An obvious explanation is that skewering of the “traditional family sitcom” was a motivating premise of The Simpsons, much more so than being economically relatable to its entire audience, and after your whole reason for existence has been thoroughly battered by the likes of Swartzwelder, Meyer, and O’Brien for 8 or 9 good years, it’s hard to maintain cultural momentum. There’s few TV shows left whose major creative forces were in the industry before The Simpsons hit big and we’re at near-100% saturation of shows made by people whose senses of humor were formed after The Simpsons completely changed the culture of American comedy.
Ah, you see, the politics are passé because it doesn’t feel the need to educate the audience about what the collapse of the lower middle class is like in between stupid gags. As in, because of the economics, being nonpolitical is passé.
If he feels that what the audience needs is a cartoon family sitcom rubbing our faces in the collapse of the American Middle Class, he’s welcome to pitch one to the studio execs.
Good luck pulling off such a sale.
One already exists and is very popular - Bob’s Burgers.
And it is far superior to the Simpsons, at least the Simpsons from this century.
The article is spot on, the show just isn’t relevant anymore. The people it was written by and for are all old and out of touch. I was a huge fan, first when it was on Tracy Ullman and then when it was its own show, but it hasn’t been good in over 20 years.
His basic premise seems to be, a family in 2021 that would be like the Simpsons couldn’t afford a home. Which is patently untrue, as the fifteen calls and texts a day I get wanting to buy my house would attest. It isn’t retirees and boomers creating a seller’s market.
In the second, he makes the same mistake me and practically every other person that cries “The Simpsons isn’t funny anymore!” make. His examples of the “bad” years is starting the 12th season. We’re on the 30th. THIRTY! 700+ episodes.
For people like me, that quit about ~200th-250th episode, it has been “bad” TWICE as long as it was “good”. But yet, obviously, someone is still watching it. Maybe it got “good” again, somewhere in that undiscovered country of 500 episodes? I know I’ve seen some gems I’ve caught randomly from that era.
In fact, the people watching it now probably never saw the “good” seasons. They’re never rerun. The people that enjoy it now are watching a totally different show that I and those like me did. And whatever that show is, someone must like it.
The criticism would make more sense if the author would reference modern issues with the Simpsons, not 20 year old issues.
I think the article is half right. The politics are bad and outdated, but that’s hardly new. They’ve always been suspect. What makes it stand out is the writing, which is bad. For me, The Simpsons ended with season 8. They had a very nice final episode where Lisa came out of her shell and both she and Bart graduated from their respective grades after finishing up the school year in middle school. They both had nice moments together, and it really tied the whole series together in my mind, and neatly mapped onto what would be my own “coming of age” in going to and graduating from a military school for college.
So I don’t dislike The Simpsons. I just don’t consider anything after season 8 to be The Simpsons in any meaningful sense. No judgement against those who see it differently (whether they thought it went down hill before Season 8, or is still amazing).
On that note, there’s an inference to be drawn that the show’s politics have been… if not outdated per se, at least somewhat incoherent since basically the beginning, but glaringly so in the Grimes episodes. Great writing, incoherent politics. Consider the following video essay:
It’s about 20 minutes. If you don’t want to put in the time, the main thrust is that having the Grimes character identify Homer, as opposed to Burns and the system over which Burns and men like him preside, as his arch-enemy in the workplace is batshit. Though perhaps representative of how the lead writer for the episode and a good many Americans envision our economic system.
Rent control, covered in the very first episode.
Fair enough.
That doesn’t explain Joey’s and Chandler’s apartment, or Phoebe, who never even held a steady job and didn’t have a roommate.
Anyway, back to the subject of this thread, the premise is flawed from the start. I was an avid Simpsons watcher when it was on and experienced the decline in writing and humor in real time. I have a bunch of the seasons on DVD and it was really excellent through season 7 or 8, then there are good episodes here and there. I tried watching some of season 12 and 13, shows that I remember seeing and not liking the first time around, and still didn’t like them. There just isn’t humor in them.
I remember reading an article in the New Yorker years ago, an interview with one of the newer writers. He talked about how easy it was, you just do this and that and you have a joke. I remember thinking, yes, you do do this or that, and it’s not funny.
I’ll tell you when the show started its slide. It’s when they start having Homer whisper something to someone else in the scene – “he’s talking to you” or something like that. Once you have to start explaining the joke or how clueless he is, you’ve lost the thread.
Well, I’m with the posters who basically look at it as apolitical. I don’t think anyone involved was trying to make a political, social justice or any other sort of critical point with the Grimes episodes. It was just funny to have someone actually see Homer for what he was, and be frustrated with it. It wasn’t meant to be an indictment of the employers/capitalist class, or of incompetent coworkers, or anything like that.
The show as a whole has generally been that way; it is very pop culture and current events aware, but in general doesn’t take a hard stance on much of anything political. It’s not there to preach or teach- it’s there to make us laugh.
And that’s the fallacy with the article author’s article- just because it’s aware of current events and pop culture doesn’t mean it’s trying to teach anyone about it, and if it does, it’s likely to be somewhat subtle, for example, there have been multiple gay characters who have been shown in a positive light, but their sexuality has never been front and center as the subject of an episode. It has something of a liberal bias, but the politics is rarely the point of the episodes.
And FWIW, “Mayored to the Mob” in Season 10 was pretty great.
Chandler, the I.T. manager, who shares a tiny apartment with the guy who he admittedly has to subsidize but who occasionally is in a national TV show?
I thought it wasn’t that she didn’t have a steady job, it was that she had multiple hustles - the masseuse and cab gigs alone should support a single flat. And she has all those criminal friends. And her sister’s porn paychecks. And the Smelly Cat royalties are probably not nothing.
The writer lives in San Fransisco. Of course a blue collar worker can’t afford a nice house in San Fran. Almost no one can.
But I just looked at real estate in Springfield Missouri and Springfield MA. In both places you can get a decent middle class home for $199,000 to $250,000. In Missouri you can get a NICE home for that money.
Assuming a 10% down payment, a $250,000 mortgage over 25 years is around $950 per month at today’s interest rates. A nuclear tech and safety inspector could easily afford that. And since Abe gave him a pile of money to buy his house, Homer’s mortgage could be smaller than a car payment.
If you are qualified for a decent job but can’t afford a house, maybe you’re living in the wrong place. Like San Fransisco.
And the Simpsons has declined purely because the writing is no longer very good. It doesn’t matter if the show is ‘dated’. In fact, in the hands of a good writer the ‘dated’ aspect of the show could be used to show how different things are now, much as MASH was actually a commentary on Vietnam even though it was set 20 years earlier.
I thought she turned those down. Anyway, maybe the bank is still giving her extra money.
Also, Chandler’s job was transponster, according to one of his best friends. (According to various sources, he as an IT Procurement Manager or a statistical analyst and data collector, whatever that is, and he was unemployed for some stretches, right?).
How do you know it hasn’t been good in over 20 years if you haven’t been watching in all that time? But on the other hand, why would you keep watching for over 20 years if you didn’t think it was any good?
I no longer watch the show regularly, but every once in a while I’ll watch a new episode. And my impression is usually… “meh.” It isn’t actively bad, and it’s still recognizably the same show. I don’t enjoy it nearly enough as I used to, partly because the writing isn’t as fresh or as funny as it was during the show’s golden years, and partly because I’ve “been there, done that,” and even if the show still were every bit as good as it used to be, I’ve passed the point of diminishing returns.
The Simpsons pretty much invented the genre of adult cartoons. It’s easy to forget how subversive it was when it premiered and for much of what people consider the “good years.” When I was in elementary school ('90-'95), most of my friends weren’t allowed to watch it, and some still weren’t allowed to watch it in middle school. But as others have pointed out, it’s impossible to retain that kind of freshness indefinitely. As with music, you either have to constantly reinvent and risk becoming terrible, or at least being perceived as terrible by those fans who don’t like change, or you have to keep doing the same schtick and gradually become irrelevant. The Simpsons has taken a third tack of increasingly relying on self-referential meta-humor, mocking their own irrelevance, and it sometimes works, other times falls flat IMO.
I watched it pretty religiously through the early aughts. Going away to college, where I had limited TV access, started the process, but I also began to find it less compelling. I would occasionally see a really good episode that made me wonder why I didn’t watch more often, but then I would watch more, and the next few episodes wouldn’t be as good. I’m not sure how much it’s actually declined vs how much its successors have raised my standards. Shows like King of the Hill, Bob’s Burgers, Bojack Horseman, and Rick and Morty might never have existed had The Simpsons not paved the way, but they are in a lot of ways smarter and funnier than The Simpsons ever was.
Just because a statement isn’t intended to be political doesn’t mean it isn’t a political statement. Perhaps that’s your fallacy? Thinking that for speech to be political, it must be intended as such?
Ignoring The Flinstones, I suppose so.
Yeah, I thought about that, but I don’t think the Flintstones is in the same category. Maybe it appealed to adults, but I don’t think there was any humor that kids wouldn’t have gotten, let alone anything considered inappropriate for kids.
And The Jetsons, The Roman Holidays, Wait till Your Father Gets Home, and to some extent Jonny Quest.
One of the jokes I remember most because I didn’t get it as a kid: Mr Slate asks his secretary for something and she says “OK, pookie”. He breaks the fourth wall and says in a quizzical manner “Ever since the office Christmas party it’s been ‘pookie’”.
Eta: and what other childrens show got a Prime Time slot?