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There is a show that airs every night on the Fox network from around 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
And it's an animated series about a family of five:
Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie.
And it's not an exceptionally entertaining show, in fact it's downright mediocre.
But what's so unusual about it is that the show goes by the name The Simpsons.
And the reason this is so strange is that it bears a striking resemblance
to another animated TV series from the early 90s, one also called The Simpsons,
which many people, myself included, consider the greatest piece of television of the 20th century.
But make no mistake; no matter how similar these two appear,
no matter what surface level resemblances exist, these are not the same show.
And this, friends, is the story of how one became the other.
How one of the best and most influential TV shows of all time became just another sitcom.
This is The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened.
So, to keep this outside the realms of my own subjective opinion, we're going to chart The Simpsons' decline off the IMDb user review data,
collected from nearly 300,000 individual episode reviews aggregated over the show's 28 seasons,
which looks like this:
Yikes.
And so the conversation is, how did we get from the Simpsonsmania of the 90s,
to present-day, where the show is now widely referred to as "Zombie Simpsons?"
And to understand this, as well as the gravity of its decline, we need to first go back to the series' origins.
TV of the 80s was a very different place than what we have today.
While the first half of the decade was dominated by soaps like Dallas and Dynasty,
in its later half we would see the return and rise of the TV family sitcom,
with shows like Diff'rent Strokes, Alf and Family Ties dominating primetime TV slots.
Each of these big shows centered around instilling the virtues of the American family unit,
with smart-aleck but well-meaning kids, and wise and loving parents.
The families being shown on TV were safe and comfortable depictions of the staunchly middle-upper class,
rich enough to be aspirational, while not so wealthy that they become unrelatable.
Which was fine as long as you were never in the mood for anything more than good, wholesome fun,
but it was also TV at its softest and most docile.
There's a sugary blandness to the television of this period.
Or, as Matt Groening referred to it, the "zombification of the American family."
And it seemed like this was the way family sitcom was going to stay,
right up until the last dying breath of the 80s,
when, on December 14th 1989, two weeks before the closing of the decade,
the Fox Network aired the first episode of The Simpsons,
and in doing so completely transformed television as we know it.
It was dark, it was satirical and it was hilarious.
Rather than embrace the virtues of the American family like every other show of that time,
The Simpsons seem to be actively mocking them.
It's a little hard to imagine, given the modern media landscape,
but back then The Simpsons were seen as an expression of blatant anti-authority.
Disruptive entertainment that challenged every convention of primetime TV that had built up over the forty years of its existence.
The Simpsons was counterculture,
shining a spotlight and satirizing every ugly wart of American society that so many others willingly ignored.
Bullying, depression, the struggle of the lower-middle class,
nothing was off-limits and everything was game. And The Simpsons took gleeful joy in exposing it all.
Such disregard for what, at the time, were seen as modern American values
quickly drew the ire of many parental and watchdog groups, decrying The Simpsons as abashedly un-American,
even drawing the disdain of former United States president George Bush Senior.
"...make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons!"
[crowd cheering]
Of course, the disdain of such massive authority figures only fueled the flames of The Simpsons' countercultural blaze,
and audiences across the world fell in love with the distinctly dysfunctional family.
If you were born after 1990, you probably don't remember how big Simpsonsmania actually was,
but for a time, The Simpsons was easily the biggest fictional property in all of media,
with even throwaway pieces of Simpsons merchandise turning into their own miniature cultural touchstones,
like The Simpsons arcade game, a staple of 90s Arcades across the world,
or Bart Simpson's Guide to Life, which to this day is still one of my favorite books I've ever read.
The Simpsons even had hit songs, like the infamous "Do the Bartman."
♫ ...chain reaction ♫
♫ If you can do the Bart you're bad like Michael Jackson ♫
♫ Everybody if you can, do the Bartman ♫
♫ Shake your body, turn it round... ♫ ♫ Check it out! ♫
And so Simpsonsmania blazed on, but what truly made the show special was three core principles,
each of which could be represented by one of the show's three creators.
The first of which was Matt Groening. Groening was the one who conceived the initial premise for The Simpsons.
He first came to prominence with his uniquely warped counterculture comic, Life in Hell,
and if you go back and read this comic now, it's incredible how much of early Simpsons' rebellious spirit exists in it.
And it's this disdain for authority and convention that gave classic Simpsons the edge it had.
The second major creative force behind the show was Sam Simon, a veteran writer of TV sitcoms like Taxi and Cheers,
Simon was the person who took Groening's rebellious concept and gave it form, turning it into an actual TV show.
He was the one who hired and led the original writing team,
and instilled the idea that the comedy of the show should always be grounded in its characters, and not just be a string of cartoonish gags.
Which gave the characters a real weight and honesty, while also keeping the show consistently hilarious.
The third and final major contributor to The Simpsons was a little more hands-off than Simon and Groening, but arguably just important.
And that was its producer, James L. Brooks,
who not only was the one pushing for the series to get made in the first place,
but also largely credited as being the person to bring a heart to The Simpsons.
While not on the actual writing staff, he'd often come to the yearly story retreats,
and was always keen to encourage ideas that were more emotionally resonant than they were satirical or comedic,
often pushing episodes that featured Lisa or Marge as the protagonist,
and is even credited at penning the beautifully bittersweet moment from the episode Lisa's Substitute,
where Mr. Bergstrom hands Lisa a note that simply reads, "You are Lisa Simpson." before disappearing from her life forever.
Rebellious satire, comedy grounded in character, and heart.
These men and their ideals were at the core of The Simpsons,
something that is plainly obvious by the fact that you can still see their names listed at the start of every episode.
Of course that's to say nothing of the actual writing staff, who were also heavily involved in the development.
John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, Conan O'Brien, David M. Stern,
these and many others were the exceptionally talented writers that made up the early staff of The Simpsons.
And while Groening, Simon, and Brooks oversaw the show's creation, these were the people that crafted each and every episode.
One thing that becomes abundantly clear after going through enough old interviews with these guys
is the incredible amount of work that went into each and every script.
A team of roughly twelve writers would work multiple long eleven-hour days on a single episode,
and it's a little hard to imagine now, given how seamlessly the comedy in classic Simpsons flows,
but I think once you start to break down the way these jokes work, the effort behind them becomes abundantly clear.
Let's take one of my favorite moments from one of my favorite episodes, Bart Sells His Soul,
in which Bart sells his soul to Milhouse for five dollars,
and after a run of bad luck and a rather horrifying existential nightmare, he realizes what a mistake he's made
and journeys out late into the night in order to find Milhouse, and reclaim his lost soul.
And then this happens:
"Well finally, a little luck!"
[evil laughter]
It's a brilliant, darkly hilarious piece of comedy, timed, paced, and delivered to near perfection.
But what's interesting is what happens when you break down the mechanics of how this joke works.
Mainly by recognizing that this is not one singular joke, but a combination of smaller ones.
It starts with Bart's bike being run over by the street sweeper.
Second, it turns out that all the street sweeper actually did was clean the bike.
Third, no, it's actually been destroyed.
Fourth, the reveal that this was actually an act of malice by some psychotic nameless public servant.
And finally, the street sweeper plunging down the stairwell.
That's five jokes in fifteen seconds.
And I get that by breaking them down like this, I'm robbing them of some of their magic,
but I think it's important to understand the underlying structure.
And that is how each little piece of comedy builds on and expands on the one that came before it,
crescendoing in the beautifully absurd and nearly surreal punchline.
And it's a perfect example of the brilliant layered comedy of the jokes of classic Simpsons.
These are jokes that, according to writers of The Simpsons from the time,
would go through roughly thirty to forty drafts of rewrites, which I think is genuinely evident from their makeup.
They're simply too layered and too intricate to be the product of one single writing pass.
And this is also a style of comedy that was completely distinct to everything else at the time.
Sitcoms of the late 80s and early 90s were ruled by the laughter track, which had been a staple of American sitcoms since the 1950s.
Originally provided by a live studio audience, but now it was just fake canned laughter,
used as an artificial way to prop up lazy one-liners and unimaginative quips.
The problem with using laughter tracks is that they only allow for jokes to be structured in a very particular way,
with long lead ins and big punchlines.
But there is also a forced quality to it too, as it takes the onus away from the audience and tells us when to react.
And if a joke is genuinely funny, then surely we don't need it to be pointed out to us.
And if you want to see some proof of this, just check out what an existential nightmare the Big Bang Theory turns into when the laughter track is removed.
"Sorry I'm late."
"What happened?"
"Nothing. I just really didn't wanna come."
[long, uncomfortable silence]
[shudders]
Not only is there not a laughter track in The Simpsons, there straight up could not be one.
The pace, rhythm, and subtlety of the jokes didn't allow for it.
Take our previous street sweeper gag.
The way the joke is interconnected and paced means there's no space for canned laughter.
The only place you could put it would be right at the end, and by doing so, you would ruin these darkly surreal atmosphere the joke establishes.
And so in disregarding the biggest crutch of TV sitcoms of that era, The Simpsons created a different style of comedy to anything else at the time.
One that was consistently creative, surprising and hilarious.
And yet, despite how exceptionally the show delivered its comedy, it never did so at the expense of its characters.
I think the key to what makes these characters so distinct and memorable
is that each one operates off a very specific set of conflicting beliefs and motivations.
Take Homer, for example.
He's an emotional man, equally prone to bouts of both intense joy and excitement, as well as fits of blinding rage.
He's unintelligent and slow witted, but not just that. He was also gluttonous and extremely lazy.
And this aspect of his character would often prove more detrimental to him than his low intelligence.
He was also an optimist, often choosing to ignore problems until they became unavoidable,
but also just kind of wanted to be left alone.
To go about his life his own way, and enjoy the little pleasures of it on his own terms.
And lastly, he really, really cares about his family.
These are the core traits that define Homer Simpson.
These are the motivations and beliefs that determine each action he takes,
and in any given scene, you can see one or more of them pulling him in different directions.
In other words, there was a consistent internal logic to Homer.
No matter how outlandish this situation he was in, Homer could always be expected to act like Homer.
And so when comedy did occur, you weren't just laughing because something goofy was happening,
you were doing so because a character you were intimately familiar with had done something that made sense to them and only them.
The comedy of Homer's character comes from his failings causing him to misinterpret the world around him, and suffer because of it.
This is the kind of character writing that was dense throughout every episode of The Simpsons.
But it's only when this combined with the show's expertly crafted narratives that the series' true strength becomes apparent.
Even when the show ventured into its more surreal territory, which it often did,
there was always the feeling that each story had something to say.
From accepting one's own mortality, to corruption in politics, and even the nature of the human soul.
And yet It did all this with a sincerity that never felt patronizing.
And so The Simpsons delivered classic episode after classic episode,
like the touching, poignant Lisa on Ice,
the genius season-spanning cliffhanger Who Shot Mr. Burns,
and the irreverent, hilarious Last Exit to Springfield.
These, and so many others, are some of the finest pieces of television ever crafted,
and cemented The Simpsons not only as one of the greatest TV shows of all time,
but as a bonafide worldwide cultural phenomenon.
The Simpsons, it seemed, was unstoppable.
And then...
Season eight happened.
The eighth season of The Simpsons is... odd.
It's still home to a lot of classic stories,
in particular the episode Homer's Enemy, which is the all-time highest rated episode of the entire show.
But when you look at this season closely, things were beginning to change in subtle, but meaningful ways.
The rock-solid narrative commentaries of the earlier seasons were gradually giving way to stories that were growing increasingly more nonsensical.
Homer became a heavyweight boxer, Bart started working at a burlesque club,
Marge got involved with both the Italian mob and Japanese yakuza, and the family hired a magical British nanny.
And I like all these episodes, but what they represent is the start of a pivot away from satire straight into the absurd,
a pivot that's full significance would only truly come to light a season later, with the infamous episode The Principal and the Pauper.
It's an episode largely reviled by the hardcore Simpsons fanbase,
and was originally written about by Simpsons authority Charlie Sweatpants in one of his many fantastic blog posts about the show.
Like a lot of seasons eight to ten, the episode itself isn't particularly bad, and there's even some great jokes in there.
But the problem comes from how it shatters the fictional integrity of one of the show's most beloved characters:
Principal Seymour Skinner.
Skinner, like so many other of the supporting cast of The Simpsons, is a geniusly written character.
Designed as the direct antithesis to Bart, Skinner is a rigidly authoritarian abider of rules,
and a strict believer in hierarchy and order,
used to hilarious effect in the episode The Boy Who Knew Too Much.
But at the center of Skinner's character, and what made him this way,
is his upbringing by his tyrannically oppressive razor-toned mother Agnes,
and the pair were a hilarious commentary on what overly authoritative parenting could do to a person.
"I owe everything I have to my mother's watchful eye,"
"and swift hand..."
"Hm. There's mother now."
[crow cawing]
"Watching me."
"Well they have a right to be here! It's school business! I-"
"Mother, that sailor suit doesn't fit anymore!"
"Hrmm. I think we should go."
It's dark, comedic Simpsons brilliance, emblematic of how Simpsons of the 90s handled its characters.
And in 22 short minutes, The Principal and the Pauper undoes all that.
The entire episode is based on the premise that the upbringing that made Principal Skinner who he is
and is so integral to his character... never actually happened.
Instead, the character we thought was Seymour Skinner is actually Armin Tamzarian,
a street punk from Capital City who switched identities with his M.I.A. Officer after returning from the Vietnam war.
It's not the first time The Simpsons delved into absurdist storytelling,
various episodes from even the earliest seasons would occasionally dabble in these kind of immersion-shattering narratives,
but throughout them we could always rely on the characters to act like the characters.
But now this episode was telling us that a character who's been built up carefully for eight years isn't real and never was.
all for the sake of a cheap gag narrative that ultimately goes nowhere and says nothing.
It felt... wrong. A little perverse, even.
And if this perversion had remained just in this one episode, it wouldn't have been that big a deal,
but unfortunately this was just a prelude of what was to come.
Slowly, as The Simpsons crept along, little pieces of it would start falling away and disappear.
The narratives were becoming less poignant, the characters less consistent,
and a lot of the jokes were starting to land with the laziness of the most average of sitcoms.
Something was changing for the primetime series.
Something was corrupting The Simpsons.
And I think you can boil down this shift in direction to two primary factors.
And to find the first, we need to look to what was happening to the staff that made up The Simpsons of the late 90s.
The three people credited as creating the show were long gone at this point.
Matt Groening had moved on to other projects like Futurama,
Sam Simon had left in 1993 over creative differences,
and Brooks became less involved with the show from around 1995
after a public dispute with Groening over the episode A Star is Burns.
There had also been some deaths on the cast, most notably the tragic passing of Phil Hartman and Doris Grau,
which unfortunately left some of the show's best characters without a voice.
And that's to say nothing of the actual writing staff itself.
Here's a list of every major writer who is a lead on multiple episodes of The Simpsons during its most acclaimed period.
In other words, the writers who shaped what the series was.
And watch as we go forward through the years.
More and more drop off, with a massive exodus right at the start of season eight,
which is when the ratings for the show would begin their slow decline,
with only a tiny percentage of the original staff left by season 12.
I want to make it clear at this point that the purpose of this video is not to demonize any of the staff for The Simpsons from season ten on,
namely because I think that's a bit of a shitty thing to do,
but also I think the problems are more complicated than that.
But what I do want to do is explore how this change of staff
affected the writing behind the series, and how it changed its style of comedy.
The best analysis I've seen of this is from a 2016 blog post written by Jonathan Jayson,
in which he breaks down a joke from a more recent season in the style of both modern Simpsons and classic Simpsons.
The joke goes like this:
Homer is sitting in an airport, and over a loudspeaker a voice announces:
"Boarding has commenced for women, children, and fat men,"
to which Homer exclaims excitedly, "That's me!" and that's the joke.
With all due respect to the person who penned this line,
does this really feel like a joke that went through thirty or forty drafts like Simpsons of old?
It has no layers, no subtlety. It's just a self-referential, throwaway piece of nothing,
and ironically, the exact kind of joke a laughter track would fit over perfectly.
Now watch what happens when Jayson rewrites the same joke in the style of classic Simpsons.
We have the same setup, with the same announcement for "women, children, and fat men,"
but this time Homer ignores the announcement and sits in blissful ignorance,
before being approached by an airport staff member who taps him on the shoulder and says:
"Um, sir?" and points towards a queue of overweight men, before cutting back to Homer, who would let out a disappointed "D'oh..."
See how now all at once, the joke is funny, tells us a little bit about Homer's character,
about the airport and its staff, and is even a mild commentary on how society views obesity?
Now it has layers. Now it has a purpose.
The article also reveals another problem that was creeping its way into The Simpsons,
and that is the two characters present here are not actually the same person.
One is the slow-witted, downtrodden everyman from the first seven seasons, and the other...
Well, the other is Jerkass Homer.
Jerkass Homer is a term that's been coined to describe Homer of the modern Era.
While classic Homer is layered and nuanced, Jerkass Homer is basically a Wacky Cartoon Dad™.
An indestructible, supremely confident sociopath who's willing to leap headlong into any new venture for the most nonsensical of motives.
There's little rhyme or reason to his actions, and the lens of satire was now being turned firmly inwards,
with many of Homer's jokes being lame self-referential one-liners of a far weaker show.
"Fog machine!"
"Even I think this is crazy."
[laughtrack]
[shudders]
And this shift could be felt not only in each member of the Simpsons' family, but in every resident of Springfield,
sometimes completely destroying characters in the process.
Moe went from a violent lowlife, vaguely criminal owner of a shady bar,
to a boring, lovelorn family friend who only occasionally said the wrong thing.
Lisa went from a skeptical, isolated intellectual and voice of reason, to someone who religiously follows popular trends.
Or Barney, who goes from an alcoholic to a... coffee drinker, turning him from a hilariously dark representation of a major societal woe into...
Well, someone who likes coffee?
Every dark, satirical edge of Springfield was being smoothed out and sterilized.
Its characters were slowly devolving into simple-minded cartoons of what they had once been.
The exact kind of one-dimensional writing Sam Simon had worked so hard to avoid.
The second major reason for the show's change is a little less tangible.
The Simpsons was born out of a complete disdain for the status quo.
A hatred for the neutered, zombified version of the American family that sitcoms of the late 80s depicted.
And this anger gave The Simpsons its cynical edge it used to tear through pop culture of the time.
But now, 10 years later, The Simpsons was no longer a cruel and biting attack on popular media,
it WAS popular media.
The pop culture landscape that the show had been created to lampoon had been utterly obliterated,
and in doing so, The Simpsons lost its ability to truly be satire.
Characters that had been conceived as a harsh critique of TV stereotypes at the time now lost all context,
and The Simpsons itself was even being parodied by newer shows like Family Guy and South Park.
The Simpsons as a show had aged out, and as a result, it needed to transform and change its identity to stay relevant.
And it did so in the most disappointing way possible.
And that was that, rather than treating the idea of celebrity with the wry disdain it had in its earlier seasons,
modern Simpsons revels in the celebration of the rich and famous.
No longer were bespoke guest characters created for each new celebrity,
the joke now was just "let the Simpsons meet a celebrity and have that serve as the gag."
And the result is some of the weakest, most insincere writing of the entire show.
"Welcome to the United Kingdom!"
"Prime Minister Tony Blair?"
"Hey, Blink 182!"
"Thanks for the lift, Tony Hawk!" I gotta go now, Tony Hawk!"
"Bart, you know, Tony Hawk?"
Is this really the same show that so thoroughly took apart celebrity-centric culture
in episodes like Radioactive Man, Bart Gets Famous, and The Be Sharps?
And the answer is no, it's not.
This is no longer a show that satirizes pop culture, this is one that actively worships it.
The only thing that The Simpsons was a parody of now,
was The Simpsons.
And this is the state it would remain in for the next two decades,
a soulless, shambling husk that only vaguely resembles what it had once been.
and this is the period known as Zombie Simpsons.
And so with this in mind, let's return to our graph and put all this together.
The Simpsons was born in the last breath of the 80s, and quickly became the dominant force of early 90s television,
with a ferociously satirical slant on not only entertainment, but also society itself.
With masterfully written episodes and characters that drew in a global audience, thus creating Simpsonsmania,
right up until season eight, where major staff changes slowly began to eke away at the identity and craft that made the show great.
Slowly, little pieces of The Simpsons began falling away,
with characters that were beginning to only vaguely resemble who they had once been,
reaching a critical limit in season nine with The Principal and the Pauper.
And thus, the show begins relying more and more on outlandish plots and absurd self- referential writing,
until season twelve where, now a decade away from the media landscape it had been created as a response to,
the show ages out, and in an effort to stay relevant, transforms its relationship with pop culture,
and in doing so, snuffed out the final spark that made The Simpsons what it was.
And so, Zombie Simpsons is born,
which would cause the legendary series to fall into a decline that is still happening today,
bottoming out at its most recent season 28, with the lowest ratings of the series' entire history.
Ultimately, it's hard not to feel sad about what's happened to The Simpsons,
but even if the same staff had stayed on, even if everything had remained exactly the same for the show internally,
I think Simpsons was too much of a time that it could never really have survived the turn of the millennium.
So much of it was so rooted in the culture of the 90s and its media, and I think that's okay.
I think entertainment isn't meant to last forever. Rather, it's an extension of the people and places that made it at a particular moment in time.
And that's what The Simpsons is.
One of the purest and most raw expressions of social and political unrest, beautifully told and hilariously depicted.
And despite what it's become, and how it's all ended, I can't help be so glad that we got those early seasons.
It was a show that shaped a generation, and transformed entertainment as we know it. and I'm very, very glad it did.
But regardless, this has been the story of how the greatest show on Earth became just another sitcom.
This was The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened.
Friends, that's gonna do it.
I want to once again give a huge shout-out to artist Rebecca Reynolds for providing the artwork for this video.
You can find her over at rebeccareynolds.tumblr.com or on Twitter: @brobexx.
Her stuff is awesome, so do check it out.
Also, I want to give a huge shout-out to the blog Zombie Simpsons over on the Dead Homer Society,
which was a massive source in putting together this video, and whose Zombie Simpsons shtick I've been kind of curbing this whole time.
They have a massive 22,000 word essay that goes into way more detail than I had time for here, so you should definitely check it out.
Link for this, and various other sources, in the description below.
If you enjoyed this video and would like to help me create more like it,
then you can do so for as little as a single dollar over at patreon.com/supereyepatchwolf.
Thank you to all my patrons, without whom this video would not be possible,
and in particular this week I'd like to thank:
As always, you can find me on the Let's Fight a Boss video game podcast, or on Twitter: @Eyepatchwolf.
Friends, take care of yourselves, and I'll see you next time.