Pinpointing the Moments “The Simpsons” became less Cromulent

http://diffuseprior.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/kalkalash-pinpointing-the-moments-the-simpsons-became-less-cromulent/

by gwern • 12 years ago

53 45 12 years ago

diffuseprior.wordpress.com

iguana• 12 years ago

This is the best headline I've ever read.

spb2• 12 years ago

The article ends a lot more abruptly than I was expecting. It says what the failure points were, and then it completely stops.

By what I've come across, I think this site has the best in-depth analysis of the rise and fall of the Springfield empire, of the type that I was expecting from that article:

http://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/zs1/

TillE• 12 years ago

I was curious about those three sharp dips in the first section. Turns out they're all clip shows.

I'm pleased to see this aligns with my own opinion of a slight decline in quality around S9/S10, followed by genuine mediocrity.

ecopoesis2• 12 years ago

The author asserts that the new episodes are stale, and then in the very next sentence says he hasn't watched a new episode in ten years. Pretty hard to take anything he says seriously after that.

This hipster affectation that older things are always better is quite annoying. People complain about SNL in the same way: the current cast is always considered terrible. Yet, five yeas later we inevitably look back on the older era with nostalgia.

The current incarnation of The Simpsons sucks, because it's always sucked. You just only remember the good parts of the old episodes because of the fallibility of human memory. This selective memory makes the good old days seem better then they were.

malnourish• 12 years ago

While I agree about SNL, I strongly disagree about The Simpsons, and I recommend reading Zombie Simpsons [0] if you're interested in reading about the downfall of The Simpsons (and how in many respects, it's not The Simpsons at all).

The show absolutely did not suck. You may have never liked it, and that's fine, but the show has had incredible impact, was well written, and was groundbreaking. There are legitimate reasons for not the change in The Simpsons, notably a drastic change in showrunners and writers.

[0]http://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/

jghn• 12 years ago

I remember around 2000 or so discussing that part if the problem was that the writers then had pretty much grown up watching the show, leading to it staling a bit. 15 years later that's even more true now IMO

graeme• 12 years ago

Have you talked to any Simpsons fans?

I have a couple dozen close friends who are simpsons fans, and we pretty much all agree it got worse sometime season 8 onwards. We watch old episodes again.

We've also occasionally watched new ones, and the movie, and find them worse than the old ones.

colomon• 12 years ago

So your hypothesis is that, despite massive changes in writers (and in the case of SNL, cast) over the decades, the level of quality of the two shows is completely constant?

ecopoesis2• 12 years ago

No. I'm just saying the old days are not always as we remember.

I've never been a huge Simpsons fan: I like the show, but I've never gone out of my way to watch it. I also didn't watch it back during the old days because growing up in rural VT we didn't get a Fox affiliate.

But last month when FXX did their every Simpson marathon, I was home with a non sleeping newborn, so I watched a lot of Simpsons. I probably saw around 70% of the episodes. When I occasionally slept, I dreamed of yellow people.

From my perspective, it was all pretty good. The tone changed over the course of the show, and I can see how people who grew up with the original version may not like the new, but I still don't think the newer episodes are the terrible dreck they are often made out to be. They're just different.

I've just read through Zombie Simpsons, and while it makes a compelling argument, the facts don't seem to bare it out.

Take a beloved episode like the monorail one. This is a beloved episode, it makes everyone's best of lists. But in the end, other then an entertains song sung by Phil Hartman, it's fits into the mold that Zombie Simpsons characterizes as bad. Homer gets a new job, a larger part of Speingfield is destroyed, and it's terribly unrealistic.

asveikau• 12 years ago

The thing is it's possible to go back and watch those early seasons. If today I watch a random episode from the early 90s then I watch a brand new one from last week, it's harder to say my memories of the 1990s are making me prefer the old one. In fact when I do watch an old episode, I often laugh hardest at jokes that I didn't remember. There are definitely ups and downs but on average the first few seasons hold up very well.

It's not uncommon to observe that with writer staff turnaround a television series can decline. The only thing that makes this topic slightly absurd is the length of time The Simpsons has been airing new episodes.

Ollinson3• 12 years ago

I guess me and all of my friends were sporting hipster affectations when we were 12 years old because we all noticed the change around 1999-2000 and correspondingly stopped watching. Interesting that I also had my VHS tapes of earlier seasons on repeat from that time until I learned how to pirate copies with XDCC on IRC.

The burden is on you to prove that the show hasn't changed. If TV shows didn't change they wouldn't be cancelled. Writers change, plot lines get exhausted, the network demands for a cash cow vs a dynamic new comedy influence the style. That's not even mentioning the famous quote by Mike Scully (show runner, conincedentially taking control right at the moment of supposed quality dip):

"When asked in 2007 how the series' longevity is sustained, Scully joked, "Lower your quality standards. Once you've done that you can go on forever."

I almost regret putting so much effort responding to a comment that contains troll bait like "the simpsons sucks, because it has always sucks" but the simpsons is a truly special show and what it was deserves to be recognized.

vor_• 12 years ago

The burden is on you to prove that the show hasn't changed.

I've never been a regular viewer of the Simpsons, so I have no position on this issue, but that is an odd statement. The burden of proof in this case is on those asserting that the show has declined. The default position, until presented with more information, is to have no belief.

ivanca• 12 years ago

No, at all. He is using a measure to make his point: Ratings. You are not using anything.

And the "If you think is worst is because you only remember the good parts" is bullshit as a general statement. Internet is better, Windows 7 is million times better than Windows 3.1; even many old people think of "Adventure time" as an awesome cartoon. So this argument that if you think something got worst is because you long for your young tastes is just a well-disguised ad-hominem.

neltnerb• 12 years ago

I think my favorite part about the Simpsons is how you can date people by which key episodes them remember. For me, it's the X-Files episode, or the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. But for people a lot younger than me, they remember totally different episodes. I think there's just an age range where the jokes are targeted.

I do think the modern version is just sort of more modern. With so many competing cartoons like Adventure Time, Family Guy, and other (better) ones, the overall humor has just evolved. Simpsons I think has tried to evolve too, but can't evolve enough to really be a solid show because doing so would destroy the fan base it does have.

Perhaps best to think of it as the "Oracle" of television cartoon comedy =)

themoonbus• 12 years ago

You do realize that its pretty common for shows to have a prime, pass it, and this has nothing to do with hipsters.

chrismcb• 12 years ago

I think it has something to do work sharks.

gwern• 12 years ago

The current incarnation of The Simpsons sucks, because it's always sucked. You just only remember the good parts of the old episodes because of the fallibility of human memory. This selective memory makes the good old days seem better then they were.

I would have to disagree here. I grew up watching post-season-9 or so episodes, mostly the new episodes each Sunday night. If I was lucky, I might see an older episode like "30 Minutes Over Tokyo" when it got rerun and I happened to tune in to a weekday episode, and I enjoyed them a lot. (This was long before I became a hardened torrenter.) Then the DVD box sets starting coming out and I asked for them as gifts; season 1, season 2 - these were revelations to me, I had never seen any of them before. (Fox didn't rebroadcast them, or I missed them.) And they were clearly very different from the newer episodes, and I thought by and large they were better.

wodenokoto2• 12 years ago

While I do admit that season 15 isn't as bad as I remember it, I don't know of anyone who consider it a classic and look back on it with nostalgia.

However, I do think that since the movie was release they have started to occasionally show episodes that are really good.

I do think that for most television shows it is normal that within the concept you burn through most of the good ideas in a few seasons. The novelty of the characters get worn out, so either you have to change the characters away from what made them great or you start repeating yourself; neither is a good choice.

laumars• 12 years ago

Graph TV plotting the ratings of each Simpson's episode and season trend line: http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0096697

mcfunley• 12 years ago

I'm sympathetic to the idea that classic episodes were superior. But when the classic episodes first aired, there were literally five channels in most homes. Simple rating trend analysis is doomed. The world around the show has changed too much.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

The ratings used in the article are per episode opinion surveys, not television viewership ratings.

increment_i• 12 years ago

Not to mention the 'five channels' thing is off the mark. Cable television was more or less entrenched by the 1990s.

lexcorvus• 12 years ago

If you really want to appreciate "The Simpsons", be sure to seek out the original episodes. The syndicated versions have been edited to squeeze out extra time for commercials, and some of the best jokes ended up getting cut.

djur• 12 years ago

The older episodes also suffer more from that. The show lost a couple of minutes of runtime over the years, so there's more to cut. Later seasons also have longer, more elaborate couch gags, which can easily be cut in syndication.

porsupah• 12 years ago

It's a frustrating practice, and indeed, not limited to the Simpsons - even Doctor Who has suffered from cuts, on BBC America, of all places.

SNPP, perhaps not surprisingly, has a catalog of Simpsons syndication cuts, arranged by season:

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/scg.html

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

And in other news, will analysis of phase changes in the coolness of tv series ever jump the shark? Statistics after the break.

LeoPanthera• 12 years ago

The most interesting thing I learned from this is the existence of GEOS: http://www.geos.tv/index.php/select

I've always used IMDB ratings to compare TV shows, I wonder how they compare?

cpwright• 12 years ago

With the advent of every Simpsons ever, I've been watching it much more recently; and still find it funny, though maybe a little less so.

I wonder if as the family and Springfield drift more from the "average" family, it is harder for the show to be funny/relevant.

The Simpson's family stays constant, but the average family has changed over the last years. When the Simpsons first aired having 3 kids, with a mom at home was pretty normal. Now, at least in the circles I'm associated with, most mothers work; especially when you are likely to have the persistent money problems that are the focus of so many episodes.

bjourne• 12 years ago

Has the Simpsons financial situation ever been reasonable? They survive on only Homers salary which can't be that great. Still, they own two cars and live in a two-story four bedroom detached house in an average size American city. On top of that, Homer has enough disposable income to get wasted at Moe's Tavern almost every night. In the show they are labelled as poor but it really doesn't seem so.

twoodfin• 12 years ago

There's great fun made of this very point in the season 8 episode, "Homer's Enemy". The punchline: "Don't ask me how the economy works!"

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

Springfield strikes me as being on the smallish side for an American city. As a Nuclear Safety Inspector, it's been suggested he makes around $65,000 a year. That's enough for the kind of life he has in a small, middle-American suburb.

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

There was a time when a man working in industry in a small city could support a family on his income. That was back when Matt Groening was a kid, so that's how the Simpson's family is structured - when Groening started the show, he was really just writing about his own childhood through Bart, transposed into the early '90s, ignoring the economic realities of the '90s.

jesuslop• 12 years ago

Just quoting from 4F12 season 8 (itchy & scratchy & poochie show):

COMIC BOOK GUY Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever! Rest assured that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world.

BART Hey, I know it wasn't great, but what right do you have to complain?

COMIC BOOK GUY As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.

BART What? They're giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, If anything, you owe them.

COMIC BOOK GUY (pause) Worst episode ever.

sehugg• 12 years ago

It's kind of funny to read the reviews posted on USENET immediately after the episode -- the irony is not lost: http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/4F12

jaimebuelta• 12 years ago

I get baffled by the fact that it looks like the current opinion of the first seasons of The Simpsons gets valued into the 7-8. I saw that previously on IMBD

To put this in context, that's the same as Smallville (http://www.geos.tv/index.php/index?sid=161)

Now, I enjoy Smallville (I really do), but I can watch old episodes of The Simpsons laughing along the way and quoting them almost line by line. It's probably the ONLY TV Show I can watch it over and over without growing old. I've seen some episodes more than 10 times, and they are still brilliant.

Other than the fact that, yes, probably is not as good as it was, I still think is weirdly under appreciated in ratings these days, not sure way. The first seasons are GOLD. Are part of the basic vocabulary all over the world. They are innovative in terms of cartoons in ways that they are not easy to see now (in particular, the first seasons tend to use the "camera" in ways that it was never been done in cartoons, or even real action movies)

When it started, they started to show it up in Spain late at night as "cartoon for adults". My mother watch ONE episode, and decided that I NEEDED to watch it (I was a 11 year old kid at the time). That it was SO GOOD it will be bad to miss it. So I'd watch it next day through the wonders of VCR.

I sincerely think that The Simpsons is The Best. TW Show. EVER.

It's just that we are so used to have it around, that we don't see it...

nnnnni• 12 years ago

I consider the movie to be the end of the series, but it was definitely going downhill before that point -- looking back on it after reading this article, I would have to agree with his findings. Homer vs NY was the last good one.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

wow, light gray text on white background makes this pretty much unreadable...

karmacondon• 12 years ago

The new Simpsons episodes are not awful. I don't think anyone wlll say that they prefer the new seasons over the older ones, but that doesn't mean that the new seasons are objectively bad. Whatever is said about the show, it still has the market cornered on Ivy League level humor. The best jokes are just smart, I would dare to say smarter and more insightful than any other television show. Fraiser at its best wasn't nearly as intelligent as some of the Simpson's throwaway jokes.

There used to be one truly inspired joke every few episodes. Now there might be only one or two per season, but they're still there. The Simpsons remains on the air because there are some things that can only be done with the right combination of deep wit and animated insanity. It's ok to make references to the classics or philosophy if you follow it with Homer getting hit in the groin. Plenty of shows are funny, animated or intelligent, but I can only think of one show that is the best of all three of those things.

Anyone who hasn't watched The Simpsons in ten years should tune in to a few new episodes. You'll laugh, at least once. There will probably be something that makes you think just a little bit. Nothing is ever as good as it used to be, but there are definitely worse ways to spend 30 minutes.

freshyill• 12 years ago

I watched every episode in order last year, so I have some fresh perspective, and I agree completely. there were seasons that were much worse than I remembered (11-12, and things definitely got better. I wouldn't say the current episodes are 4-8 quality, but roughly 9-10, which is still pretty good.

Anybody who says the show sucks today needs to give it a chance. They'll be pleasantly surprised.

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

I remember as a kid the sudden collapse. It happened really fast - in season 8 it's a solidly good show, and by season 11 it's unwatchable. I'd always assumed that the best of the team switched gears to work on Futurama (which came out during this period).

For me the final nail was Saddlesore Galactica. At the time I had no idea that there was all this drama between writers and fans in the newsgroups, as I'm sure most fans were similarly unaware. So there's this episode that seems to be deliberately, aggressively bad. That seems to revel in its absurdity and clumsiness. And it delibrately lambasts itself as "worst episode ever". I had no idea that this was some kind of in-joke "gotcha" against the newsgroup - at the time I'd assumed they were just celebrating all their own bad ideas as a gag theme episode.

In hindsight it looks like they tried to mock the "comic book guys" of their fanbase and instead seemed to just prove them right. It's almost a sort of drama-queen meltdown, not something you'd expect from a group of professionals. And following Saddlesore, this new almost deliberately bad flavour of writing became the new normal, so it didn't even stay the "worst episode ever".

Saddlesore Galactica and the following episodes were the shark-jump moment for me.

tzs• 12 years ago

Despite any decline, every season from 15 on has averaged just a bit under 7 at IMDB, with about 1/3 of each season in the 7.3 or 7.4 neighborhood.

People who call for The Simpsons to be cancelled because they think it is not as good as it used to be are, frankly, insane. The proper measure of when to cancel a show is not how it compares to its own past, but rather how it compares to what is likely to replace it. The average bottom third of current Simpsons seasons is still better than the typical new Fox show.

It's interesting to see how perceptions of old episodes change. For example, 3F02, "You Only Move Twice", where Homer goes to work for Hank Scorpio, is seen today as one of the best episodes of the series. On IMDB, it has the lowest rating of season 8.

9F10, "Marge vs. the Monorail" is the lowest rated season 4 episode on IMDB, but now is on most of the "best of" lists for the series.

Pinpointing the Moments “The Simpsons” became less Cromulent

Related Stories