Lucas Crandall / Staff reporter
The Simpsons is a show that is widely considered to be far past its heyday in its first few seasons. Almost anyone who is a devoted fan to the show will talk about how much better the old seasons were compared to the new ones when asked about it, but is this really the case? Can shows evolve to be completely different from how they started without dipping in quality? Or has The Simpsons simply fallen off since its peak?
Before covering why people have these strong opinions on new episodes of The Simpsons, we need to look back to why people enjoyed the old episodes so much. The Simpsons is currently the longest running scripted show ever made. It started in 1987 as a cartoon short for the “Tracey Ullman Show” where it was later expanded to a half-hour timeslot for a Christmas special. After this special, the first season of the show was picked up and The Simpons started.
The Simpsons pioneered a method of joke telling which brought laughs through the watcher’s knowledge of media and pop-culture. This is not to say that the show couldn’t tell good, well-structured jokes that were believable for how their characters acted. One of the biggest draws of the show for fans was the balance of these two types of jokes.
Despite the shows episodic storylines and comedic tones, the writers of the show knew how to flesh-out their character into distinct entities. This helped nail the believability of some of the stories portrayed on the show.
The show’s decline is said to have started around the release of The Simpsons Movie, but everyone has their own opinion of when it started.
Many of the reasons for the widely considered decline of the show were its straying from its original balance of pop culture and constructed jokes, an overall dip in writing quality for characters and stories in the show. Many new storylines are fully committed to being only about pop culture, and not as committed to the characters they have been building for 20+ years. Since this change in style happened, it has now become cool to hate on ‘new’ Simpsons.
However recently, many of the new episodes of The Simpsons have started to feel experimental, like how older episodes felt, but now with a modern feel that tries to parody itself, along with other media.
One of these new episodes, Lisa the Boy Scout, sets itself up as a normal episode of the show, but early into the episode, two “hackers” say they have infiltrated the Disney servers and will release tons of un-used Simpsons episodes. This episode is essentially a clip show of storylines that depict episode ideas that the writers know fans of the show would hate. The episode satirizes itself and the long-time fans don’t like the way the show has fallen over the last few years. Despite it highlighting elements that the fans don’t like; this episode feels like a return to the greatness of old Simpsons.
So has modern Simpsons gotten worse or is it just different? In the last few years, it’s seemed like the show has been rolling downhill, but this modernized return to form of this new episode feels like a promising new beginning for the show.
Cites:
The Simpsons Thinks You’re Stupid (and they’re right) – YouTube
The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened – YouTube
there will Never Ever be another Simpsons episode like Homer’s Enemy – YouTube
Images:
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