The Simpsons Thread

I've been rewatching the Simpsons from the start, and while it's still pretty good overall, I think the haze of nostalgia and bad memory has convinced a lot of people that the show was really really good up until a certain point. There's certainly some clever writing in there, but there's a lot of painfully formulaic plotlines that got recycled for decades. It could be argued that these things got worse as time went on because so many other shows copied these cliche plots, and even the Simpsons copied them off other sitcoms and The Flintstones before them.

Simpsons Thread, I guess.

Dude………….i understand the pain, but please.

Simpsons like anything is a thing people "say" they like more then they actually do. its that way with every "cultural touchstone". sure you have some super fans that will post fan theories or go to a con or some shit (most IPs have that) but that vast majority of people see the simpsons as a big deal because of 80's/90's nostalgia glasses. people think it's better then it actually was because of how hard it was marketed back then.


not to mention how easily mellionals are manipulated by group consensus (false or not) when something as long runing as the Simpsons gets referenced it's almost always used to show-off on social media. because it's easy and familiar (like cute cat pictures or spongebob) "hey, it's thats thing we all remember!" (like/subscribe/react, etc)

as a kid my favorite episodes were always the halloween specials. and a few of the earlier season standouts with dark or surreal theme.

the show has fallen (for me) as the humor is no longer edgy or relatable (it's about as bad as family guy and snl) the animation quality has lost the charm it once had and the show is produced by a bunch of smug wealthy assholes terrified of leaving their echo chamber. or making any meaningful changes.

the show was never a big thing for me growing up. I don't quote lines or trivia with friends and family but I did enjoy it as thing that existed in the background of my life growing up. think I spent more time with the video games based on the show.

Seasons 1 and 2 were the best, prove me wrong.

No, it isn't. They've been recycling the same plotlines you've mentioned for decades. They are out of ideas and that's the main problem, along with virtue signaling and "hello fellow kids". The Simpsons should just die at this point, they haven't been relevant since the movie and it just keeps getting worse somehow, such as Pokemon Go episode a year after it became a fad. Not charming at all. WebM related is the Simpsons in current year.

Here's a challenge: name 5 enjoyable episodes from Season 20 onward. I literally cannot recall a single one. Most of the episodes boil down to unknown celebrities, extremely rapid-fire unfunny jokes and a 10 minute long soapbox at the end, usually by Lisa.

Poor wording on my part. "overall" refers to the earlier seasons, specifically. Not the entire run of the show, which is about 15-20 seasons of garbage, depending on your personal opinion.


They had a lot more heartfelt and genuinely sweet episodes. The characters were less exaggerated and their problems were more grounded.

The moment the character's became less grounded, self parodying, and the show entirely ran on humor was when it began going down hill, because once the humor left all you had was bland characters with no value.
That is why 1 and 2 are the best.

Personally, I think season 1 was clumsy. It was still trying to find it's footing after just being spun off the Tracey Ullman show.

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do they literally not know what the fuck benghazi was?

I think some of the problems can be chalked up to the mostly stand-alone episodic nature of the series. They can put in nods to previous episodes as jokes, but they weren't telling a sequential story. So you ended up with a number of disappointing episodes where something big happens and right away you are made aware of the fact that this will not stick, there will be no consequences, and everything will reset at the end.

Not necessarily a bad thing when the problems are small, like Bart needing to study to pass a test, but when it's stuff like.. Homer gets a promotion and starts making a ton of money, well you know the payoff will be everything goes bad and they are back to being poor and miserable.

I think a big part of what happened to the Simpsons was societal change.

The original seasons were counter-culture for the era they were made in, a glorious response to the wholesome family values that the media was pushing. It was willing to tackle the things most sitcoms wouldn't touch, and it worked. It challenged people, and if I had to sum up that era it was the battle for America's soul between Bart Simpson and the Carebears. A satirical version of reality vs. bubble-wrapped niceness.

The problem is the show changed the way TV was made. As time went on not only were more shows emulating The Simpsons, and they were willing to take it further. The show lost it's main draw and became in essence became culture. It lost it's place on TV, so it scrambled to not be left further behind. After all, it was still making money. Episodes become more topical whereas classic Simpsons transcended it's era. Fads and guest stars take center stage in an obvious attempt to stay relevant. The characters further degrade themselves to compete with the likes of Family Guy, leading to the likes of Jerkass Homer.

I remember being on a job and talking to my coworker about how we both agreed the show has gone downhill and should be axed. The sad part was this was about 10 years ago.

Vid related explains how and when the simpsons went to shit.

They've memoryholed it just like she did

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Too late to let it retire gracefully?

And yet it came out in December of 1989, whereas Married with Children came out in April 1987, which was also counter-culture and had a dysfunctional family, so that can't be what made it so special.

Stop blaming society for everything.

The Simpsons is only as good as its writers team. The first season to the 8th were filled with disgruntle Harvard graduates who hold liberal ideas in the 1960s but realized that their dream world is not achievable. So they complained by satirized the messes of real world. Authorities was the target because they are responsible and failed at making a better world. Everyone was stupid because everyone is responsible in making the world messy as it. Right now, the writers are just liberal graduates with ties to the industry.

The older ones got run out of ideas and left. Their best writer John Swahathisface need at least 50% rewrite to make a good episode(the least out of every writer). Good writers reedit great writers. Now he no longer work there.

With Al Jean at the helm. The writer rooms resemble a factory. Whatever jokes they made, as long as it had a good laugh it was put in. No longer when they spend more than 20 hrs debating a funny name to an appear-one-time-20-seconds character. They need to get the jokes as fast as possible. That is why Homer and Liza turned to the ways they are. The writers don't need to think of a creative plot.

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It was never great.
At best it was fairly good, for about three years there.
It's undoubtedly the single most malignant pop culture entry, its influence being very large and very negative.
If i could go back in time and kill one person, it'd be matt groening

This is a damned good video.

You fucking people

If The Simpsons isn't great, then no TV show is great.


I know, I know…

I think early Simpsons had some true glimmers of greatness, but Sturgeon's Law is a law for a reason. I think a lot of people just like to put on their contrarian goggles and insist that things being pretty okay-ish or being moderately entertaining means they were shit. Kind of like the Game Journo review system: Average games get 7s and 8s out of ten, but bad games gets 5s and 6s, even though 5 and 6 should mean its moderately good, but has some flaws.

I think what impresses me about the clip is Homer's anger and variation of actions he has with the Bart's locked door.

What even more impressive is the last 5 points take place in 7-8 seconds.


Good video. After seeing that ratings chart, feels like the show is only going to end when one of the main voice actors dies. I was hoping the show was going to end at season 25 which obviously didn't happen.

Amazing video, thanks for sharing.

Those are IMDB ratings, not actual Nielsen ratings. The Nielsen ratings are below 5 million (compared to the peak of near 30 million), which would be cancellation for a new show but because Simpsons is such a cash-cow for Fox it keeps on getting renewed.

We'll see what the state of play is after 2019, when the 30th season airs.

When discussing 'early' Simpsons, Sturgeon's Law doesn't apply. These faggots are just being contrarians.

The writers put more effort in their freenium game than the actual show, seeing how Tappedout is the only remaining Simpsons related media that makes them money.

Don't forget


I'd include the third too as that started to develop the side characters in interesting ways like Skinner being a shellshocked veteran.
General opinion seems to be that the show started declining after S8 though IMHO, I'd say S6 is when it started because it was when the formulaic episodes OP mentions started to appear, chiefly the insufferable "I don't deserve Marge" ones; there's still good episodes until S8 and maybe a bit further but S6 is when the snowball starts rolling down shit mountain.

How about that Amin Tamzarian episode?

The difference is that MwC was marketed as a crude show. It was crude and mocked something that locked it into it's age. It is the longest running prime time series to never get an Emmy nomination. It's not bad but critics wouldn't give i the time of day.
Simpsons were critically well received and less locked in an era. it was also less real as apposed to MwC which showed us roughly how most Americans lived.

Yes the lack of quality writers is a problem but n the societal change subject the Simpsons no longer thumb their nose at the world and pop culture they revel in their fame and are less critical than Dilbert.

They had the biggest celebrity on earth play a mentally off morbidly obese white guy. That was brilliant. Now celebrities are just celebrities.

That was a weird episode.

As stated, they don't have time to fully craft their jokes, so they put anything that could produce a small chuckle.
The celebrities are just an easy hack plot device, they could put jokes in.

name anything worse

Nu Family Guy

Granted they had less of a fall because it was a raunchy Simpsons rip-off to begin with but the animation sucks all the joy out of the television.

Seeing that stiff, mechanical digital style when there's gratuitous gore is way more unnerving than if the animation was fluid like Superjail!

Family Guy was always shit

user, your enter button is broken?

It was too late a decade ago.

Season 1 was decent

Season 20 of South Park

Simpsons is honestly worse because it just seems like a shitty, safe version of Family Guy.

As someone who for some reasons never watched it at all till recently…
I know that pretty much the best of it all should be up until S8. About the seasons after that, and especially pre-flash animation, are there good episodes or arcs in the following ones?

Rick & Morty

Family guy.

Watch to the end of season 11 to get the complete experience.

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I'm onto season 6 and you can see the early stages of cancer developing. Early seasons would make brief, off-handed remarks about politics, in season 6, we have entire episodes dedicated to the Republicans being evil (The one where Sideshow Bob runs for mayor), and new characters introduced just so they can have the characters prattle on about feminism and how women are oppressed (The Gummy De Milo episode with the feminist babysitter)

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Hopefuly over time they'll get rid of her.

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The Simpsons is certainly an overrated show, but it had its redeeming qualities in its prime. Moe and Barney were pretty funny, for example.

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I'm almost done with Season 7 and one of the thing that strikes me as really impressive is the way that every single episode, hundreds of them at this point, is completely familiar to me. I didn't obsessively watch the show, but I'm able to remember having seen all of these at one point or another, even decades later.

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sneed's feed and seed
formally chuck's

These are both pretty good. What are they from?

How long till it happens?

The Simpsons is the perfect example of the fall of the Left. It started out as a show that twisted, and mocked what was mainstream at the time, and now it's attached to it like a parasite.

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They'd sooner do it to a side character, because it would allow them to pepper that character in sparingly, instead of dedicating the rest of the season following such an episode with the running plotline that Bart is a tranny, which would mean committing to a hard running plotline between episodes, which they haven't done since the "Who shot Mr Burns" gag, to my knowledge.

It's 30 years later and Bart is still in 4th grade, despite having multiple summer vacations and several episodes that overtly involved Bart graduating to fifth grade. There's no way they'd commit to making Bart gay or a tranny, even for a single episode… Now, Millhouse, no one cares about him.

This show needs more fanservice.

This


You have poor taste

Did it really happen IRL?

What do you think, stupid fucking cuck?

I've never liked family guy, but if you look at old family guy vs new family guy you can see that old family guy is more animated and doesn't piggyback off of pop culture references and interchangeable jokes as much as new family guy

I don't think he's the stupid one.

I think he's just to young to remember.

Once upon a time it did, user.

Ty Suka, idi nahui blyat. Yob tvoyu mat'.

Wat?

I'm busy blowing up whities on that country, my bad.

in an early ep, the school counselor is talking to Homer and Marge about their son's flagrant homosexual tendencies. When they express shock that Bart is gay, the counselor realizes he has the wrong file and we see that the label on it reads Milhouse

EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

I may agree with you. In what ways do you mean?

I remember the swedes were known for being sauna enthusiasts, but nothing about public nudity
Sauce pls.

If you really wanted to be an autist, you could argue that Millhouse chasing Lisa well into his middle-aged years means he isn't gay, but they rewrote the future several times and forgot that Bart was supposed to become a Supreme Court Justice.

I can only imagine that the ratings must be pretty bad right now, so give it time and they'll have a "Millhouse is gay" episode, or introduce some one-off "non-binary" character who teaches the Simpsons all about how everything is a spectrum.

That was a joke. Remember those?

There are no jokes here. Merely unintentional predictions of the future.

A podcast called Cum Town.