US TV shows, and I admit this may not be completely fair, given how large a percentage of popular shows are American: When a US TV show turns out to be popular it will be milked to death. Producers will keep popular shows alive for much longer than they should, because they know a large percentage of fans will watch every new show, regardless of quality.
The Simpsons had a good run, it's time to cancel it. If it's true that it peeked at season 10, then the most of the shows are produced after it's peek.
This makes it even more incredible that Seinfeld ended its run after 9 seasons at the height of its popularity. Jerry Seinfeld reportedly turned down $100 million dollars to make another season
I collected Simpsons season DVDs until I lost interest... last one I purchased is season 14. So there's a data point on when I had (re)seen enough of the show (Although, I've seen S15-22 or so completely, sporadic watcher since then).
I think season 10 is a fair cutoff point.
The jarring thing about the more recent episodes is the decline of Julie Kavner's (Marge's) voice. It sounds...weak. Unhealthy. Other actors on the show have a similar problem but hers is most notable.
I don't hate the episode, but even despite my contrarianism I have to admit I've been brought around to agree that it was a very bad episode for the universe even if it was an OK episode internally. It's easy to forget if you are young and you've never lived in a world where Simpson's seasons 1-7 or so are all there was in the world, but the Simpson's used to actually have a universe, rules, characters that were more than walking stereotypes, and even a bit of capacity for lasting consequences, and thus, a capacity for drama that the modern "cartoony" (in the bad sense) version has a very hard time sustaining.
If you were raised in the modern era, you can get the reverse effect that some of us oldster's describe by going back and watching Season 1 in order. It is not the best season, but it was already showing a lot of the promise that would manifest a couple of seasons later, and in so many ways you'll find it is just a different show, even more clearly than if you go a couple of seasons later. (And it does have my favorite Halloween episode. I have to admit I haven't seen them all, and there were certainly some other good ones, but when it comes down to it, it is hard to beat a dramatic reading of The Raven. There's a reason this became a tradition and not just a one-off.)
It’s not that the episode itself is all that bad in and of itself. Fans think of it as a turning point in tone (changing the long time Skinner character). Think of it as the beginning of the very long and steep decline.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I feel around season 12 is when it started getting really annoying with the celebrity cameos. The NSYNC episode was so horrendous that it actually made me stop watching with regularity, and it felt like after that too many episodes were just means in which to showcase some celebrity (e.g The Rolling Stones, Tony Hawk, Weird Al).
> The decline was much like Fox News’ transition to a hardcore sex channel
When did that happen? Granted I haven't paid close attention in a while, but that still seems a surprising departure, to say the least. What have I missed?
Southpark - S5
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia - S6
Arrested Development - "S4"
Deadwood - ended before its time!
New Girl - S3
Big Love - S3
GoT - S7
Friends - S6
Office - S7
Workaholics - S4
The League -S4
My baseline seems to be around 5 +- 2 seasons. Saw another poster say same. Similar dynamics apply in any creative job -- the writers can get bored and complacent, early success leads to staff getting lured away, etc. Must make it extremely hard to maintain quality.
Where does Frasier and Parks and Rec fit into your analysis? From what I can tell after the first season they had pretty consistent runs after a shaky first season.
The Guatemalan Insanity Pepper episode was the first “bad” episode to signal decline in quality, after which good episodes were absent, if not extremely rare.
There were a couple of violations in that episode that I remember instinctively grasping when I originally watched it as a new episode when it first aired.
I had been eagerly anticipating the episode, based on station promo spots that had teasers about the episode, and I really thought it was going to be a really good episode.
It was obvious that some extra effort was put into the animation, I had anticipated solid writing to match. It looked like it was going to be on par with a good Treehouse of Horror episode.
Instead, it turned out to be fluff. Only the trippy animation got attention, and the entire episode is built around the trippy shots. The episode lines up what might be considered the first “jerk ass” Homer incident, such that Homer eats this MacGuffin chili pepper, apropos of nothing, and why? There is no reason. It doesn’t build his character. It doesn’t reveal or change anything about Homer. And he’s the centerpiece of the whole episode, the other characters don’t figure into the plot very much, other than as sentimental plush toys. He just does it. Why is he at the chili cook off? No real reason.
So the answer is: because they (the staff) wanted to do a trippy vision quest desert sequence. And that’s it. No other alignment with the Simpsons universe. It’s just Homer trips out in the desert. Everything else is window dressing. Any tugs on the heartstrings, and appearances by the rest of the cast. The spirit animal becomes nothing, and is never seen again, in any other episode that mattered.
And so, then we have the principal violation of Homer doing drugs, and the ancillary violation of Homer “doing drugs” without actually doing drugs. The pepper is a stand-in for hallucinogenic drugs, obviously. And here we have homer trying the pepper, but for dishonest reasons. He didn’t set out to trip balls in the desert, and his character is unaware of this outcome a priori, conserving a moralistic aspect of Homer, the family man, even though, we, beyond the fourth wall, know better.
So they do this episode once, and without any explanation, or impact on continuity, and the jokes aren’t even that great. The episode isn’t very quotable, and has nothing else going for it, aside from the animation, which everyone does remember.
So, at the time, everyone said they loved this episode, but really the episode sucked, and rewatchng it decades later, it still sucks. But people remember the animation, and The Simpsons is animated, so surely this must be a “good” Simpsons episode. But it’s not.
At the time, I remember a subliminal inkling that if this episode passed muster, then more bad episodes were on the way, and I was right. The Poochie episode aired soon after, and I remember watching it at the time, and thinking to myself: “message received, this show isn’t going to be good anymore, don’t expect much else going forward... “ and it seems that was interpretted correctly.
I'm not sure it's a jerkass-Homer episode, and him being at a chili cookoff makes perfect sense - Homer's two principal qualities are that he's stupid, and he's gluttonous. Hubris is in there, too, which is why he eats the pepper.
And I remember a few choice quotes from the episode. "This is because I kicked you, isn't it? "Dogs can't talk! - woof woof - Damn straight." But maybe that's just nostalgia talking, and the fact that I spent far too much time watching The Simpsons as a kid.
I see your point, though - I can see how it's a precursor of what happened later.
When Phil Hartman died. This was my personal intuition but it fits the data. The death was in May 98. The episode given as the turning point was Jan 99.
https://youtu.be/KqFNbCcyFkk