The big turning point for me was when the guest celebrities were no longer characters on the show and just played themselves. Just small ads for celebrity du jour.
Celebrities are the worst part of any media.
Every time a celebrity isn’t on-screen, everyone should be saying where’s celebrity?
I think I recall the Alex Baldwin and Kim Basinger being the first episode that pushed me off the Simpsons … it felt like celebrity pandering or something and I just stopped watching
Absolutely. I was watching the series sequentially for the first time in ages and that episode stood out as a definite turning point. The celebrity appearances just got more frequent and more insufferable from then on.
? There were many Simpson celebrities in the 90’s that played themselves. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Wade Boggs, Bob Hope, Leonard Nemoy…
they didn’t use their real names of course but you could tell it was them
Pretty sure they used their real names…
Not every time. Those mentioned were mostly the exceptions. Tons of people were on the show not as themselves. Daniel Radcliffe wasn’t himself or Harry Potter on the show. He played a character that was a parody of Twilight. It had a somewhat decent enough joke and wasn’t just hey look at this famous person we got. Look how cool they are. Ooohhhhh ahhhhhhh
It does depend on how they are written into the show. Leonard Nimoy in the Monorsil episode is a caricature of himself and it works well.
They weren’t the centerpiece of the episode, like Jack Black as the new comic guy
And those were the exceptions and not an every episode occurrence. Some of those also had good points to make like Lisa going vegan. Very much not how the modern cameos go.
Somewhere around the point of Lady Gaga driving into Springfield on a magical train it became celebrity ads.
Exception? Wiki shows 221 “himself” and 37 herself in the first 20 seasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Simpsons_guest_stars_(seasons_1–20)
It’s quite jarring how everything pre-season 7 is compared to the rest. Like most the characters are quite deep with conflicting emotions and not caricatures. Especially season 2. Like “Bart gets an F” episode, that kind of empathetic emotional portrayal of bart would never happen post season 10.
And we really went from Homer is a dumb guy who genuinely loves his family and is suffering under an oppressive system, to well “jackass homer”.
This process is called Flanderization, whereby a character on a long running show becomes a self-parody as their most distinctive traits and behaviors are amplified again and again. It’s named for a popular side character Ned Flanders, from the show the Simpsons. Though arguably Ned undergoes more permanent personal growth than any other character on the show.
Ironically, Flanders is nothing compared to what happens to say Lisa.
Shortening attention spans had to be part of it. It was probably hard to compete with other shows that had rapid-fire jokes and shorter time to pay off. Building up complex characters and creative situations takes a little more time and probably loses eyeballs.
Sort of analogous to long form vs short form videos now (but obviously both are much further down that road in comparison).
I sometimes wonder if Family Guy had anything to do with it.
Because Homer went from being quite his own character to basically Peter Griffin lite in the 2000s.
Wouldn’t surprise me a bit, that show was crazy influential, at least initially. Punchlines came way faster than we were used to, sometimes deliberately abruptly (iconic example of that for me is Peter’s instantaneous face-plants, which I still find funny TBH). And people liked the endless gags that were just random non sequiturs of dumb stuff happening that had nothing to do with anything. Fun at first, not enough to scaffold a whole show around IMO, but most folks couldn’t get enough.
That kinda stuff really cheapened humor (“mainstream humor”? is that even a thing?) over the long run, according to me. I started to say I’m just crotchety and old, but actually I wasn’t then and I thought it was lame pretty quickly after the initial “fun new show everyone’s into” vibe wore off.
Then again if it wasn’t them it would’ve just been another, audiences were just kinda “ready” for that sort of humor I suppose, obviously wouldn’t have been the runaway success it was otherwise. I’d be shocked if The Simpsons weren’t influenced, seems almost impossible with the cultural swell around Family Guy at the time.
Also they had to reduce the episode runtimes to make room for more ads. I recall an interview where one of the writers said this made it really hard to have a b-story to accompany the main plot.
that reminds me i have to keep ripping my simpsons dvds
Why not just download the episodes if you’ve already paid for them?
i rip them so they have the subs, extras, audio tracks, chapters, and commentary tracks plus i like to keep everything organised in my media folder (also if they ever came up with a vhsrip or a 90stvrip torrent format, i’d be in heaven)
I’d forgotten about the commentary tracks! It’s weird how they’re not widely available for stuff.
i miss simpsons world so much. it was the best thing fx did </3 i wish it came back. i loved the themed “live streams” they used to have.
but yeah the commentary tracks are amazing!
I need to do this too.
Then impact that writers have on shows is vastly underappreciated.
Its never more apparent than when an IP changes hands or gets rebooted. Sometimes they have lightning in a bottle with the original and then the sequel/reboot just feels like a pale imitation wearing your beloved IP’s skin.
Pretty sure the pot episode came out while I was in high school and smoking pot, which woulda been 2000 at least. Which, well still proves the point.
Still one of the best episodes ever. They call em fingers but I dont ever see them fing. O wait, there they go.
What season do you guys stop at?
I’ll go as high as the 12th. But no more.
I don’t remember when the movie was but i feel like that’s where it ended for me
