Has the Simpsons Lost It?

[simpspin]

This thread is to free up the S13 Blu Ray thread.

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Originally Posted by mayorofsmpleton

In my opinion the show has severely drifted AWAY from this type of episode in the recent episodes (at least the last few seasons).

They've gone back to having guest stars playing "characters" and not themselves.

The jury's out on if they'll continue this, otherwise, it could be just a fluke for a few seasons. Or maybe they realized throwing celebs onto the screen hasn't helped the falling ratings over the past few years.

They've also gone back to taking many more political/social stabs at many topics.

...and failed. Some of this so called 'satire' in the past few seasons has been a bunch of bad punditry with run-on jokes. IMO, the last decent satire the Simpsons pulled off was in S14 when Homer was commenting on airplanes flying "Back over the homes of poor people."

You posted a graph from IMDB? Seriously? All that shows is that many people online jumped on a bandwagon of the meme "The Simpsons has sucked for so long..."

That's a pretty bold claim, like you can actually vouch for everyone who cast a vote! However, where you get your feet wet is the only posters who posted obvious voting to tip the scales were the people who voted "10s" for next season's "Elementary School Musical" (South Park Already did It!), and that's really lame. But if you want true bandwagoning, saying the show's getting better has been the en vogue thing to do. There's always an excuse:

1. "Al Jean's taking over from Scully to make the show better!"
--Sort of agree with this, but he didn't leave and the show is staler than week-old pizza.

2. "The work on the Simpsons Movie will inspire the writers!"
--Uh, if you guys say so...

3. "The writers aren't as distracted making the movie, so they have time to make the show better!
--Wait, you people just said...!?

4. "The show's funnier/awesomer now that it's in HD!!!!
--How does being in "HD" and looking like a flash video (with stiff, lifeless animation) make it better?

In one form or another people have been expressing these exact argument for years. The problem is that it never seems to last. The show has a well established golden age in its first eight seasons or so, but there is no second or third peak era that lots of people will point to as being great. In this argument the show has always gotten better “recently”, or “in the last few seasons”, or some other nebulous time frame. It’s a cop out used by people who want to find something – anything – positive to say so they don’t sound like cranky old farts.

I know because I was part of the crowd who felt that way too. Realistically though I hadn't seen many of the episodes since season 12. After going through and watching them all I find that it's a show that went through a low period and has been "reborn" as something different. If I was like a lot of other "internet" voters I'd have voted all those later episodes low too -- and like many of the people who voted -- I doubt I'd have seen them before voting.

I'm not debating that you know what you want, I'm just letting the numbers speak for themselves and I doubt there's THAT many people who voted "low" because they had nothing better to do. I'm guessing it's not many more than the people who gave a perfect score to an episode that hasn't even aired yet. (And I've seen every episode since the Ullman show, in order, but I've never voted on the IMDB.)

The graph shows nothing except that there's a "general opinion" that the show went downhill and nobody has to have SEEN those episodes to actually vote on them... it's irrelevant and proves nothing.

Again, did you go in and do a background check on EVERY voter? Really, if the show was 'getting better', I'm sure there would've been some people happy to tip the scales back to even out the chart just because they could've...and they did.

I do agree that saying the show is "Back like it was in seasons 6-8!" and similar comments aren't really warranted. It's not BACK to anything... it's evolved into something different. It's almost a parody of the show it once was... which doesn't mean it's necessarily bad...

I think it is. People have been saying the show's been "getting better" since Season 11. Every year, someone is always saying this season will be better because they don't want the next season to look like the past season. It's also funny that Entertainment Weekly did a Top 50 best Simpsons episode poll when the show was celebrating the 300th episode and all but one were from the first 9 seasons. So, when the show was 'getting better" and was "reborn as something different", people still didn't care.

...it's just a DIFFERENT show...

That's the understatement of the year!

...one that I've found myself enjoying again after many years of assuming it had just drifted into mediocrity -- like many of the fans who stopped watching but continue to comment on how "terrible" the show has become -- despite not having seen many of the so-called "terrible" new episodes.

Again, how do you know what other people do, or don't do?

While I have no sympathy whatsoever for this argument I do have some sympathy for the impulse behind the "it's getting better!" excuse. So many fans are so desperate to like the show again that they can’t bring themselves to snuff out that last trembling ember of hope. I get that. I understand that, but the real Simpsons is dead, it died a long time ago and it’s not coming back. And pretending that it might won’t make it.

Why do people blow the Simpsons way out of perportion? It's a funny cartoon. Just leave it at that.

Being a cartoon and being well-written aren't two mutually exclusive concepts. Saying "it's a cartoon" means saying little at all.

Originally Posted by Imrahil2001

Yup. These other guys are BORING. Quit BORING EVERYONE.

What happened to C'est la vie?