LONG DUK DONG

a fully engaged Simpsons writing team

well there's your first stumbling block, there's hasn't been one of those for decades

i remember when i used the say how the Simpsons was great but "the last few" seasons haven't been up to par, and i realize it's probably been about twenty years since it's been near the peak (and even then it was on the descent a bit.)

It really does blow my mind that the Simpsons has basically been on autopilot for nearly 20 years. You have one of the most successful brands in television history and you just squander it year after year. Like there would be any real consequence in just, like, doing a good job

Wow @ that clip, how is this show still going?

one of the few new Simpsons episodes I've seen in the last decade actually addressed this issue head-on. before even the documentary came out. it was about Apu's cousin or something. mostly jabs at millennials (ugh) but there was one poignant bit

it's a pretty obvious sentiment but comedy is extremely difficult, and i think even more difficult is trying to maintain a consistent comedic tone w/different creative types being brought in. the peak era staff wasn't just funny but also extremely smart about their humor and knew how to effectively deploy it, you watch old episodes and they're very understated and not wall-to-wall jokes, and they deeply understand the characters. seems like the staff at present tried and failed to get into the writer's room at AFV but sneaked into the Simpsons somehow.

and i think the animation style over the past however many years hasn't done the show any favors, it's a bit uncanny valley so i can't quite explain it but there's not nearly as much personality or humor in the way the characters appear, it's too polished or something.

in addition to the poor writing the show's standoffish tone is really irritating these days. I remember one that had a card in the end that said, "okay, you can all now log on to your computers and complain about this episode now", which would have sounded dated in 1999, much less 2006 or whenever it actually aired

Yeah, one of the odder but sorta unsurprising thing is that the writing staff were online pre-web and paying attention to Usenet very early on

pretending Apu was ever acceptable is bullshit isn't it? I mean here they are getting called out on it 11 years ago
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jul/16/theaputragedy

i remember when i used the say how the Simpsons was great but "the last few" seasons haven't been up to par, and i realize it's probably been about twenty years since it's been near the peak (and even then it was on the descent a bit.)

sigh, that clip...

tbh what's on tv now isn't really the simpsons. this is a disappointing response but modern-day simpsons was never going to be capable of the smart + nuanced response this deserved.

we're all praying for an end to the depression at this point

that response is some bullshit you'd see in a libertarian meme cartoon

This is similar to recent Seinfeld bullshit in that the sheer witlessness is more shocking than the defiant commitment to bigotry if you stopped paying attention a long time ago. Like, ppl becoming more shitty when their shittiness is pointed out is not uncommon, and obv everyone knows they've lost it but how do you lose it this much?

what recent Seinfeld bullshit? as much as I love the show he's always had a huge blind spot when it comes to race

my original answer ITT was way wrong and I'm sorry for it

Simpsons used to be subversive (like 25 years ago) and most of the targets were the super rich, the media, idiot cops, etc. and now this, it feels like punching down in such a mean spirited cynical way, fuck this show & that smartass response

Let’s not invent some “always punching up” narrative about the show that gave us Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel

And said they wanted to blast Al Sharpton and Spike Lee into space

yea I think the Simpsons has always been fairly right-wing as a whole

television has always been fairly right-wing as a whole tbf

pretty sure guys in the 40s and 50s used to punch up tho

Twelve Tolerant Men

i was thinking of those gangster movie uppercuts

TV movie of 12 Angry Men where the racist guy is a 5 percenter still one of the most hilarious movies ever

feel free to invent the "someone said always punching up even though they just said 'mostly'" narrative

also wow they made fun of a white trash person totally the same as making fun of Indian American immigrants

http://12-geschworenen-die-hume-cronyn-mykelti-williamson-4-rcm0x1920u.jpg

L-R: this thread, Adam B

"white trash person"

I don't think it's fair to categorize the show as "fairly right-wing" or as liberal so much as always shooting at targets of opportunity. The three-eyed-fish episode where Mr. Burns ran for office took a dim-view of right-wing faux-populism, but there's also

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S03E21/1277580.jpg?b64lines=SSdMTCBCRSBCQUNLLiBZT1UgQ0FOJ1QgS0VFUAogVEhFIERFTU9DUkFUUyBPVVQgT0YgVEhFCiBXSElURSBIT1VTRSBGT1JFVkVS

hahahahahaha

xp-to-adam no one's making that false equivalence

they definitely had the very light version of the toxic "everyone's a target" crap animation shows jumped wholeheartedly into in the late 90s, but it was a little less obvious because the core of the writing was really that 90s middlebrow white dude view that we've mostly solved racism, sexism, and inequality and anyone still affected by those is probably just not working past it

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-djhW_W-QwQ4/VXKKXd9CX3I/AAAAAAAADSc/YdtVltmjH7M/s1600/belief-as-truth-1.jpg

totally thought this thread bump was about the molly ringwald piece. are we talking about that somewhere else?

NV, you're gonna give me nightmares

Stampy the elephant crashing both the Democratic and Republican national conventions is one of my all-time favorite political jokes.

https://playitagaindan.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/12-angry-men-george-c-scott.jpg

BUT THE WHITE TRASH PERSON DAMMIT

Homer was woke before any of you.

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E13/426975.jpg?b64lines=CiBJVCdTIFRSVUUhIElUJ1MgVFJVRSEKIFdFJ1JFIFNPIExBTUUu

(several xposts)

Some discussion of the Ringwald piece over at the John Hughes thread, though, oddly, it largely turned into a discussion of Baby's Day Out.

too bad there no other simpsons threads

are

Pretty sure somewhere on the web there is a right wing message board on which users are arguing to which extent the 90s Simpsons is on the left.

classic simpsons was never remotely right-wing -- the al sharpton/spike lee joke is from after that era, i remember being pissed off by it at the time. the jokes about democrats being soft on crime or giving away free money or whatever are clearly jokes about popular right-wing talking points.

classic simpsons was never remotely right-wing

John Swartzwelder, who wrote for the Simpsons from the start for 14 years and wrote more episodes than any other writer is a self-described "hardcover conservative", libertarian, and has been described as an "anti-environmentalist".

John Swartzwelder was pretty personally conservative but the show itself was massively anti-authoritarian from the beginning

Xpost

swartzwelder's views don't seem to have made it into the episodes he wrote. i guess he did write the episode where homer buys a gun, but i wouldn't say that episode was really pro-gun.

I mean he uses his gun as a remote