Name: The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened
Uploaded: 2018-07-17T07:12:37.000Z
Duration: 31 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There is a show that airs every night on the Fox network from around 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

And it's an animated series about a family of five:

And it's not an exceptionally entertaining show,
in fact it's downright mediocre.

But what's so unusual about it
is that the show goes by the name The Simpsons.

And the reason this is so strange is that it bears a striking resemblance

to another animated TV series from the early 90s, one also called The Simpsons,

which many people, myself included, consider the greatest piece of television of the 20th century.

But make no mistake; no matter how similar these two appear,

no matter what surface level resemblances exist, these are not the same show.

And this, friends, is the story of how one became the other.

How one of the best and most influential TV shows of all time became just another sitcom.

This is The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened.

So, to keep this outside the realms of my own subjective opinion, we're going to chart The Simpsons' decline off the IMDb user review data,

collected from nearly 300,000 individual episode reviews aggregated over the show's 28 seasons,

And so the conversation is, how did we get from the Simpsonsmania of the 90s,

to present-day, where the show is now widely referred to as "Zombie Simpsons?"

And to understand this, as well as the gravity of its decline, we need to first go back to the series' origins.

TV of the 80s was a very different place than what we have today.

While the first half of the decade was dominated by soaps like Dallas and Dynasty,

in its later half we would see the return and rise of the TV family sitcom,

with shows like Diff'rent Strokes, Alf and Family Ties dominating primetime TV slots.

Each of these big shows centered around instilling the virtues of the American family unit,

with smart-aleck but well-meaning kids, and wise and loving parents.

The families being shown on TV were safe and comfortable depictions of the staunchly middle-upper class,

rich enough to be aspirational, while not so wealthy that they become unrelatable.

Which was fine as long as you were never in the mood for anything more than good, wholesome fun,

but it was also TV at its softest and most docile.

There's a sugary blandness to the television of this period.

Or, as Matt Groening referred to it, the "zombification of the American family."

And it seemed like this was the way family sitcom was going to stay,

right up until the last dying breath of the 80s,

when, on December 14th 1989, two weeks before the closing of the decade,

the Fox Network aired the first episode of The Simpsons,

and in doing so completely transformed television as we know it.

It was dark, it was satirical and it was hilarious.

Rather than embrace the virtues of the American family like every other show of that time,

The Simpsons seem to be actively mocking them.

It's a little hard to imagine, given the modern media landscape,

but back then The Simpsons were seen as an expression of blatant anti-authority.

Disruptive entertainment that challenged every convention of primetime TV that had built up over the forty years of its existence.

shining a spotlight and satirizing every ugly wart of American society that so many others willingly ignored.

Bullying, depression, the struggle of the lower-middle class,

nothing was off-limits and everything was game. And The Simpsons took gleeful joy in exposing it all.

Such disregard for what, at the time, were seen as modern American values

quickly drew the ire of many parental and watchdog groups, decrying The Simpsons as abashedly un-American,

even drawing the disdain of former United States president George Bush Senior.

"...make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons!"

Of course, the disdain of such massive authority figures only fueled the flames of The Simpsons' countercultural blaze,

and audiences across the world fell in love with the distinctly dysfunctional family.

If you were born after 1990, you probably don't remember how big Simpsonsmania actually was,

but for a time, The Simpsons was easily the biggest fictional property in all of media,

with even throwaway pieces of Simpsons merchandise turning into their own miniature cultural touchstones,

like The Simpsons arcade game, a staple of 90s Arcades across the world,

or Bart Simpson's Guide to Life, which to this day is still one of my favorite books I've ever read.

The Simpsons even had hit songs, like the infamous "Do the Bartman."

♫ If you can do the Bart you're bad like Michael Jackson ♫

♫ Everybody if you can, do the Bartman ♫

♫ Shake your body, turn it round... ♫
♫ Check it out! ♫

And so Simpsonsmania blazed on, but what truly made the show special was three core principles,

each of which could be represented by one of the show's three creators.

The first of which was Matt Groening. Groening was the one who conceived the initial premise for The Simpsons.

He first came to prominence with his uniquely warped counterculture comic, Life in Hell,

and if you go back and read this comic now, it's incredible how much of early Simpsons' rebellious spirit exists in it.

And it's this disdain for authority and convention that gave classic Simpsons the edge it had.

The second major creative force behind the show was Sam Simon, a veteran writer of TV sitcoms like Taxi and Cheers,

Simon was the person who took Groening's rebellious concept and gave it form, turning it into an actual TV show.

He was the one who hired and led the original writing team,

and instilled the idea that the comedy of the show should always be grounded in its characters, and not just be a string of cartoonish gags.

Which gave the characters a real weight and honesty, while also keeping the show consistently hilarious.

The third and final major contributor to The Simpsons was a little more hands-off than Simon and Groening, but arguably just important.

And that was its producer, James L. Brooks,

who not only was the one pushing for the series to get made in the first place,

but also largely credited as being the person to bring a heart to The Simpsons.

While not on the actual writing staff, he'd often come to the yearly story retreats,

and was always keen to encourage ideas that were more emotionally resonant than they were satirical or comedic,

often pushing episodes that featured Lisa or Marge as the protagonist,

and is even credited at penning the beautifully bittersweet moment from the episode Lisa's Substitute,

where Mr. Bergstrom hands Lisa a note that simply reads, "You are Lisa Simpson." before disappearing from her life forever.

Rebellious satire, comedy grounded in character, and heart.

These men and their ideals were at the core of The Simpsons,

something that is plainly obvious by the fact that you can still see their names listed at the start of every episode.

Of course that's to say nothing of the actual writing staff, who were also heavily involved in the development.

John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, Conan O'Brien, David M. Stern,

these and many others were the exceptionally talented writers that made up the early staff of The Simpsons.

And while Groening, Simon, and Brooks oversaw the show's creation, these were the people that crafted each and every episode.

One thing that becomes abundantly clear after going through enough old interviews with these guys

is the incredible amount of work that went into each and every script.

A team of roughly twelve writers would work multiple long eleven-hour days on a single episode,

and it's a little hard to imagine now, given how seamlessly the comedy in classic Simpsons flows,

but I think once you start to break down the way these jokes work, the effort behind them becomes abundantly clear.

Let's take one of my favorite moments from one of my favorite episodes, Bart Sells His Soul,

in which Bart sells his soul to Milhouse for five dollars,

and after a run of bad luck and a rather horrifying existential nightmare, he realizes what a mistake he's made

and journeys out late into the night in order to find Milhouse, and reclaim his lost soul.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened

episode

entire

massive

hilarious