The Simpsons Problem: Knowing When to Stop
Like so many kids of the 90s and beyond, I grew up watching The Simpsons. I’d sit down every week at 6:00pm and wait with baited breath to see which episode it’d be. The best thing was, they were all brilliant. There was no way to lose because around 1999, when season 10 was new, there wasn’t a single episode that could be called bad. Sure, some weren’t as good as others, but none were truly unwatchable.
But around this time, things were admittedly starting to take a downward turn for the show. From the first season, ratings had only been getting better and had hit an all-time high with the season 8 episode Homer’s Enemy, but that high would be short-lived. Season 10 is what many would call the beginning of the end for The Simpsons, though some would say it came earlier in season 8 itself, and the numbers don’t lie. Ratings had already dipped by the time season 10 came around, and they continued to dip, with the exception of a handful of highly-rated episodes like Trilogy of Error from season 12 and 24 Minutes from season 18. Compared to the earlier seasons, however, these episodes are still rated quite low.
I, being 6 at the time, didn’t know a thing about ratings. I certainly had no idea that ratings for a masterpiece like The Simpsons were anything but favourable. As far as I knew, it was one of the funniest, smartest shows on television and would continue to be for as long as it ran. I knew it was funny because it made me laugh. I knew it was smart because it made my dad laugh. Considering how big The Simpsons was in the 1990s, a lot of people, families and individuals alike, would undoubtedly say the same.
But 6-year-old me had little to no concept of change. My brain saw something like The Simpsons and saw it as an anchor, something that wouldn’t change because it seemed so sure of itself and its place on TV. I didn’t understand that this show and many like it found their voices through writers, who came and went as life required, and that meant change.
What I did understand was that the show started to feel different. By season 13 I was laughing a lot less. The characters were starting to do things and act in ways that didn’t feel normal for them. The comedy had evolved. The longer the show ran, the more the episodes turned from great, to mediocre, to just plain bad. By season 19, The Simpsons had completely lost me. I actually turned the TV off halfway through Smoke on the Daughter. I just couldn’t stomach it.
Now, here we are, 31 years and 31 seasons after it all began. I stopped watching The Simpsons many years ago, but I know from the ratings that things haven’t exactly improved for the show. Sure, it still draws in huge audiences but if something’s big enough, it’ll keep attracting viewers no matter how much it changes for the worse. The size of an audience certainly isn’t a testament to the quality of any given thing.
So, why do shows continue going if the ratings keep dropping? Why do shows keep limping along even when the quality is clearly lacking? Don’t be fooled — it’s not just a problem unique to The Simpsons. Any show can crumble and become something completely other than what it started out as. Family Guy and The Big Bang Theory have both suffered from similar downward trends in their ratings from season to season.
But what causes a once-successful franchise to take such a turn? While that’s not a question with a particularly easy answer, it is partly about understanding the fictional universe of any given franchise, television or otherwise, as well as the characters who live within it. If you understand that, then you’ll understand the limits dictated by those characters and their personalities, and by the boundaries of the world; what can reasonably happen and what can’t.
Take another show I love as another example — Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You may have heard of it. Now, I adore BtVS and think it still stands as one of the greatest things to ever air on television, but it did begin to lose its way towards the end, despite there being only 7 seasons. Characters began acting out of…well, character. Plotlines made less and less sense in the last two seasons. We now know that the poor finale stemmed from changes to the Buffy writing staff and the notable lack of Joss Whedon, and therein lies the problem.
Another example? Silent Hill. It may not be a television show, but the same principle applies. The first four games were created by Team Silent, who had a very clear vision of what the world of Silent Hill was all about. They created a very specific brand of horror for those games, and that brand of horror has stayed with generations of people who played those games as children. Now, take the 5 later games, particularly Homecoming and Shattered Memories. They were all made by separate development companies outside of Team Silent, and not a single one has managed to live up to the reputation of the early games. The two Silent Hill movies suffered from similar problems to these later games.
I’m sure you can see that there’s a pattern here. When people who don’t necessarily understand the characters and world within a particular franchise step in to take over, then that lack of understanding is obvious to those watching. Changes that aren’t quite right within the franchise begin to occur. Something at the core of that franchise begins to twist, to distort, and eventually, to rot.
This is what has happened to The Simpsons. And really, it’s no surprise when we look at the massive transformation of The Simpsons’ writing team over the years. By the time season 8 had rolled around, many beloved members of the team had left to go on to different things, including Sam Simon, Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Mike Reiss, and even Matt Groening himself. All of these writers are responsible for many of the show’s peak years. As they slowly left, they clearly took some part of what made The Simpsons what it waswith them.
It’s why a great many of us don’t recognise the comedy or the characters anymore, why they act so outrageously in comparison to how we remember them in the 90s — over the years, they’ve gone through so many different pairs of hands that they’ve mutated, and so has the ideology of The Simpsons as a whole. It’s no longer about parodying the popular facets of American culture, like politics, celebrity and the nuclear family. It’s about fully embracing that culture in the name of selling out. I mean, we all remember season 23’s Lisa Goes Gaga, don’t we?
But it’s not just about misunderstanding a franchise, or changing it for the worse. It’s also about knowing when to stop. Franchises like Shrek, Ice Age, BtVS, even the likes of Doctor Who, were all tainted by those in charge cranking out film after film and season after season. Buffy was actually meant to end at its fifth season, and the finale would have been perfect. But of course, there was money to be made.
A lot of things in pop culture suffer from this not-knowing-when-to-stop syndrome. It’s not just a today problem, either. Hollywood and the fat cats of any big-shot company have always had an issue with letting something die gracefully — Rocky, James Bond and Star Wars are all franchises that seemed, or maybe still seem, to have no end. After all, as long as there’s money to be had off the back of an already half-dead franchise, the machines will keep turning.
Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t to say that things can’t still be great if they continue for longer than expected. There’s plenty of superhero films with regards to The Avengers and the various offshoots around all of the individual heroes, and though they’re not all good, they’re pretty consistent. Ratings for The Wire only improved with each season. The likes of Adventure Time, Steven Universe and Breaking Bad were all consistently rated well with a fair number of seasons between them. Even Steven Universe: The Movie was good, and I don’t normally hold out much hope for spin-offs.
But when a show has been running for over 30 years, with over 30 seasons and a worsening track record, something perhaps needs to be reflected upon there. Anyone’s free to continue flogging a dead horse for as long as they wish, but at some point it becomes gratuitous. Sure, there may never be a show quite like The Simpsons. To let it go would be a shame; even I can admit that. But there’s an even bigger shame in allowing something to become half the thing it was before. The continuous and devastating decline of The Simpsons should be looked upon as a warning; know when to stop.
