For me it was Lisa Goes Gaga. It was focused entirely on Lady Gaga who played herself and was awkwardly inserted, I don’t mind the occasional brief celebrity appearance or when they lend their voice to other characters (ex. Meryl Streep playing Jessica Lovejoy in Bart’s Girlfriend) but they started to feel so forced. I tried watching the occasional episode afterwards but people like JJ Abrams would show up in Do PizzaBots Dream of Electric Guitars? and I’d lose interest.
I have started watching the show again but I am curious who else has lost interest due to an episode or trend especially those who have been watching the show since its beginning.
For me it’s the one where one of Marge’s sisters comes out as gay and Marge is the only person who is uncomfortable with it, which felt completely out of character.
Especially since she chastised Homer for his own homophobia earlier in the show
This episode kinda hit home for me because of that, honestly. My mom loved gay men but she was not respectful towards her sister being gay and would call her a dyke all the fucking time and constantly removed about gay and bi women. It took me coming out as bisexual to her to get her to quit that shit. After that, she focused more on her sister being a bad person because she’s an abusive loser that would only talk to her when she needed money. :)
I’m glad your mum came around for you. Sorry to hear about her sister.
The “trend” (if you even want to call it that) is just when they lost the bulk of thier original writing staff around season 11 or so.
It played out for me similarly to GoT after they ran out of source material. They could kinda limp by for a little bit by extrapolating from what they had, but they just eventually lost the thread completely. They forgot who the characters were for long enough that the bastardized versions of themselves eventually become cannon as the series wears on.
The term Flanderization exists because of Ned Flanders. The Simpsons literally ran so long it’s characters became caricatures of themselves.
That’s a really cromulent point!
I think this doesn’t need to be inevitable, though. I think it’s again a result of writer turnover. There were original people with a relatively cohesive vision they could write towards, maintaining a consistency against an imagined character with traits that maybe were never explicitly described (yet).
As the torch is passed from writer to writer, team to team, some of the “hidden values” that the characters behaviours orbiteded around get lost. New teams need to invent their own based on an imperfect view. It becomes a fax or a fax of a fax.
So… Maybe I’m oversimplifying it, but I suspect that writer consistency can stave off Flanderization.
I get what you mean. I feel like there was a sharp increase in how zany the show was and a decrease in story lines involving the typical reoccurring characters.
IIRC after the writers left they applied an algorithm to measure ratings against character involvement, and Bart and Homer were the standouts, and so there was top down pressure to limit episodes that didn’t revolve around Bart and Homer.
I admit that they already were the primary subjects of most episodes before that, but it became even more pronounced later on.
The season 10 or 11 episode where the celebrities come to Springfield. Some of the laziest jokes in the series up until that point and it just fell flat for me. The whole bit with homer being too fat to parasail just made me roll my eyes.
I actually haven’t been a fan for a long time,just bumped into the thread browsing all. At some point a formula for the shows became apparent to me, and I realized for the majority of the episodes, there’s a standard series of event-misunderstanding/misdirect-main event/conflict-resolution. Once I saw it, I couldn’t help noticing the first 10 minutes of every episode didn’t matter and I lost interest.
‘The Simpsons are going to…’
I wasn’t watching regularly before that because of my job, but those episodes stopped me from watching for years. I used to watch every episode religiously with my family before going out on a Sunday night, and they just completely killed any desire to want to go back to the weekly watch.
The ‘enough is enough’ episode for me was the one featuring Elon Musk.
I thought I was misremembering that and confusing it with Rick and Morty’s Elon Tusks
😆
I know this thread is old. But the nail in the coffin for me was the “300th” episode (not really). The one with tony hawk. Everything was so forced, just so they could have tony hawk guest start. Before that, guest star mostly played other characters (I know there are exceptions). I was the exact target audience for this episode, and I remember just being annoyed.
Season 9 is a missed bag, and everything after season 9 is completely garbage inside and out.
