That may have been true when the shark jumping started circa 1998, but nowadays South Park and, dare I say, even Family Guy are consistently funnier than anything the Simpsons does. To me this just seems like an excuse for the writers to fall back on - “Well, we’re funnier than most everything else on TV anyway, so we’re just not going to try very hard.”
To me the humor’s just become too broad, Homer too assholish, and the liberalism too preachy. And for the record, I voted for Obama and disdain the modern conservative movement, but what purpose does it serve to have Homer move into a stereotype-filled gay neighborhood, like they did a couple of years ago. They tackled that subject with more more finesse in the eighth season episode where Homer was afraid of Bart turning gay. And if they wanted to rail against the Bush administration’s shouting down of dissenters they could have done much better then the episode about the government rounding liberals up into concentration camps. Again very broad satire that, unlike South Park, just comes across as self-righteous.
South Park doesn’t come across as self-righteous?
Cripes, I know I don’t catch the show that often, but they’re not exactly famous for pointing out that their targets’ positions might have just a smattering of nuance, are they?
I think South Park demonstrates a pretty impeccable understanding of both sides of whatever issue it’s tackling. It can get preachy with Kyle’s “lessons” but they have a sense of humor about themselves in that regard - they know it’s preachy. In the episode they did spoofing Family Guy, they put in this quote re: the show.
“I mean, I know it’s just joke after joke, but I like that. At least it doesn’t get all preachy and up its own ass with messages, you know?”
Obvious self-reference that made me laugh.
I think the show has become too cartoonish. Sure it’s always had cartoon elements, but too often it relies on throwaway cartoon jokes, like last Sunday when a baby beat up Homer.
Also it’s clear the writers are not aware of what the others are doing and plots are WAY too recycled. There used to be an excuse when in the 60s shows like Bewitched were doing 33 or 39 episodes per year. But now with the ability for anyone to look up a script on the Internet, there’s no excuse for this.
There are TONS of new ideas why are the writers recycling old ones. If they can’t think of anything new, get new ones.
It reminds me of an interview I read with Lucille Ball and she was discussing the low quality of “Here’s Lucy,” and Lucille said something along the line of “We paid those writers a lot of money, you think they could’ve come up with better stuff.” And her daughter Lucie replies “I hate to be mean to my mother, but she was certainly in charge and could’ve easily changed anything on the show in an instant, including the scripts.”
So I think it’s a case of the writers view working on the Simpsons as an easy gig that is going to lead them to bigger things. Just like NBC’s Saturday Night Live has become a venue for actors just to get exposure.
When the Simpsons, first started, was basically a sitcom, like any other sitcom that just happened to be in cartoon format.
I loved the early lines like when Marge and Homer were called to the principal to discuss Bart
Marge: Bart doesn’t mean to be bad
[cut to Bart and Lisa]
Bart: OK, Lisa, Mom and Dad are gone, now’s our chance to be bad
That is a scathing indictment there, accusing a cartoon of becoming too cartoonish.
The problem is actually pretty simple:
Before season 10 or so, the show was written like any other high quality, high-brow sitcom. It just happened to be an animated one. Things like plot, well developed characters and situations all still came first. Then, you had comedic situations stem from those. The comedy is so much better because its completely organic, and natural.
Post season 10 is done completely the opposite. You come up with a bunch of jokes, then you stitch together a paper-thin, highly improbable, contrived plotline, and then you just jam your jokes into it at regular intervals, regardless of how much sense it makes. You have ridiculous, illogical events, and once familiar characters now doing and saying things that are totally out of character, but who cares as long as it serves as a setup to the Madonna/American Idol/Sarah Palin punchline!
IOW The Simpsons has become The Family Guy, a show which always was a low-brow, soul-less, lame-ass piece of shit. There are no real characters or plots on The Family Guy, just lifeless props for (mostly lame) jokes. Its Robot Chicken, it just pretends to have recurring characters & locations.
Without life-like characters you can believe in the show has no heart, no soul. And then it doesn’t matter if the jokes are funny or not because they’re not happening to anyone or thing you care about. Its much, much harder to write comedy like this, which is why you don’t see much of it anywhere. I’m amazed the earlier Simpsons episodes were able to keep it up as long as they did.
The blame lies squarely with the writers (and those who hire them). Whereas the original Simpsons’ writing staff consisted of well educated, witty, Harvard Lampoon alum who were always writers first, comedians second, the current crop are just stand-ups and guys who write for them. They’re just joke-machines, they’re not real ‘writers’, as in writers of fiction that also happens to be of the comedy genre.
This was my thought as well. In its time The Simpsons was the preeminent pop cultural source for social satire/critique/commentary/subversion, etc. but it was supplanted by South Park when that show got in on the action. Take the recent Disney/Jonas Brothers episode. How can The Simpsons compete with that?
By being funny? I mean, you’re right that those two shows go farther out there than the Simpsons; they showed up 10 years later and tastes change. But The Simpsons is the only one of the three I’ve kept watching: I got tired Family Guy but got tired of it because of the lack of depth, and I never fully got into South Park. South Park’s always been more disgusting, that’s not the same as being funnier.
I agree that South Park is cruder and braver than the Simpsons. Wittier or funnier? Not.
I think season eight was the first time where I disliked more episodes than I enjoyed and around season twelve was the point where I stopped believing the self-told lie that it was okay because “it was still better than so much else on television”. When I realized the “We’ve been on so long we’re beating the joke to death” joke had been beaten to death it was time to jump off.
The Simpsons used to be witty and clever. It lacks both of those elements. When was the last time that a gag on the show crossed into nerd consciousness? It’s been more than ten years since we’ve had a “And I for one welcome our new ant overlords,” “The goggles do nothing!”, or “Worst. Episode. Ever.” (and on that subject the fact that the writers started handing out “You should be grateful to us and never criticize” messages in the shows was another sign of serious problems). Even if you can’t stand how unfunny people just make pop culture references on the Internet (or on their animated Fox show 
) the writing doesn’t have that kind of zing anymore that makes nerds co-opt it for reflected glory.
ETA: I had the misfortune of seeing Sunday’s episode and was quickly reminded why I couldn’t stand the show anymore. I couldn’t make it through the whole thing.
That’s from early 2000, actually. Still a while ago but newer than you think.
Err… if you don’t watch anymore, how do you know the writing isn’t witty and lacks zing? Seasons 11 to 14 or so were not great, on the whole (I’m guesstimating on the time frame there), but I think there’s been a lot of improvement.
To back up my earlier point about liking the version of the show you became familiar with, here’s the SNPP.com guide to Cape Feare, my favorite episode and in my opinion the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on TV. If you scroll down to the “Reviews” section, you see some positive comments, but you also see
Granted, the rake sequence in this one was “controversial,” and my favorite isn’t going to everybody’s favorite. Still.
For personal reference or whatever, the first episode I remember watching is Homerpalooza in season seven, although I was aware of the show earlier and probably caught a few episodes before that. I think season five is the all-time best, just ahead of season four.
First, it’s because I stopped watching that I know it isn’t witty since that’s the reason I stopped watching. Yeah that’s circular, but what are you going to do. I stopped liking it so I stopped watching and I don’t watch because I stopped liking it.
If I didn’t find the show funny any more why should I keep watching on the hope that it would someday improve? From experience I know that’s a sucker’s game.
Second, I see an episode about once every few years; note that I mentioned that I watched a bit of it (about twenty minutes; I turned off the television before the second commercial break to just enjoy the silence) a few days ago and I couldn’t get through the whole thing. I can’t even think of the last time I watched an episode before that.
Gotcha. I’m not saying you’ve got no standing to criticize the show, just that if you watch once every couple of years, you know what you didn’t like about older episodes but don’t necessarily have the best picture of what’s going on now. I didn’t like Sunday’s episode very much, but some of the other ones from this year, last year, the year before that were great.
That’s exactly my problem with the middle period of the Simpsons–I want a f*cking story and a story has a beginning, a middle and an ending. A bunch of seasons (seasons 10-17 or so–I couldn’t begin to tell you which specific seasons, but in that range) had two storylines, neither intersected the other and neither had an ending.
Hell, there was one–the “Lord of the Flies” episode where the narrator just point blank says (and this is a paraphrase, please spare me the actual quote) “And so the kids learned to work together and were eventually rescued, oh–by…um…Dr. Hibbert in a…um…hovercraft or something.” (Ironically, that episode did resolve the main conflict–the ending was just tying up a loose plot thread).
What’s nice is that this season they seem to really be working on making the stories coherent again. For me, this season (and some of last) are such a huge improvement that I’m really looking forward to the next episode again–something I can’t say was the case since the show was in single digits.
I won’t give you the actual quote, but it was Moe, not Dr. Hibbert. Some errors are just not forgivable. 
Done once in a while those kinds of endings are funny. In this episode, I liked it and how the kids get off the island isn’t important, as you said. A couple of weeks ago, the episode ended with a fairly long and unfunny Footloose parody because, well, nobody knows. The plot was wrapped up and nobody thought of anything better to do, I guess.
People usually focus on negative character changes over the years, but I do want to point out that some have been positive. I like what they’ve done with Nelson and his sometime friendship with Bart in the last couple of seasons. He used to be a stereotypical school bully - very funny at times, but also one-dimensional. These days I think he’s a more complex and even fairly realistic kid.
Is it just me , or do the newer episodes seems so quiet? It’s pretty much just
Moe’s line.
Marge’s line.
Homer’s line.
Older episodes seemed to have a much more energetic pace , tastefully punctuated with sound effects and the occasional song. Maybe it’s just me.
I’ll just add a few more items to the bonfire. The show has lost the good sense of comic timing that it used to have; a good joke needs to breathe, but more often than not there’s no pregnant pauses or the like. Another is that well with a show this long you really can’t avoid repeating plots here or there. If you look at the Halloween episodes as a barometer/microcosm of this, there’s just so many pop culture monster/horror tropes that you can skewer, and the same goes for the main show. I’m frankly amazed that it has lasted this long-when you reach this point in a show’s run it typically has become a cash cow, and little more. Ultimately that’s the problem.
Because I was 16 when Season 1 came out and I’m 36 now?
You sir, have the borish manners of a Yalie.
I’m picturing you as Roger Meyers, Jr. shouting and waving his desk nameplate at his writers.
I wouldn’t say the old episodes are necessarily “better”. I mean you are comparing each new episode to 20 years of classic bits you remember. And sometimes an episode may only have a couple funny bits. You may not remember Troy McClure from such episodes as “A Fish Called Selma”. But every remembers Planet of the Apes, The Music (I hate every single ape I see…from Chimpan-A to Chimpanzee…).
I’d have to look at an episode list and see the actual ration of good episodes to bad episodes by season to really make a judgement.
Any TV show is going to have more room to manuever, and more stories to tell, early in its run. The Simpsons needed a little time to find its legs, but when it did it was just hitting 'em out of the park, week after week. Now it’s been on such a looooooooong, long time, it’s become harder and harder for the writers to find fresh, funny new things to do and say. That said, it’s still better than just about any other comedy now on TV.
I wouldn’t mind more attention being paid to some of the less-prominent Springfieldians: the Sea Captain, Hans Moleman, Comic Book Guy, Lisa’s band teacher, Crazy Cat Lady, Lenny and Carl, the cops, etc. More about their origins and how they came to be who they are could be fodder for some pretty cool episodes.
Seems like they’ve done all they can (or Flanderised the heck out of them) with the naturally funny characters (Homer, to a lesser extent Bart and a plethora of other characters I can’t be bothered to list) and have gone on to the, let’s be frank, boring ones.
No more Lisa episodes, please. She’s supposed to be a clever 8 year old girl not Genius McSnotface (which became apparent in Season 7, Lisa the Vegetarian, blech, and has gotten much worse).
Celebrity episodes, too. Name me one classic episode built around a celebrity appearance. Can’t do it.