The Simpsons

[mfunk9786]

Pretty good Slate article on this from 2003

[Black Hat]

That was the one that did it for me.

I jumped ship after this one too. The only time I think I've watched it since was when they did the big anniversary celebration a year or two ago. I did try to watch the movie tho one late night and failed. So bad.

[hearthesilence]

"The Principal and the Pauper" was definitely the one for me too, and over the years it became shocking to see how many people felt that way as well, including Harry Shearer (who vocally criticized the episode before they even recorded a second of it, telling the writers it was the weakest script he had ever seen in the show's history).

Season 1-8 were all brilliant, every episode was a laugh riot with me and my friends, and then with season 10, except for the first episode (the NYC episode), the drop in quality was ridiculously dramatic. It wasn't a gradual decline, it was like the bottom fell out. Barely a laugh in that entire episode, and I remember me and my friends really noticing that, like "wow, that wasn't good at all." And then the same thing happened with the next episode, and the next, and the syndicated reruns made this even more apparent because we still found those hilarious, so it wasn't like our tastes had changed overnight.

[jindianajonz]

One thing I noticed the last time I rewatched some early Simpsons episodes is how the adage "the show went bad when they stopped being real and became more cartoony" doesn't seem to hold up. Sure, you had episides where Bart isn't allowed to see the Itchy and Scratchy Movie or Homer can't afford a good Christmas for his family, but you also have things like Homer falling down the springfield gorge (twice!), Bart getting sent to France in exchange for an Albanian child spy, Bart joining the Mafia, and a day where all the townspeople get together and kill snakes. These "zany" episodes never get the same derision that a lot of the later stuff does, so I think there's something else going on other than "they stopped being a realistic family."

[mfunk9786]

It honestly just comes down to good joke writing, which later seasons lack in spades compared to earlier ones. And any creativity w/r/t usage of guest stars went out the window, they began to just show up in a "Wow, it's _______, what are you doing here?!" fashion on a weekly basis. In the earlier era of the show, even when stars were playing themselves, they found something interesting to do with them. And they had an eye for choosing celebrity guests who'd endure and hold up well years later. I don't know that the Mike Scully era shows exhibited that sort of discretion (or this current era, from what I hear), and it cheapens the entire experience.

[Matt]

Yeah, as my mentioning the tennis episode indicates, it was really the heavy reliance on guest stars and the very lame, sitcommy ways they were integrated into the show that wore my patience down, even more than unfunny jokes.

[domino harvey]

One of the worst examples of this I can think of, and one of the last episodes I can remember, is that awful "The Simpsons are going to Britain" ep, where there's like fifty bad cameos, none of them amusing, and no narrative function to anything happening. Just hyperlink humor at its blurst

[matrixschmatrix]

You could make a case that even that had its roots somewhat earlier- like Paul and Linda McCartney's appearance in Lisa the Vegetarian isn't too far off from the latter day usage, where celebrities drop in for no reason and suddenly know someone in town in an absurd way, which is gotten around by putting a lampshade on it- contrast that with the episode appropriate and subtle use of Harrison in the Be Sharps episode. Though the Paul McCartney episode was still actually funny, so it's not entirely like nu Simpsons stuff.

[domino harvey]

Or the Krusty Komeback Special, where a lot of celebrities are randomly shoehorned in and yet every single joke kills and the restraint is fantastic. Elizabeth Taylor has like ten seconds total of lines and they're all perfect

[FakeBonanza]

Or the Krusty Komeback Special, where a lot of celebrities are randomly shoehorned in and yet every single joke kills and the restraint is fantastic. Elizabeth Taylor has like ten seconds total of lines and they're all perfect

There's no better example of this than "Homer at Bat". It's loaded from front to back with guest appearances from ballplayers who can barely act, but everything somehow falls in place perfectly, and it hits every note. This episode ended up being one of the best early episodes, if not one of the all-time best.

[swo17]

Perhaps it was partly a shift away from cameos by celebs that the writers admired and toward cameos by celebs that were simply thought to have ratings potential. Like in that awful episode with Kid Rock, was anyone saying that it had long been a dream to work with this guy?

[mfunk9786]

You could make a case that even that had its roots somewhat earlier- like Paul and Linda McCartney's appearance in Lisa the Vegetarian isn't too far off from the latter day usage, where celebrities drop in for no reason and suddenly know someone in town in an absurd way, which is gotten around by putting a lampshade on it- contrast that with the episode appropriate and subtle use of Harrison in the Be Sharps episode. Though the Paul McCartney episode was still actually funny, so it's not entirely like nu Simpsons stuff.

Lisa the Vegetarian in Season 8: In the waning few minutes of an insightful, sharp, funny, and fair episode about Lisa no longer wanting to eat meat despite being outside of society's norm, she arrives at the Kwik-E-Mart, overwhelmed by pressure to eat meat. She rushes into the store and chows down on a hot dog, which Apu tells her is made of tofu, and proceeds to, absurdly, show her a secret entrance to the roof on which Paul and Linda McCartney are visiting, and discussing vegetarianism with Apu. They encourage Lisa to follow her heart, and then Apu plays "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" on some bongos - badly.

Lisa the Vegetarian in Season 13: At the beginning of the episode, Paul and Linda McCartney come to Springfield to spread the word about vegetarianism, and Lisa gets taken in by their charms and becomes a vegetarian, educating Springfield on eating habits and meeting other famous vegetarians along the way. McCartney plays a concert in Springfield with... oh, let's say Green Day about how great it is to eat vegetables, and they play punk rock versions of Beatles songs together. Lisa is invited up on stage as a guest speaker. Somehow Homer is suspended on some sort of wire and crashes down on stage and there's all sorts of mayhem and blah blah blah blah blah. FIN

[domino harvey]

Perhaps it was partly a shift away from cameos by celebs that the writers admired and toward cameos by celebs that were simply thought to have ratings potential. Like in that awful episode with Kid Rock, was anyone saying that it had long been a dream to work with this guy?

The producers desperately wanted Joe C but he stipulated that he and Kid Rock and Diedrich Bader were a package deal

[mfunk9786]

Hey, no [percieved] Diedrich Bader bashing on my watch

[dx23]

The Lady Gaga episode somewhat did it for me last year I don't think I've watched a new episode since then.

Today, it was announced that the Simpsons will have another crossover, but this time with Futurama.

[mfunk9786]

You win the prize for lasting the longest, then!

[wattsup32]

I really like the crossover with The Critic. Having not seen it in what must be at least a decade I can still think of at least a half dozen great jokes off the top of my head. All the interactions between McBain and Jay (especially McBain's answer to Jay's question, "How do you sleep at night"), Senior Spielbergo, Barney's film, and Homer's astute commentary on the substance of "Football in the Groin" are all really funny.

[mfunk9786]

I think the reason that episode works so well is because Jay Sherman feels very much like he could be a part of the Simpsons universe to begin with. If The Critic never existed, that episode would have still made perfect sense (perhaps the cartoon crossover references would need to be dropped, though).

[Saturnome]

The Critic wasn't broadcasted here so I thought of Jay Sherman as a Simpsons character for a very long time.

As for the question I stopped watching whenever Apu got octuplets. Not this episode in particular, but around that time. I've only seen a handful of episodes from recent seasons, but the guest-directed couch gags are fantastic and I've seen them all... on youtube.

[Murdoch]

I was never a regular viewer, only catching the reruns that would air on my local Fox, but I remember seeing an ad for "Husbands and Knives" in which a super buff Homer's nipples "cried" and I just swore off the show. Although I stopped watching long before once the syndication schedule changed and Simpsons was pushed to a later time, that ad was the moment I saw a completely different show.

[colinr0380]

I'm not too bothered about the drop in quality of The Simpsons but I do think the above is neatly illustrating that simply hiring celebrities to state their name and what they are famous for seems utterly pointless. It has always been a part of the show but it seems that the show does not really know what to do with them, or is not allowed to treat them in certain ways.

Getting an actor to say who they are and then just stand around (rather than actually playing a character not themselves, but where they can really show off their talents, as in the Dustin Hoffmann episode from early on - even Michael Jackson figured that out!) seems to not really understand the point of acting!

The Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger/Ron Howard love triangle thing was perhaps the beginning of that slide, in the sense that they were actors playing themselves but in a wacky way and in service of a wider plot about interacting with 'in their own bubble' celebrities. But even this could be seen in the same way as mfunk's Lisa The Vegetarian example above when compared to the earlier Radioactive Man episode, which tackled similar ideas without too many celebs (until Mickey Rooney's "jiminy jillikers" payoff!)

I do agree with domino about the London episode - the Tony Blair cameo was excrutiating, but I suppose that accurately captured the celebrity himself. The Ian McKellen one was OK but too reverent to the actor and too much about broad Macbeth gags that could be done with any luvvie actor (Though at least they didn't go the X-Men or Gandalf route!)

The best celebrity sections in that episode were the totally looney JK Rowling-doing-Benny Hill and Judi Dench drive-in franchise moments. Though tellingly they were fast paced moments, and the Judi Dench bit was better for having someone doing a terrible impersonation of her rather than actually having the casting coup of getting her voice! (Though that recent McKellen/Derek Jacobi show Vicious showed at the very end of its series that Dench does have a sense of humour and appears willing to do voice acting!) Just imagine if they got Dench in to do that and then had to spend a minute talking about her career in non-comedic reverence, or do some strangely predictable but unfunny couple of minute sketch such as having her still playing the Queen and refusing to wear anything else other than the costume (and then getting into a punch up with Elizabeth II).

Although on the other hand the use of musicians is worse because that often means that they actually do have to do what they are famous for, which means devoting a minute or two of an episode to a performance of their latest/most famous song. There cannot be too many gig gags left to do now to keep the comedy going while the musicians are doing their numbers.

[JamesF]

So long as no-one's speaking ill of Barry White's cameo in Whacking Day.

[domino harvey]

Co-creator Sam Simon is dying

[Black Hat]

The pod he did with Maron was one of the best in recent memory.

[Black Hat]

This was long but really great, every Simpsons movie reference from the first five seasons.