The fall of The Simpsons

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A analysis on how The Simpsons came from been a great show to... whatever it is now...

Interesting video that highlights what is and isn't funny quite well. Comedy isn't easy to write or produce.

Early Simpsons I would compare to Dumb and Dumber. What made that film funny was Lloyd and Harry don't know they're dumb.

Later Simpsons is more like The Mask. Trying hard to be clever but lacking sublety and too bizarre to really mean much.

I watch the Simpsons weekly but only as a ritual now as it is a shell of its former self and has been since season 10. As the video said, they used to make fun of pop culture and very rarely used celebrities. The softball episode is my all time favorite mainly because it was a rare gag to use "real" well known people. Now, every episode is "Homer meets fad celebrity". Speaking of Homer, he was an idiot but he still had a good heart. Today, he is just an idiot and knows it. Lame.

I could go on all day but this series should have been put to bed a decade ago. Now it's just getting embarrassing.

They just ran out of ideas. There was too much money in it it to pull the plug and let it die gracefully. I won't watch it anymore. Another one is south park, I watched a couple of episodes and its completely unfunny now. That's a curse of american TV shows they'll keep making series after they run out of ideas.

Not sure what I will do if both of those shows go off the air.

The Simpsons sucks now because the show's edge has worn off.

Homer Simpson was originally a comical inversion of the "father knows best" stereotype. Nowadays, nobody (in the West at least) even believes in that stereotype anymore ... so inverting the stereotype is pointless.

Bart was originally a very shocking character. Nowadays, the shock has worn off and so Bart just seems like an unlikeable jackass.

New episodes aren't as good but I might be in the minority that still enjoys them. Not as gaudy as Spongebob nowadays or that teen titans show smh

I really like Super Eyepatch Wolf's videos. I should agree that Simpsons started to fall off somewhere in the late 90s. But I personally still quite enjoyed an episode like the one where Skinner turns out an impostor. For me, it stopped being funny with the episode Tennis the Menace, at which point I found the characters to have grown so far away from what they had previously been, that I just couldn't root for them anymore.

For me, Simpsons was on a winning streak throughout the 90s, and could be divided into three periods of splendor: the early 90s, when it was an ironic send-up of family sitcoms and the American family nucleus; the mid 90s, when it was a biting satire of American society in general; and the late 90s, when it was a streamlined joke-a-minute show that brilliantly poked fun of both society, world issues, and the media and showbiz. From there, it either had to evolve with changing society, or atrophy. Sadly, it did the latter.

That video is a pretty good summary of the reasons for The Simpsons' decline over the past 20 years. Although I kept watching it until season 14, season 9 was the point where the show really started to get noticeably weaker.