Are you saying you've never met anybody talking about, or admitting to watching, only the newer episodes, or the show in general? Because a shitload of people talk about and quote the classic era incessantly. In real life and online. This millennium's episodes are generally bad and nobody watches them, but they didn't destroy anything.

No, I'm saying I've never met anyone that's watched the past 15-or-so years of the show.

Yeah.. I remember S12 and The Who episode really well, because I had just entered college and was still quoting The Simpsons a lot, even stuff from S11 (like "stupid sexy Flanders.") But something happened that year. All of a sudden the show just.. wasn't very funny or at all quotable. I still watched the whole season because it was still sort of a social Sunday night thing, and then just kinda gave up altogether. 15 years ago is all-too on-the-dot for me.

A friendship with a good pal from high school and college was based around our shared love of girls, Unreal Tournament, and The Simpsons. The best Simpsons episodes (based on our shared language of Simpsons quotes) were from 1993-7, dunno which seasons those were but those were the best, cause me and Adrian are still tight because of it.

What I don't understand, and will possibly never understand, is why they didn't fire writers who weren't funny and hire writers that were as cutting edge as the ones they had the first 12 seasons or so.

This has been mentioned several times here but the Simpsons once mocked mediocrity and then they became just as mediocre as anything they once made fun of. Any intellectual commentary was stripped from the show and replaced with (enter hokey non-wacky sitcom plot). It's sad, because it can't bring itself to be self aware of how much it sucks now.

I have watched every episode of the Simpsons, ever.

http://deadhomersociety.com/ is a website dedicated to the idea that the Simpsons was one of the greatest shows ever, and should end as soon as possible, as every additional episode that airs just lowers the batting average. I agree with them wholeheartedly, and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

"What I don't understand, and will possibly never understand, is why they didn't fire writers who weren't funny and hire writers that were as cutting edge as the ones they had the first 12 seasons or so."

Most likely, the guys running the show now don't get what made "The Simpsons" work back in the day, or what would be a workable current version of the show (possibly different from the old days). They'll hire the wrong writers because they don't know any better, and push the show in the wrong direction.

Same thing's happening in comic books these days too: over at DC at least, the various major heroes are pretty much all interchangeable cranky jerks overburdened with personal problems, like this was 1993 X-Men or something. And coincidentally enough, DC's upper echelons include at least two figures who were in charge of early 90s X-Men. Right now we've got Superman with his powers scaled down and punching out cops who are trying to oppress him for no good reason, which I don't think anyone anywhere actually wants of Superman. But hey, it worked for Marvel in the 90s (until their 1996 bankruptcy anyway), it'll work for Superman too.

As far as "The Simpsons" goes, I say the heart of an episode is what wins the viewer's good will, and that heart is usually found in Homer, who really really wants to be the dad his family deserves, but is too dumb and mercurial to actually achieve it.

For me, when the focus of the show switched to Homer and they changed him into a sort of lovable, well-meaning buffoon instead of a vaguely threatening alcoholic is when the show started to slip. So somewhere around the second or third season. The first season or two were rough around the edges but they still had some of the bleakness of the 80s Life In Hell comics (I was a huge fan of those when The Simpsons started, somewhere near the beginning of 6th grade a friend had gotten me in to them and I'd plowed through every book I could get my hands on a couple times that winter - I thought it was the best comic strip I'd seen since the peak of Boom County a few years earlier). I don't remember exactly when the show lost me but it was sometime between 8th and 10th grade.

Bold take, OZ. Too bad it's wrong.

I tuned out of the Simpsons after it left the Tracy Ullman show.

(Was supposed to be here)

Re: the question of who watches the Simpsons?

When I was an after-school tutor a few years back, I heard kids (think roughly 4th-8th grade or so?) talking about the Simpsons, and they seemed baffled when I asked if they were talking about old Simpsons or new Simpsons. They scoffed at the idea of watching old Simpsons.

I think nowadays it is mostly a show for older kids/younger teens, possibly with their parents, who tolerate it because they grew up with it and it has some adult-focused gags. So it makes sense that it's not the edgy show that appealed to people like us as adults, or going from teens into young adulthood.

Maybe there are aspects of the show that appeal to kids born >2000 A.D. that I'm just not able to fully appreciate. Or perhaps kids just have terrible taste.

I think it's only appropriate to paraphrase the great Seymour Skinner:

"Maybe I'm out of touch.... No, it's the children who are wrong."

The Simpsons is like that handy light that got left on in the basement. It was useful at one time but then no one remembered to turn it off, nor cares to go down there to do so.

Same for me. Went into college quoting The Simpsons non-stop, by the end of those four years, no one cared about the show anymore. It had gone into syndication by then too, and we were even getting tired of the repeats by that point cause we'd seen them so many times. The frat I was in would have family dinner and then watch a Simpsons repeat at 6:30 and Jeopardy at 7:00. The Simpsons crowd thinned at a certain point. I started school in 97, left the frat scene by 2000.

There's a reason the term "Flanderization" is named for Ned Flanders.

Not even Evilhomer would have tried pulling devil's advocacy as factually wrong as "Simpsons were all downhill after the first two seasons".

Re: the question of who watches the Simpsons?

When I was an after-school tutor a few years back, I heard kids (think roughly 4th-8th grade or so?) talking about the Simpsons, and they seemed baffled when I asked if they were talking about old Simpsons or new Simpsons. They scoffed at the idea of watching old Simpsons.

I think nowadays it is mostly a show for older kids/younger teens, possibly with their parents, who tolerate it because they grew up with it and it has some adult-focused gags. So it makes sense that it's not the edgy show that appealed to people like us as adults, or going from teens into young adulthood.

Maybe there are aspects of the show that appeal to kids born >2000 A.D. that I'm just not able to fully appreciate. Or perhaps kids just have terrible taste.

I think it's only appropriate to paraphrase the great Seymour Skinner:

"Maybe I'm out of touch.... No, it's the children who are wrong."

I love the Simpsons. I remember asking my dad what sarcasm is. He said, "it's like saying 'hey nice bike' to a kid with a crappy bike." It changed my life. That said, I think the newer episodes are wonderful.

The fact that it's not a punchline, just a line delivered in the course of telling the story, helps tremendously.

Ever watch "Gravity Falls"? The rule with Soos seems to be, don't have him ever open his mouth unless what comes out is going to be funny or strange. But he tends to not speak in punchlines either, it's just material that comes up in the course of telling the story.