Ten years ago this month, I wrote one of the earliest posts on this blog called ‘The Decline of the Simpsons‘ which I referenced again last year on a similar post about another long-running animated series, South Park. I won’t be writing another about The Family Guy, as I was never really into it to begin with and it began broadcasting a few years before I stopped regularly watching television anyway. All three of these shows are amazingly still running as of writing which means there is enough of an audience left to make them worth producing.
By coincidence, I recently came across an infographic by Roshaan Khan with exactly the same title as my post. It was actually made in 2020 and visually presents IMDb user ratings for each episode up to Season 31. It supports my claim the series began to seriously decline in quality beginning with Season 10. I was simply going to add a link to this in my original post but I found I had more to add and so decided to make a dedicated post.
What is immediately clear is there is a lot more green (which is a rating of 7.6 or higher), in the first nine seasons indicating much more favourable opinions of each episode. There is also a clear point at which the show begins to decline starting in Season 10. Even at the height of the show’s popularity, not every episode was a banger but they were still generally entertaining and this is reflected in the infographic. I should also add that while “7/10” might not be considered bad in general, it usually is on the Internet. Where video games are concerned, anything lower than an ‘8’ is often assumed to be a waste of money. I’m not sure how true this is of IMDb’s rating system but it is something gaming sites like IGN are famous for.
The first episode with a noticeably negative rating of 5.9 is in Season 6, Episode 3 and titled ‘Another Simpsons Clip Show‘. If you’re old enough to have watched broadcast television somewhat regularly then you will know it wasn’t uncommon for shows to occasionally make episodes showing clips from earlier episodes with the characters offering a lazy narrative or commentary to tie these clips together. Before streaming, all you could really do is groan and accept it or stop watching. This was not the first time The Simpsons did this as the title indicates and the show’s writers knew their audience well enough to be self-depreciatory about doing it at all. The first time was Season 4, Episode 18 which is titled ‘So It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show‘. Unsurprisingly, that is the lowest rated episode of that season with a ‘7.1’ but this rating is still higher or at least equal to a lot of episodes beginning from Season 11.
The lowest rated episode from the first ten seasons is Season 9, Episode 11 titled ‘All Singing, All Dancing‘. This is not yet another clip show but it does live up to its title as a musical episode. The series was never a stranger to musical numbers and I still have a CD collecting many of them called ‘Songs in the Key of Springfield‘. I do remember this episode but I don’t remember hating it but I am guessing that I wouldn’t be impressed if I re-watched it today. The second lowest rated in that season is the second episode ‘The Principal and the Pauper‘ where it is “discovered” that Principal Skinner is actually a Vietnam War veteran named ‘Armin Tamzarian’ who adopted the name, identity (and mother) of his sergeant who went missing. This was where the series arguably “jumped the shark” and I do remember hating this episode and the meta-narrative of it parodying the way sitcoms reset at the end of each episode doesn’t do it any favours.
From Season 11, there are only four green or more highly rated episodes. There are two low rated episodes with the first in the thirteenth episode called ‘Saddlesore Galactica‘. Looking this one up, I see they get a racehorse which is similar to an earlier episode where Lisa gets a pony and that the Comic Book Guy even breaks the fourth wall to point this out. I do not remember it though I think I watched most of the season. Looking through the episodes, I see that the first episode was the one I mentioned in my previous post featuring Mel Gibson. I do recognise a couple of other episodes but it is clear this is where the decline really accelerated. 12 of the 23 episodes in Season 10 have ‘green’ ratings and the rest are yellow whereas only 4 of 22 in Season 11 are.
From Season 11 to 31 there are only 27 rated ‘green’ out of 458 episodes! Of the 226 episodes of the first ten seasons, only 24 are below this and many are within a decimal point or two of that rating. To make this even clearer, it was easier to count the lower rated episodes in the first ten seasons and easier to count the higher rated episodes in the twenty-one seasons that followed. As I write, the series has just finished Season 37 and I expect an updated infographic would look even worse.
This data isn’t perfect but as it is from IMDb, the users have to be engaged enough to go and give a rating; which leads me to assume they watched the episode they rated. I doubt there are any more people deliberately giving a low rating than there are doing the opposite. Many would be the kind of fans that contribute to the articles I’ve been looking at to find out information about the episodes I’ve mentioned. I am certainly not writing these episode titles from memory and I long ago discarded my episode guides which I only had up to Season 12 anyway.
There is a lot more you could pluck out of it but this infographic is consistent with my own observations of the show from a decade ago and my observations clearly aren’t unique. The series began to significantly decline in Season 10 and Season 11 was the first season that took the series into the 2000s and as it was largely a product of the 90s, it should have really ended there. Then they could have used what creative energy was left to make a genuinely great film to send the series off. Instead we’re left with one of those extremely rare films where the otherwise mediocre video game tie-in is actually better and hundreds and hundreds of totally forgettable episodes that only the most committed fans would even recognise. With hindsight, I also have to wonder how much more excited people would have been for any potential revival if the show had been off the air since the early 2000s?
To be extra thorough, I had a look at the entries for The Simpsons on KnowYourMeme. As of writing, there are 109 entries (oy vey!) and as expected, well over half are from the first ten seasons. Many of the others are related in general such as entries on certain characters as well as some bizarre brain-rot/creepy-pasta Internet nonsense using the characters. There is at least one from the film and a few from later seasons but not many and these are usually short-lived and/or obscure such as ‘Marge Krumping‘. So this supports my claim that the series has long been out of the zeitgeist as well.
To finish then by slightly modifying one of the more famous memes:
Stop! Stop! It’s Already Dead!