Damn, the top one doesn't even really look like a modern TV, either. It's like they tried to update it while trying to do it in a way that most people didn't notice. What a cop out.
The picture.on those things was horrible compared to CRTs. I don't understand why anyone bought one. Must have tapped into that American attitude of "bigger is better even if it's shit". Same reason we keep Texas around.
Rumor has it that season 33 is speckled with passable episodes, and season 34 in generally considered a minor come back of the series. I'm watching 34 and yeah, it's pretty alright.
I'll take today's Simpsons over today's Family Guy. Family Guy today is just being used as someone's soapbox through shitty gags that are thought up in under a minute.
I read simmering a while ago that McFarlane wanted to stop the show years ago because it had run its course but the studio threw a ton of money at him to keep going so he did.
It's called "Simpsoning" or "Groening" in the entertaining industry: do something really great, then do it for so long and get worse and worse for so long, that people actually forget that it was great at some point in time.
I feel like I've been hearing this for a decade. Not that the show has been good for the last decade, but that the latest season is always the one that was pretty good.
The last time someone I knew told me this, I pressed for details. I tried to get examples of good episodes vs bad episodes, and a sense of the ratio between the two. The impression I got was that each recent season had a few episodes that stood out as pretty good, and the rest were either forgettable or kind of crap, but not as bad as the worst episodes in the show's history.
They had a couple strong seasons roughly 10 years ago IMO. Good enough to keeping me watching again consistently for a few years. Then one day I realized that we were 5 episodes into a season and every single episode had been an alternate universe style episode. Like, oh hey, this week's episode is The Simpsons but it's a spaghetti western for absolutely no reason and with no explanation.
I remember asking my wife it she could remember the last time we actually saw Homer at the power plant. Did he still work there? Did he finally get permanently fired and this season represents his decent into madness as he realizes there's no coming back this time? Or maybe he never worked there and I'm the one who's gone crazy.
Just watch the first 9.5 seasons and call it a day. There is enough good content out there that you don't have to subject yourself to hours of unfunny brain rot just to find the one or two jokes that make you chuckle.
I've heard that rhetoric thrown around a lot and so I watched it and I will say that no, no it is not. It's just eh, instead of a machine gun of disjointed jokes like the last 23 seasons
Thanks. I think the likelihood of me diving back in went from 5% back to 0%. I've heard similar sentiments as well and then getting all defensive. I don't begrudge anyone for enjoying the new Simpsons but it's not for me. Also, I've been listening to clips here and there. Homer and Marge's voice sound rougher, which makes sense given the amount of time that's passed but yeah...
Ok, I've seen this take recently, but what made the newest season better? I'm probably going to give it a shot anyhow. I really hope I'm not let down. I still recite the old episodes like religion.
It's going back to actual story telling instead of trying to just insert as many jokes as possible.
In the bad seasons, you'd have so many plotlines that just didn't make sense and characters doing things they simply wouldn't do. For example, Marge is not the absent minded idiot that Homer is, but if the joke needs her to be, then that's exactly what she'd be turned into, without any explanation. They do the same with the overall plot too
The writing seems to try to tell a good story first and then add jokes in where they work, unlike trying to put as many jokes in a flimsy story as possible. They also handle character like Marge a lot more like the early seasons.
Fron what I heard it's because the pandemic forced them to have less writers with more agency on each episode. It's not every episode, but there are definitely a handful of banger.
A Serious Flanders works way better than it has any right to do so