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They just finished Season 23. I've only seen the occasional episode produced in the last ten years or so, but none of it has given me any cause to become a regular viewer again. The last couple I watched were so chronically devoid of laughs I was amazed the plug hadn't been pulled. To be honest, I'd take the wackiness of the Scully years over the complete boredom that seems to have set in more recently.

(Posted on Monday, July 23, 2012 at 7:45 PM)

I've now made my way through the first disc and about a third of the second, and it's... OK, but the best years of the show definitely seem to have been behind it by this stage. I remember watching some of them on Sky 1 back when we first got cable, while others are completely new to me. I didn't react to "The Principal and the Pauper" with the revulsion that some have - it was just silly, implausible and not particularly big on the laughs. (On the other hand, I happen to think "Homer's Enemy" is quite possibly the best episode they ever did.) "The Cartridge Family" (Brad Bird's last episode, I notice) and "Lisa the Skeptic" had some laughs, but "issues episodes" always draw a fine line between being entertaining and just annoyingly preachy. I actually gave up on "Bart Star" and skipped to "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons", another "yeah, it's OK" episode with some decent laughs peppered into a fairly standard sitcom script.

Yesterday I watched an episode from the most recent season, "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again", and I didn't laugh. Not once. Not only that, but I barely got the impression they were TRYING to make me laugh. The whole thing just seemed completely zombie-like. The animation was stiff and lifeless (I know THE SIMPSONS was never Looney Tunes or even SpongeBob SquarePant on the animation front, but come on!), the voice actors sounded like they were phoning it in, and the plot was the sort of hackneyed tripe the show used to poke fun at (the Simpsons go on a cruise and Bart learns to treasure the brief moments of joy in life).

I agree with the Wilson Bros - just how long is Fox going to be able to milk this? And how much worse can it possible get? Then again, I was saying that close to a decade ago but would take pretty much anything from that period over what's being produced now (assuming that the recent episodes I've seen are typical of the current output). Presumably the voice actors will just keep demanding more money for their 3-4 hours of work per week until someone finally says "Enough is enough. Put up or shut up" and the show can finally be put out of its misery.

(Posted on Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 5:46 PM)

I remember watching MovieBob's defence of recent Simpsons last year, and I can't say I agreed with his argument. If memory serves, it more or less hinged on the same defence frequently trotted out by the producers: "The Simpsons haven't changed, it's us that have moved on." To me, that doesn't hold water, for a very simple reason. As I've been slowly but surely buying up these DVD sets, I've occasionally come across old episodes I've never seen, and without fail they make me laugh considerably more than anything I've seen from about Season 11 onwards. That do me pretty much destroys the notion that I only continue to enjoy the older seasons because of nostalgia. Case in point: "Lisa's Sax." Part of the Season 9 set, but actually produced around Season 6/7 by the CRITIC crew and held back. Compared to the episodes it's sandwiched between, it's in a completely different league in terms of humour, characterisation and its ability to tell a coherent story. Even a lesser episode from Season 8 like "Burns, Baby Burns" (which I only saw for the first time about a week ago) is comedy gold compared to the more recent output.

(Posted on Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 10:10 PM)