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Originally Posted by AnthonyC
Who really cares if the show keeps running? Don't complain that it's a bastardization of its former self; just stop watching if that bothers you so much. Honestly, it's still a decent show and this is a great season; but when you compare it to the days of S4 - S8, you're never going to be satisfied.
find it hard to believe that anyone would prefer season 1 to the current seasons.
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Actually, I *did* stop watching. Around 1998, as I mentioned above. Admittedly, I've heard in a few other places lately that this current season's a slight cut above the past six or seven years preceding it, and I plan on giving it more of a go...but once the writing staff began using Amazing Super-Retarded Homer (who seemed to be getting more and
more super-retarded as the seasons progressed) as their "go-to" crutch at the expense of the hitherto richly-developed ensemble of years past, I threw my hands up in disgust.
Suddenly, it became all about Stupid Homer, episodes specifically written around "A"-lister guest stars while throwing rest of the main cast to the wolves (also known as "
Will & Grace Syndrome"), more Stupid Homer, and general pratfall-wankery simply for the sake of pratfall-wankery, without any of the heart or the sense of simple
connectedness to these peoples' lives that we got during seasons 1-7.
Someone else -- and I'll never remember who it was, but they totally nailed it -- said not long ago that the writing staff from first several seasons cut their teeth on other comedic endeavours before ever doing
The Simpsons, and/or wrote their own personal, original material as stand-up comedians...but then this new generation of young writers now in charge of the series grew up with nothing
but The Simpsons as their main influence, and now that's their only real frame of reference in writing the show. It's like a Xerox of a Xerox.
Just as the writers of the original
Star Trek were WWII and Korea combat veterans, airline pilots, and policemen before they ever went to Hollywood -- thereby gaining a rich depth and diversity of personal experience (and even trauma) to mine for their stories in the 1960s -- the ST writers of later decades had no such "real-world" life experiences, largely being nothing but professional scriptwriters their entire post-college careers. And thus spent most of their time rewriting simply what they
knew cold, which was the original show's concepts, never breaking out of their decades-old mental "
Star Trek box." Again -- frame of reference.
When you look at the quality of the writing in
The Simpsons' early years and the quality of the later years, the difference is total night and day.
Season 3 is where the series truly began to hit its stride, I absolutely agree, with that writing team being probably the best on television at that moment in time...but I'll still take the crude "purity" of season 1 over what we've gotten recently any day of the week.
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