Sitcom characters have been living in unrealistic homes for as long as I
I’d also guess he lives in New York City or northern California. Springfield ain’t NYC or Silicon Valley in terms of affording housing.
This is a MUCH better explanation for the show’s decline.
Also, wasn’t it kind of the point that it was a satire of 50s “perfect family” type sitcoms, hence the four-bedroom suburban (-looking) house, three kids, pets, breadwinner husband, stay-at-home mother?
Also, with some trade jobs and a good union and good overtime, you can make some decent money by your 30s.
But those are all rather hard to get. The only unions I know around here, in rural America (which is where the Simpsons is set, as Springfield is not a big city), are police unions and teaching.
Homer does unskilled labor. He has to—he’s too stupid for anything else. He’s not actually capable of handling the job he does have. He’s a guy who lucked into a good paying job and a boss who is too stupid to fire him most of the time.
I know that, when I watch even modern episodes of the Simpsons, I definitely feel like I’m stepping back in time to a large degree. It feels period. Not only the stuff above, but the way Bart and Lisa act and how much of their lives still feel like the way I was as a kid (despite technology being very different). The general vibe of even knowing my neighbors. The lovable doofus cop who is no threat to anyone. And, yes, the absence of politics and the way it has utterly changed my social circle.
That doesn’t make it bad. But the argument is that it makes it harder to write well.
This topic got me thinking, was Al Bundy’s life style ever sustainable? He was basically Homer except worse because he literally worked at a shoe shop at a mall. That can’t possibly have paid well.
One of the issues is that it is no longer possible to parody American politics and social life. Nothing you could make up would be as absurd as what it has become.
The people who say this tend to be horribly uninventive writers. Like how the Grand Theft Auto makers claimed it would be incredibly hard to make a new GTA story since it’s “impossible to satire modern society” despite the fact their previous game GTAV had some of the most lukewarm takes on society.
I believe Spencer lives in the San Francisco area.
Is it possible that viewership for The Simpsons has declined, in part at least, because viewership for pretty much all broadcast television has been on the decline for a while? I was 13 when the first episode of The Simpsons aired in 1989 and today I rarely watch broadcast television because I stream my shows.
I think part of the decline in viewership is because it’s been on the air for almost 32 years now. I stopped watching the show regularly in 2000 and would have given up earlier had my roommates not been fans. But then I tend to get bored with shows after 5-6 seasons. I’ve see the occasional episode over the last 21 years and most of them made my chuckle at least a little. But, man, it’s old hat. Audiences get tired of the same thing over and over.
It is not that rare to see a TV show (or comic strip, or movie franchise) become formulaic and begin doing variations on the same thing over and over. One of the issues I see with shark-jumping is the apparent notion that there is something wrong with ending by choice. That if you are getting decent ratings/dales you have to keep it going until it’s unsustainable because you lose someone irreplaceable or the next season/installment outright bombs.
But yes, The Simpsons does feel “period”. Which by itself is not a bad thing. As mentioned earlier, it was from the start a parody of a “sitcom family” archetype that was already receding. It uses that framing that even then was already known to be a tired trope – and that in itself does not have to compel weaker writing. Just that the writers should have to make more effort to keep it fresh.
OTOH if Fox Entertainment is still getting ratings that justify keeping it in production… that sounds like there is no great demand for turning it into something “relevant to our reality”. And really, not everything has to be “relevant to our reality”.
I agree. I don’t feel that the Simpsons live in a suburb. Granted the show’s continuity is all over the place but Springfield is generally portrayed as an independent community rather than lying on the outskirts of some larger city.
Its a common trope on TV shows for people to live lives they couldn’t possibly afford with the jobs they have. I don’t see how that has anything to do with the Simpsons decline.
The Simpsons decline is more because the writers changed and its hard to keep a show going after 30+ years.
I don’t get it: “the show is less funny, but it’s not the writers’ fault, it’s society’s fault”??
This is a bizarre take. If I write a dated joke, and you don’t laugh, it’s your fault for being a human in 2021?
I hear Krusty the Clown can’t even play college campuses anymore because the woke brigade will cancel him over his flapping dickey routine.
[cough] Friends in Manhatten [/cough]
Well, that, and time he rolled out a line of Krusty-branded Klan robes.
“I thought the pitch guy said CLOWN robes!” isn’t cutting him any slack with the college crowd.
Maude Flanders: “Excuse me, Edna. I don’t think we’re talking about love here. We are talking about S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N!”
Krusty: “Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down!”
8th Season.
Some of the worst episodes ever had come in Season 11/12. I went to see if I could get references to those (the one with the jockeys singing springs to mind), but it appears that some are still watching it, and there’s a whole host of new worst episodes from the last ten years.
The entire premise is very “TV critic.” For some reason that profession attracts people who fundamentally don’t understand what the comedy genre is, or is trying to be.
If people have abandoned watching The Simpsons or changed their opinion of it due to changes in its political relevance, then a significant number of people must have been watching in the first place in order to have their political beliefs reinforced. This is, obviously, not the case. People watch comedy shows because they are funny (or at least, because the viewers believe the show to be funny). People do not watch comedy shows to have their politics validated, follow romantic storylines, check off boxes for “representation,” etc. TV critics watch shows for these things, and sometimes dramas serve these purposes very well so TV critics end up having very useful things to say about that genre. In comedy, this kind of criticism doesn’t work. Most full-time critics can write reviews of 200 Simpsons episodes without ever once mentioning whether they found the jokes in a particular episode to be funny, and some in fact have done so.
It’s also the case that many people with senses of humor whose politics trend more to the hard left or to conservatism have watched and enjoyed the classic era of The Simpsons despite its generally “mainstream liberal” political tone. Neither their politics nor the show’s have changed all that much, only its ability to be funny has.
In short;
