I didn’t know they had saguaro cacti in Oregon.
One could make a better case that Springfield NT is in the area currently occupied in our world by Arizona. The aforementioned cacti, proximity to Las Vegas and Mexico, and other “clues” over the years. The fact is, Springfield is everywhere, and nowhere. Except Oregon - that’s too obvious.
Well, I did say that it was skewering the old family sitcoms of the 1950s-1970s, not the 1980s, so I’m not surprised you can’t find contemporary examples from 1989.
It was very much a sort of satirical version of those old sitcoms- on the surface, it looked like the stereotypical 1950s-1970s sitcom family, but under the surface all the stereotypes were subverted.
Problem is, they were skewering shows from more or less a quarter century BEFORE the show started, and aiming at an audience of Baby Boomers (in their 40s at the time) with the humor. To do that today, the premise of the show would have to be skewering 1990s shows that were contemporary with itself when it started. That’s a tall order to fill… and one that I suspect the writers or showrunners never expected to face.
I know - they should start skewering -The Simpsons! And then the show would create a meta-swirl converging parody bubble that would expand and engulf all of television.
Presumably what was being parodied was the shows that Matt Groening remembered from his childhood.
I think the article is right for the wrong reasons.
It’s not the structure of the family per se, it’s that that structure is immutable.
The Simpsons is over 30 years old. In this time, the characters haven’t aged, as a show with live actors would, so their life situations haven’t changed. But there’s also a rule about continuity; so they can’t do the kind of throwaway gags, or episodes based around a serious event, that are common in other cartoons. With these constraints, it’s amazing the show has dragged out as long as it has.
It’s quite telling that the best episodes for many years were the Halloween specials, which are allowed to break the continuity rule. Although I’d guess those are probably pretty bad now too (I haven’t watched The Simpsons in years), as most of the best writers long ago jumped ship to projects with better scope.
Heh, my (early, nearly 50) boomer parents weren’t amused by it at all. Now, my friends and I in college? We loved it. I’d say it’s firmly aimed at Gen X. If they aimed for the boomers, they missed.
I would agree that the writing has been variable over the years, but I still eventually watch the current season, even if I don’t make it to the TV every Sunday. You can’t be the 84-85 Oilers every year. It’s been going on for 30 years, and they’re not the new, hot show that’s paying enough to live - but you get freedom. Those shows are on other networks or the web at this point. In some sense, you’re writing for the machine at that point. It’s Fox’s longest standing flagship, and the landscape isn’t much like it was in the early 90s.
Besides the trope of “People living in apartments they can’t afford”, is there much of 1990s TV to skewer? The Simpsons wasn’t the only one playing with the “subverting traditional sitcom tropes” thing at the time - I mean, that was basically the entire point of Married… With Children.
The other thing is quite a few of those 1990s/2000s TV shows still feel ‘current’ in a way that something like Mork & Mindy didn’t, even in the 1990s.
That’s probably a symptom of something else; we seem to be in something of a period of cultural stagnation that we didn’t see in the latter half of the 20th century. I mean, 90s TV shows still seem relevant, music hasn’t changed as much since about 1995 as it did between 1985 and 1995 it seems to me, and so on.
And The Simpsons is sort of a symptom of that as well; it’s taken the show thirty years to get to a point where it’s finally very clearly evident that the show has declined, but the reason is unclear.
Probably a subject for another thread, I figure.
Not really. Season 10 is often cited as the beginning of the decline – it includes for example Skinner becoming Armin tamzin (or whatever) and that’s 20 years old now.
The obvious decline is not a new phenomenon.
And, as I say, in my view the reason is pretty clear: the whole premise of the show invites stagnation. They can’t do consequence-free jokes and episodes like other cartoons. The characters don’t age and experience different phases of life, like a live action show.
It’s the worst of both worlds. And many of the best writers knew that, and jumped ship.
They should have wrapped it up while still on a high. Let’s say season 13. Then by now we could have had spin off show(s) as there’d still be so much love for the franchise.
Really? Seems like the opposite. We’re in a new golden age of television. Likewise, there’s a lot of music out there that wouldn’t fit in the 90s at all.
If anything, the problem is with the show. It’s still on Sunday nights on a broadcast network. Which is how vanishingly few examples of new television get watched today.
We’re the ones who have stagnated. If you’re still watching broadcast television or listening to music on the radio or interacting with people who are your age, i.e. people who also have not moved on from 30 years ago, or doing things the same way you did them 30 years ago, of course you’re not going to see how culture has moved on.
I think you may have missed the point slightly.
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If I were to throw a 70s themed party, then it’s pretty clearly going to involve flared trousers, kipper ties, maybe platform shoes, a lot of brown, beige and orange etc. And the playlist would probably include a lot of disco and glam rock.
And the same for the 50s, 60s, 80, 90s…but after that?
When it comes to fashion and music styles I would find it hard to think of anything sooo 00s or sooo 10s.
This is not a criticism necessarily; I suspect that the issue is that styles are more niche now. At one time men had to pick a side between “mod” or “rocker”, and most young men reflected one of those two sides.
Nowadays there are at least dozens of options, so a crowd of people just looks like a patchwork, always.
It’s similar to the phenomenon of places around the world losing their discrete character, as everywhere gathers influences from everywhere.
I suspect this is still a side effect of the board skewing older. I’m reasonably sure something similar could be set up for the 00s or 10s - we’re just too old and out of touch to know what that would look like or possibly even to recognize it even if we saw or heard it.
This line is over 2000 years old now but: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.
That wasn’t true then, it’s not true now.
The Simpsons seem to have declined because few television shows will stay fresh and relevant for 30 years. This kind of points to the generation gap as well. The last few years have apparently seen something of an improvement in the show (?). If so, that’s because the ones writing it are finally from an entirely different generation rather than one that overlapped the creators and they have injected a new perspective into it. If it’s not back to its glory days, the show itself is old and there’s only so much innovation you can do with that.
Think about it like this. A lot of people (like me) were around Bart’s age when they started watching it. Now we are older than Homer. Soon we will be approaching Abe Simpson age.
I don’t know if I buy the “economics” argument. Plenty of working-class Americans raise families in single family homes in various small towns and burbs around the country. I feel like that meme is the result of relatively young hip Millennial writers living in overpriced New York, LA or San Francisco condos, still trying to pay off their school debt. Plenty of affordable homes around “Springfield-esq” towns like…I don’t know…Scranton or East Stroudsburg, PA.
“I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you…”
LOL. What’s also kind of funny is that quote is from the Season 7 episode Homerpalooza in1996. An obvious reference to the Lolapalooza Gen-X alt-rock festival that was popular at the time. The relevance of Abe’s quote long outliving that of most of the rest of that episode.
My hypothesis: the GenX cohort watched the pre-Silverman family sitcoms on late nigth UHF and early Basic Cable, where they were staples, and some of the later ones on regular syndication. So they spoke the “language” fluently and were already predisposed to mocking the styles and tropes.
Oh absolutely. We were steeped in the TV from the 50s/60s. I actually probably saw more of that than 70s/80s programming because it was on during the day, and my dad was going to watch PBS just about every night.
I may make a new thread on this, and solicit answers from the younger end of our membership.
Because no-one would like it to be true more than me.
I’ve been turned off by new music for a long time, only rarely finding anything I like. And much of that has been “world music”,
Any examples of novelty and creativity that someone teleported from the 90s would regard as fresh, for sure I want to hear about.
That’s what a lot of that 90s programing was. The Simpsons, Married With Children, South Park, all took a stab at that 50s/60s perfect TV family with the sole-breadwinner dad and the doting wife and perfect kids.
South Park has managed to stay more relevant IMHO because it incorporates current political trends.
There was also a lot of the 60s/70s stuff still on the air as re-runs in the 80s/90s and probably even 00s, which helped with the contrast - you could watch something like The Beverly Hillbillies after school and then watch a show like Married With Children or The Simpsons or South Park at night in prime time and see the contrast/satire even more clearly as a result.
I thought it was quite pronounced in WandaVision too, where the 1950s-1980s ‘episodes’ were clearly parodying all those old sitcoms/tropes, but the 00s era ‘episodes’ didn’t have anything to parody because TV shows still look like that.