I endorse this view. You’ll know when 9 starts downhill because guest stars start getting plot roles. 10 is especially bad for this but it’s good enough to keep working through.
3-8, yeah. Though I think the transition to 9 is a little messy. There are some eps in 8 that feel like season 9 episodes (this is controversial, but I feel that the Grimes episode has a post-classic feel, the military school one too) and vice versa (I love The Joy of Sect and Simpsons Tide, which I always think are season 8).
Season 10 isn’t all that bad. Just kind of mediocre and a little boring, because it doesn’t have as many good jokes. It starts to feel kind of joyless in comparison to previous episodes, like a promising first season of a new show. Then season 11 gets truly groan inducing, and it goes down from there. I think people started to feel that there was no return and stopped watching around 12, 13. For me the missionary episode of season 11 was the true point of no return, though I consider the Grimes episode the first inkling that something was wrong. I thik most give the Principle and the Pauper that honor, however.
All that said, I’ve heard tell that there was a second golden age in something like Seasons 15-17. I was skeptical of course, but then I did a project with Jaffe in which every day we watched a randomly selected episode. We got a season 15 episode (The President Wore Pearls) that wasn’t just not-horrible, but actually pretty good. Like it had the tone and some jokes of a classic episode. Overall, it would have been a low-point in the classic era, due to some plotting issues and having boring songs (it’s an Evita parody), but it was stunningly well done, compared to something from, like, season 13 or 23. So maybe there is some truth to the legends. However, no fan I know has been brave enough to seek the truth.
Al Jean has been the showrunner from, like, season 14 until now (like 20 years). Jean was involved in some truly wonderful and classic episodes, so it’s been a big disappointment to fans, that he’s presided over the decline.
However, if there is a second golden age around when he takes over, that throws an interesting twist into the narrative. It would mean that basically Mike Scully’s showrunner tenure tanked the series. And it tanked it so bad that the whole generation who grew up venerating the Simpsons completely lost interest. Like, it ended up being a coming of age thing. The Simpsons got bad at a juncture in many super-fans lives when they were starting high school or college, so after three seasons of garbage, it was easy to say, “Okay, it’s gone now. Will probably be cancelled soon. I’ll move on with my life.” I don’t think we’d even notice if it did get good again, because so many of us had written it off (though there were always people saying, “Hey, it’s not that bad lately” who were always written off as charlatans).
In any case, Al Jean is still the showrunner, and the show has hit absurd lows in the last twenty years. We also ended up watching a Tree House of Horrors from one of the 20’s, and it included a fucking Diving Bell and the Butterfly parody, in which Homer communicated by farting. It was sub-Family Guy.
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as was the crossover with the Family Guy
years ago, there was a scene with a crowd of “homer simpson clones” that featured peter griffin for a couple of frames. and there was also a joke that i can’t exactly remember where they basically said family guy was crass, derivative garbage, that definitely seemed angry and bitter, rather than a light hearted jab at a stablemate.
then years later they do a crossover with it.
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Well, I mean it would have been entirely different writers, but the same showrunner, so I 'unno.
The only Family Guy joke I remember is when Homer looked up plagiarism in the dictionary, and it was a picture of Peter Griffin. I’ve heard other people say they did some really mean spirited anti Family Guy jokes, and I always wonder if they’re misremembering the severity of that joke, which did actually seem bitter but wasn’t completely incendiary.
On the other hand they did a parody of South Park that was off-base and inaccurate to the point that it indicated that the writers were both bad at parody and didn’t actually get (and perhaps hadn’t watched) South Park. They also did a parody of early 00’s Cartoon Network shows that was similarly disrespectful and tone deaf and in the same episode did a parody of flash cartoons that was defensive and overly critical. So yeah. They went a long way since their loving jabs at Ren & Stimpy.
At least Groening loves Rick and Morty.
1-8 are all great.
9 is rocky. They are some great episodes but also the first genuine bad ones.
After that, there may be an occasional good gag or joke, but it’s all downhill.
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Here’s another longtime favorite. Again, I love the world this joke creates:
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Lemon of Troy was always one of my favorite episodes growing up. I’d get pumped when that one was playing. My favorites tended to be the one with strong plots (that were still funny). Of course even today the plot episodes are memorable, whereas I often don’t realize that one episode houses a bunch of my favorite gags or B-plots.
I was always disappointed if the rerun was Lisa’s Rival or Marge’s Fear of Flying, but those episodes have some of my all-time favorite gags!
smithers is underrated
do milhouse and smithers ever hang out
Oh man, it would be weirdly touching if Smithers met Milhouse and tried to take him under his wing.
I think Smithers is out now, and I shudder at the thought of watching that episode.
The Smithers moment that everyone seems to remember:
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i was curious and found this
man i feel like the simpsons has gone past bad into … something else
does that treasure of the sierra madre thing count as a joke?
Ugh, the timing is all off and the characters animations overact, thus undercutting everything. Also yeah: the Bogart joke is awful.
My usual line now is that the Simpsons was this perfect storm of storyboarding and music and acting and writing, and now literally all of that has been stripped away, so there is no possibility of it coming back at this point. Except Harry Shearer is as good as ever. Every other voice actors seems to be phoning it in, and I wonder if they’re literally phoning it in these days, as is common for voice over but was never the case on the Simpsons, even with celebrity guests.
I love Lemon of Troy. I was listening to the Talking Simpsons episode about it recently, and was reminded of how funny it was (I love the goofy, inconsistent Shelbyville dialects). I really need to get season 6 (actually, 2 ~ 8, I only have 4) – I want to revisit Bart vs Australia and the PTA Disbands (and all of the Treehouse of Horrors – especially the one with the Dracula parody (it taught me the word “crotch”)). Oh, man, what’s the episode where Lisa stays home sick and plays that Crash Bandicoot knock-off?
Even if they did some tremendous tryharding and somehow actually restored it to its former glory, would anyone notice? They’ve been fully written off and presumably just retain some kind of zombie audience who doesn’t expect much. Then why try?
Also, it’s weird that Milhouse and Smithers know each other.
They must have met when Bart was Burns’s heir and Milhouse came over.
Since every Simpsons episode theoretically takes place in 1 year, I like to play a game in which I use clues in the episode to determine where it falls in the year. It’s fun to think that a season 10 episode happens before a season 1 episode, etc.
So my clue in that scene is that Milhouse and Smithers know each other, so this is probably after Bart was Burns’s heir. The next question is whether it falls before or after Who Shot Mr. Burns, because Burns’s heir is referenced in that ep.