It’s quite jarring how everything pre-season 7 is compared to the rest. Like most the characters are quite deep with conflicting emotions and not caricatures. Especially season 2. Like “Bart gets an F” episode, that kind of empathetic emotional portrayal of bart would never happen post season 10.
And we really went from Homer is a dumb guy who genuinely loves his family and is suffering under an oppressive system, to well “jackass homer”.
Shortening attention spans had to be part of it. It was probably hard to compete with other shows that had rapid-fire jokes and shorter time to pay off. Building up complex characters and creative situations takes a little more time and probably loses eyeballs.
Sort of analogous to long form vs short form videos now (but obviously both are much further down that road in comparison).
Also they had to reduce the episode runtimes to make room for more ads. I recall an interview where one of the writers said this made it really hard to have a b-story to accompany the main plot.
This process is called Flanderization, whereby a character on a long running show becomes a self-parody as their most distinctive traits and behaviors are amplified again and again. It’s named for a popular side character Ned Flanders, from the show the Simpsons. Though arguably Ned undergoes more permanent personal growth than any other character on the show.
The big turning point for me was when the guest celebrities were no longer characters on the show and just played themselves. Just small ads for celebrity du jour.
Celebrities are the worst part of any media.
? There were many Simpson celebrities in the 90’s that played themselves. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Wade Boggs, Bob Hope, Leonard Nemoy…
they didn’t use their real names of course but you could tell it was them
Every time a celebrity isn’t on-screen, everyone should be saying where’s celebrity?
