It’s one of the inescapable truisms of the innernets: Any mention of The Simpsons will be met with various responses as to when it stopped being funny. As someone who REALLY dislikes the group-think-common-knowledge-game-of-telephone nature of online life, it angers me, but even I can’t deny that the show has waxed and waned over the years. The last episode I watched all the way through was actually a Family Guy episode that stranded The Griffins in Springfield, which was pretty funny, and the seemingly endless marathon reruns on FXX have made it possible to experience long-unseen episodes again, leading to today’s rare-chance-to-snark-in-the-MS-QOTD query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) doesn’t usually court negativity in this fashion, so feel free to go nuts, asking: When, if ever, did The Simpsons stop being funny to you?
4 Comments
I have the first ten seasons on DVD and that’s probably where I’ll stop buying. They really hit a dry spell after that where they started putting too much focus on the guest star. However, I can’t say that The Simpsons ever got bad, exactly, they just got kind of middle of the road. There’s good episodes to be had in every season of that show but it’s often surrounded in so much mediocrity that you never find it. I thought the movie was great and I had hoped that it would breathe new life into the franchise but I think it has just become this institution now and lost that creative drive.
All in all though, The Simpsons may be the only show that allows people to utter the phrase, “well, only the first ten years were good.” I mean, ten years, that’s a lot of TV.
I have no idea. I stopped watching Simpsons because I stopped watching TV altogether about 10 years ago and haven’t gotten an opportunity to see how it is now. I only watch TV shows on streaming services or on disc now.
Maybe it’s because I’m not American, but I still like The Simpsons quite a lot. Granted, I don’t religiously watch every episode, but if I’m changing channels and I stumble upon any Simpsons episode, I’ll watch it and I’ll enjoy it.
Maybe it’s the Spanish dub that makes them more fun? Although I’ve started watching some episodes in the original audio and I’ve enjoyed them as well, despite the weirdness of hearing different voices to what I’m used to
It hasn’t stopped being funny for me, but that isn’t to say it hasn’t changed. The bulk of my favorite episodes are older, from within the first 10 seasons or so (with a select few from later seasons), and more recent seasons don’t always make me laugh as hard as the older seasons did, but I am still enjoying it.
However, I don’t really watch new episodes as they air, I usually get my fix from the blocks of episodes aired on FXX or sticking in a DVD and watching a particular season or themed selection of episodes.