Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?

DVD/Bluray sales usually dictate if a show gets renewed. Also most anime are adaptations from light novels or manga so the expectation is that they all drive up sales for one another. Then we have things like figures, video games, pillow cases, etc. This is why One Piece has over 850 episodes spread over at least a dozen box sets and 900 manga chapters collected in 60 volumes.

200 episodes was probably too much, yet 12 episodes would not be enough.

This stuff exists on a spectrum. The near end in my opinion are shows like GoT and Breaking Bad have long narratives to tell and imo they use the time well.

Further away are shows like Archer which were amazing when they came out but tend to drag on without having a significant story to tell.

The far far end is exemplified best by animes like Dragonball or Hunter x Hunter which go ON AND ON AND ON and somehow never seem to go anywhere.

GoT however has gotten much worse the closer they got to running out of source material. The last season I watched had incredibly stilted dialogue and relationships (Jon going rambo all the way to the north with no plan and then falling instantly in lust with Danny) and the pacing was hyperspeed compared to the previous seasons. If anything it feels like they really want to end it but have run out of room so they are just rushing it.

The Simpsons, Futurama, when they address these kinds of issues, they feel like they're 'reaching' for it. Or, worse, just 'not trying'.

Someone else here mentioned The Simpsons, and the Family Guy, were much better at the time that they focused on the struggles of the families themselves.

I believe that this is because unlike South Park, where, even from the name, the town itself seems to be the focus. Which allows it to be moreso whatever they want it to be.

'The Simpsons' and the 'Family Guy', are meant to satirize, or at least revolve around, the daily struggles of the 'American Middle Class Family'.

When they don't, and they reach for 'current' events, which often usually feel dated by the episode release due to the extended 6-9 month production period, they seem stale and unfunny. South Park's 6-day production period, awesomely described in the fantastic documentary 'Six Days to Air', allows South Park to comment literally on things that happened the day before. It's incredibly hard to make that feel 'stale.' Really, worst-case scenario, South Park just doesn't seem 'funny' enough sometimes (this season hasn't been great), but definitely never 'irrelevant'.

The early seasons and episodes of the Simpsons are timeless. Many of them could've happened any time over the last three or four decades.

• 'Homer's Enemy' (S08E23) - A new employee at work gets jealous of Homer's 'easy' life.

• 'Mr. Plow' (S04E09) - Hijinks occur when Homer and Barney start competing snow removal businesses.

• 'Homer the Heretic' (S04E03) - Homer decides he doesn't need to attend church any more, and Marge doesn't like the example that demonstrates for the kids.

• 'You Only Move Twice' (S08E02) - Homer is offered a new work opportunity in a 'perfect' town. This episode does involve satire, but James Bond is such an old trope, and the films are still coming out, therefore it doesn't seem 'stale'.

None of these classic and fan favourite episodes rely on tropes of the era. They're still as funny today as when they were released. (Especially 'You Only Move Twice'. What a gem. Oh, Scorpio.)

Futurama, as well, does best when it focuses on it's sci-fi premise. It's supposed to be the future. We don't need comments about Apple products in there, we want the mind-bending 'Rick and Morty'-level plots of 'Roswell that Ends Well', or the genuine moments of emotion like Fry's dog at the end of 'Jurassic Bark'.

Again, it seems like early seasons of these cartoon sitcoms have a habit of sticking to their initial premise, and maybe perhaps the creator's visions. There's tons of reasons for this, but in 'The Simpsons' case, the death of Phil Hartman in 1998 drastically affected the show as a whole. I think a lot of the spirit was lost along with him. RIP, Troy McClure.

At least with Futurama, Mom was an established character and they were able to comment on other internet culture like Twitter.

Ultimately, yeah, they probably ran out of possible new material (they even joked about doing the same themes across multiple episodes within episodes).

I think it would have been better off cancelled once Season 10 rolled around.

They could be doing the show they do now with different characters entirely, and they'd probably have a more accurate sense of quality that's not clouded with nostalgia.

It's no surprise that FOX doesn't understand going out on a high note though. I admittedly probably hung around until season 20 just because of the previous 10 seasons of goodwill.

The Futurama movies were definitely weaker than the episodes, but I remember the Comedy Central revival being better than most or all of the movies. Maybe not up to their Season Four heights, but definitely enough better to make me think the movie style was causing them problems in either writing or editing.

Very cool!

They weren't just one liners but instead would build up gradually.

That's what I like about this analysis, it got me to understand something that I somehow felt but had no idea that it was actually happening.

And, again I can hardly believe I’m saying this, it would be such a hassle to physically insert the disk when I felt like watching!

It’s got to be on HBO/Netflix/Hulu/Amazon or available on demand from my tv provider or I won’t watch it outside of theaters. Convenience has bested my better judgement shrugging emoticon

The show often also feels like the writers are just rehashing old ideas, and there seem to be a few archetypes of stories that just keep popping up over and over again: "Homer is an incompetent idiot, but comes through for his family when needed", "Lisa feels alienated, because she's much smarter than the rest of the family", "Bart is a bad student and gets into trouble", "Marge is bored with her existence as a housewife and tries to break out of the monotony". At some point you should just admit that you have done everything you would with a concept and call it a day instead of dragging things out.

While the house quality varies according to gag it is a large and well appointed house with one income from someone without a college degree from working at the plant in a physically undemanding is if not anchronistic increasingly less and less everyman representative. Even married people who are well off tend towards dual income households these days for one. The economy is far more service than industrial and the industrial has largely skilled up and automated. And that goes without discrediting of so many past tropes by time. Well meaning wholesome dolt manages to fail to fit the milieu in many ways and has been considered still overused decades ago even with their disapperance.

Everything in the article is just properties of arithmatic averages in sorted sequences.

It's really hard to account for that aspect of people's feelings about old vs new Simpsons. Some jokes that were probably light chuckles at first viewing, have become iconic fodder for further humor in the years since. This is reinforced by time, but also by syndication.

It gets to the point where no possible new Simpsons joke will get the reaction as the old ones. New jokes just work in the brain differently from jokes we've lived with and referenced for years.

This is not unique to the Simpsons, it happens with any long-running show. The SNL "cowbell" or "David S. Pumpkins" sketches seemed kind of funny at first viewing, but the constant references since have made them seem way funnier.

I'd say there are usually about 4 really good shows per season. Most of them are pretty forgettable, and none of them are as funny as the show was 25 years ago.

I couldn't honestly say whether I think the show itself has declined though. When I first started watching, a member of the family had got cable TV (a rarity in those days), and taped episodes for us. We'd get a VHS full of episodes on grainy long-play once it was full, and we'd binge on them. I'm still not sure if I've ever seen the end of the episode where Bart goes to france on an exchange trip, and Springfield gets an Albian spy in return.

But it felt so new, so American, and so different to anything else we had on terrestrial TV. It was like TV was misbehaving!

If it had never happened, and started today fresh, it'd have nowhere near the same impact. There's a higher level of quality, and a higher level of access to it, than any sane person knows what to do with.

It was a diamond in the rough. I don't think it is anymore. But the rough has changed so drastically, that it's difficult to draw an isolated comparison.

I.e., Bart.

Edit: I'm not sure people realize I'm not the grandparent, or that I was directly quoting him to answer the question?

But the real test has been the fact that I haven't bothered to watch it again. I'd rather watch "The Simpsons" or "Futurama" for the N plus 1th time.

That said, you started with the following prior: Simpson ratings went down over time. Then you looked at 1 variable: The writing staff. You noticed: Aha, if we assign each writer a rating, then we see that later writers have lower ratings than writers that only worked on early episodes!

However that's a tautology. Of course the writers that worked on later episodes have lower scores than those that worked on earlier episodes. The fact the ratings went down over time was the prior we started with! This is the natural result of taking averages. The experimental setup was wrong from the beginning.

As for why I think you would want to do proper statistics, the reason is simple: I assume that people who publish these things are well intentioned, and they want to show off actual statistical correlations.