The Official Simpsons Griefing Thread

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Frank Garrett feat. Chris the Hacker - Damn It Feels Good to be a Hoosier

Bart Prank Call.jpg
 
The Simpsons will always be part of cringe culture to me, and I stopped watching it years ago.
I didn't even watch the episode where every Simpsons character died
 
I was going to write another mile long essay about Zombie Simpsons and Season 5, but I will just sum it up with the simple terms of how The Simpsons experimented too much, and eventually ruined itself with its indulgence. Sure, Season 6&7 are when the show was back to form for the most part, but Season 5 helped to show that some of the series' smarter and sniping aspects got Matt and staff to be too clever for their own good. How'd that quote go? "You are only as good as your last work?"

To further defend Season 4, everything worked in that season because The Simpsons, for all of its deconstruction and sniping at older conventions, it still had pathos; a sense of humanity despite the trash world that was, more intrinsic boundaries that it acknowledged it did not cross, like not thinking it was above conventions in other sitcoms that did work for a reason, and drew upon actual experiences than merely turning things upside down just for the sake of showing what could go wrong. There was, for lack of a better word, common sense, in Season 4, that made Springfield feel, well, real. A common sense that wasn't just a good awareness to avoid bad things, but a common sense that no matter how good you had, your personality and faults would help to screw up at times, and sometimes, life inevitably had something in store for you anyway.

I also think my quarantine time also helped me to pick up that even for the "sappy sitcoms" that aired prior, The Simpsons was not rioting at them (well maybe Growing Pains but I digress); they were rioting at the times and all of the 80's faults, and I think when that motivation began to wane, that was when Season 5 got to be where it got to be. Post Season 7, IMHO the whole "status quo" was the straw that broke the back. There's plenty I can see that got to infest The Simpsons: the fleeting writers, a refusal to acknowledge actual realism like the changing times, an apathy that did not recognize that the entirety of Springfield was a setting that was as alive as its citizens but a punch clock job, getting way too analytical and subversive when it didn't need to be, treating out of nowhere cynicism as a cureall for "not making The Simpsons happy crap" (near the end of Grampa Simpson VS Sexual Inadequacy's commentary, some of the cast got smug off their own farts, saying this), and much more, but the need to "adhere to the status quo" was what just kept the metaphoric deadly gas in the tank and got it to explode all over the town. There is a lot about older good sitcoms from the 1980s that I have noticed aged relatively well, and broke conventions that The Simpsons ironically didn't as a show in cross examination. It also helps that these series kept in actual character development.

Plus, is it just me, or is The Simpsons actually a display of Matt Groening trying to translate a newspaper funnies serial into a TV show? I think there's plenty lost in translation that doesn't work, now that I think about it.
 
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