What is the Nadir of the Simpsons?

[looseteeth]

Growing up, I wasn't allowed to watch The Simpsons until it was already running out of what made it interesting. I started watching the initial airing of episodes around season 10 (I was twelve), and stuck with the new stuff until season 14. While I was doing that, three different stations were airing reruns of the first seven seasons five days a week, so I got caught up pretty quickly. I distinctly remember seeing How I Spent My Strummer Vacation and thinking the show had lost its cohesive creativity; that, coupled with the couch gag from the episode, summed it up (from the episode's wiki):

 

The couch gag is a visual pun of the slang term "jump the shark", which describes when a TV show has reached its creative peak and is slowly declining in quality.

 

 

So while it's not a definitive low point, I'd say season nine was when the show's laurels had started to wilt. Looking at their ratings from season 8 to season 10, they lost ten million viewers. Ten million! Holy jeez! It's only in season 12 that they start to regain that audience, but it's in that same season that I remember the guest stars started feeling more gimmicky than functional. It felt like they were using the star power to pull people back. It's been scraping the bottom of the barrel for some time, though.

 

 

(aside: At the end of season 8, writers/showrunners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein left and eventually made

, and for me that's when cartoon writing took a new upswing into the fantastic. If anyone reading this hasn't seen it, git on it!)

[syntheticgerbil]

Btw, you never answered: do you have a link to those Brad Bird style guides you mentioned ages ago?

Sorry I must have missed it: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAAahUKEwiXrNvTypDHAhWTEZIKHQB2D_U&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcourses.cs.washington.edu%2Fcourses%2Fcse456%2F15su%2Fresources%2Fstrybrd_the_simpsonsway.pdf&ei=_ErBVZe-LJOjyASA7L2oDw&usg=AFQjCNFkyRijiMr4eZxiqMBOOlFXBoFTmw&bvm=bv.99261572,d.aWw&cad=rja

God that link is painfully long, sorry. Some of that stuff seems obvious on retrospect but I really like how concise and well explained it is. It's also funny how Simpsons dropped all of those tips eventually. Although I was wrong, it was actually by Chris Roman with a few notes from Brad Bird. Brad Bird did some other King of the Hill packets though with similar tips.

 

There's still some episodes that are great in Season 5 but strangely, as much as I like Conan, he brought a sort of an irreverent insanity to the table that I don't feel helped The Simpsons.

[Ben X]

Interesting, thanks!

[Ohzee23]

It is utterly ridiculous to expect that the show would have any depth. The show is based on stereotypes so the characters were never going to be built into anything of great interest. Surely you can figure that out.

[BusbyBerkeley]

It is utterly ridiculous to expect that the show would have any depth. The show is based on stereotypes so the characters were never going to be built into anything of great interest. Surely you can figure that out.

lol

[syntheticgerbil]

Is this a robot troll?

[SecretAsianMan]

Meet the Okilly Dokilly's, the world's first Ned Flanders themed metal band

 

[Ben X]

I can't be bothered to click through, does the article cover how they think they can get away with only 20% accurate facial hair?

 

I'm making my way through season 5, and it's really weird that there are episodes I haven't seen before. Bart The Inner Child was very good, Homer The Vigilante was pretty terrible.

[Reyturner]

Careful what you say. I hear heavy sack beatings are up a shocking 900%.

[Ben X]

 

Just saw this from a season 23 (2012) episode. The Simpsons rags on LOST 8 years after it started (and 2 after it finished), and all they can come up with is "it turns out they were in purgatory like we all guessed" (no it didn't) and "they never answered anything!" (yes they did). Then they have the gall to call it pretentious and repetitive! What next, The Simpsons, are you going to call out Martin Scorsese for using obvious symbolism (even though that's not what he was doing)?

 

I remember when The Simpsons celebrated other shows like Twin Peaks, rather than making nasty and unfunny digs at other artists doing much better work.

[Reyturner]

[Ben X]

I like Cracked but I can't bear their videos, especially these sub-Tarantino smugfests. Do they actually make any good points in this one? I couldn't get more than a minute in.

[Ben X]

I'm onto Season 8 now and it's starting to fill up with stinkers. Season 7 was still mostly strong despite poor to terrible episodes like the Hellfish one, the Lollapalooza one and the Sideshow Bob bomb one. Season 8 starts off with a great Treehouse then crashes with a string of stinkers: the Scorpio one, Homer boxing, Burns' kid, and the burlesque house. It picks up with the Millhouse divorce and Lisa dating Nelson, both crackers, but then sinks again with Flanders goes crazy, Homer eats a chili pepper (both have good elements but are mostly forgettable) and then the awful X Files and pretzel episodes. And I see I have the cabin fever and Mary Poppins episodes coming up, both of which I remember being pretty poor. Ah well, there's always Poochie.

 

The main thing I've noticed in recent episodes is that they often cannot come up with a proper ending and cop-out with some lampshaded ironic thing. 

[Problem Machine]

The Hellfish episode? The Scorpio episode??? You are banned from Simpsons criticism! GOOD DAY SIR.

[mikemariano]

You are banned from Simpsons criticism!

 

This...this is a black day for baseball.

[Ben X]

Aside from the sub-Austin Powers (and redundant as Homer already worked for Mr Burns) supervillain boss conceit, the Scorpio episode is incredibly dull. The Hellfish episode is a betrayal of the show's characterisation and soul for the sake of some unimaginative comic book nonsense.

[Problem Machine]

The actual character of Hank Scorpio is one of the most hilarious inventions in the history of the show and the Ox joke is great.

Also that episode came out a year before Austin Powers.

[Ben X]

Well, I said sub- not post-...

 

I disagree on Scorpio - again, outside of the general conceit, I don't think he's that funny. He's an overly-nice boss, that's about it.

 

As for the Ox joke: if you're talking about when he explains the concept of the tontine, I groaned out loud at the overused "dumb person says something complicated" gag; if you mean the one about him dying first, of a hernia carrying the paintings out of the mansion, I did enjoy that one.

[Problem Machine]

I think if you like Jaques Brunswick but not Hank Scorpio then that makes no sense, since they're both Albert Brooks doing crazy improv. The combination of him being super nice, borderline nonsensically visionary, and a supervillain makes him a prescient send-up of tech celebrity CEOs. And what makes the Ox joke great isn't just the apparently dumb guy saying something smart, but the building on that with the reveal of what Ox is short for -- what makes a great joke often isn't the gag itself, but the structure around it that makes it fit into the world. You can make the stupidest joke brilliant with careful timing and a good setup. My favorite gag in the show is a man stepping on a rake, one of the most hackneyed physical comedy bits in the world, but it builds on it in such a way that it becomes transcendent.

[Ben X]

Well, I wouldn't call Jacques one of the most hilarious inventions in the history of the show either, but I do think that episode is much stronger and his character feels more organically derived from the story to me, whereas Scorpio is the story,

 

The undercutting of assumptions with the origin of Ox's nickname is clever but I can't enjoy it that much when it's building on a joke I find to be weak. (As for the rake bit, I discussed a while back why that doesn't work for me as much as it does for a lot of people.) But these are individual jokes and even the duff Simpsons episodes are likely to have one or two good moments in. Even if I loved the Ox joke, it wouldn't curb my feeling that the start of Season 8 absolutely crashes.

[Problem Machine]

It feels like you're coming down really harshly on these episodes for violating the 'spirit' of the show in some really difficult to quantify way. I guess the thing about a show like this is that it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so the same thing that feels like it breaks form for one person can feel like a definitive part of what makes the show work for someone else.

[Ben X]

Yeah, the whole idea of this thread is subjective, and this is all of course just my opinion.

 

But I don't mind outlandish stuff in Simpsons - I love the monorail episode and the first Sideshow Bob episode, for example - it's really just that I don't think the writing on these episodes is very good. I'm sure I'd enjoy a 'Homer works for a super-villain played by Albert Brooks' episode if I felt they did more with the concept, or a rollicking action-intrigue episode if it were lighter on its feet.

 

One thing I don't like about the Hellfish episode which is probably more along the lines of what you're talking about is how, to my mind, it throws away Abe's characterisation from the past seven seasons. I always liked the way that in flashbacks to Homer's childhood, Abe is an angry, neglectful parent, mostly glowering at the television from his armchair. it explains some stuff about Homer and nicely contrasts with how he's utterly pathetic and abandoned by his family in present day. It's why, when you see this character shed a tear at the moon-landing, it emphasises how important a moment in human history this was (as well as giving the character a little more depth). So the Hellfish episode turning him into a grandiose war-hero, attempting to assassinate Hitler and so on, breaks that. If it had been, say, Jasper with a secret war past, that would work a lot better for me (and also wouldn't fuck up established continuity between Abe and Burns, but I'm not too bothered about that - the show's been self-contradictory from the start).

 

Having said that, it doesn't bother me that Homer goes to space or whatever; I guess if outlandish stuff happens to them in the present it doesn't bug me like finding out they were superspies in their twenties or whatever. But isn't this basically what this thread is about? Outside of joke quality, which changes in the spirit of The Simpsons as a show are the point of no return for each of us?

 

 

 

I also don't like how they became more eager to have songs in the episodes with no particular justification. I mean, that burlesque house song? Jesus.

[Problem Machine]

I was actually just talking in the Slack a bit ago about how much I like the idea of a seemingly mundane person having some kind of crazy story in their past, so that setup really works for me even if it seems contradictory -- hell, maybe even BECAUSE it seems contradictory, that this incredibly heroic figure just kind of receded into his life and became utterly unremarkable, even kind of contemptible, to the point where no one would ever believe they were the same person, actually feels really powerful to me. As a character that has a history of making incredible claims that we kind of assume are complete bullshit, it calls all those assumptions into question and adds a sense of mystery to the character. Then again, I also like Armond Temzarian, so obviously I'm not in the majority when it comes to character developments like that.

 

The burlesque song isn't especially strong, and I didn't like that episode's characterization of Marge, but there's a lot of gags I really like in that one still, most notably the one with Abe walking through the front door.

[Griddlelol]

You Only Move Twice is up there with my absolute favourite Simpsons episodes.

[SecretAsianMan]

You Only Move Twice is generally considered one of the best episodes in the series.  It's definitely one of my favorites.
 
In somewhat tangentially related Simpsons news, Morbotron, a Futurama version of Frinciac, now exists.