The Simpsons forged my childhood, but it's sad to see that they stopped so early while South Park managed to have good episodes since the beginning. RIP somehow.

Comparison with Gravity Falls:

I've made peace with it. Even if the later seasons fail to live up to the earlier ones, there are still more good episodes than many other shows have in total.

I think I stopped watching around season 20. Wtf happened at the end of season 23?

WTF. Look at season 30, this is baffling. How could the writers, directors, the network, etc all be okay with an entire season of a show where its own fans say most of the 23 episodes are bad!? Even if you're just doing it for the money, that doesn't sound sustainable...

That was the Lady Gaga episode.

I have so many questions too. Is it younger writers that aren't as good? Is it older writers that aren't adapting? Was this just the type of show that was amazing during its heyday and the times/audience changed too much? Or are people just being overly critical of the new stuff because of how good the old seasons were?

Lisa Goes Gaga

Having never been a Simpsons person, I started watching the show from the beginning last year and stopped at season 9 based on this chart. I'm sure there are some decent episodes later too, but I'd prefer not to watch it slowly decline

I think there is a bit of a hard limit on how much you can do with a show like this. Every single character has been "flanderized" (a term literally FROM the simpsons) to a point where they are complete one-dimensional caricatures, they have run out of organic stories from within the universe so they have to increasingly pull stories from the real world, but because its a network family show they have to make their conclusions "balanced" and that doesn't work in a world as polarized as ours actually is.

That is why South Park still works, because it has a smaller audience and doesn't have to pull a "balanced" view, they can actually take a position that would never fly on network television and therefore retain the approval of, at least, their core audience. The Simpsons has to keep from making anyone in the audience ANGRY and so therefore they cannot really please anyone either.

thanks to you I now know I watched approximately to season 23 or so.

I agree with the general decline but man every once in a while there is an episode that I can almost compare with the golden era. (Even if others disagree).

It's in the eye of the beholder. For me it's the pseudo realism of the feel of the storyline.

Pseudo since I still love the monorail episode and the escalator to nowhere.

Edit: also this chart ends early. There are several more seasons.

What a run, though. Almost ten years of knocking it out of the park.

Yeah, it dropped, but. If you were there, you remember it was magic for a long time.

Up yours, children!

Most shows would kill for that kind of run. 10 seasons so good that it has been able to continue on sheer momentum for nearly another 30.

S1-10 = peak

S11 - 18 = meh / mid

S19 - s25 = bad

S26 - S31 = absolute cinema dogshit

Im colorblind, can you recreate this in a wimp vs chad format?

I'm with you. Sure the golden age is over, but I'm still a fan of the new episodes. They still make great jokes from time to time.

Season 6, episode 3 was a clip show, in case anyone else was wondering what happened there.

I'm so glad that those aren't really a thing anymore.

Wow, the very top row and the furthest left column have terrible ratings.

Are y'all sure about that?

Even as a kid I hated clip episodes.

Sometimes they are, but ironically, as the clips weren't actually shown before. Like "Morty's Mind Blowers", and I'm pretty sure Community did it a few times.

Yeah. 1? 2?? It's like they weren't even trying. What's next? 3???

They don't make much sense nowadays, but when you didn't have access to the episodes and seasons were 20+ episodes it wasn't so bad. Plus when they got creative with the framing device I think it worked well.

Take for example the season 9 episode 11 episode "All Singing All Dancing", which you can see on the chart as the lowest rated episode of season 9. I still sing the "Paint Your Wagon" song or think of Snake's weird singing voice. Sure that could have been the B plot for a different episode, but the new parts of the episode we got was great.

But yes, they don't make sense anymore.

I still sometimes download the Treehouse of Horror episode. They're not very good, but at least sometimes there are vaguely interesting twists. You can see they're slightly higher rated than most other episodes. Season 14 has only 2 episodes in yellow not orange, the opener and closer, and the opener was that season's Treehouse of Horror.

Despite the colours, red isn't "bad", it's a 5 to 6 out of 10. It's mediocre.

In the early seasons the show was something you planned around because you didn't want to miss it. It would be what everyone was talking about the next day (at least for certain age groups). Now it's a show that probably people put on while they doom scroll.

If you look at lists of quotes from the Simpsons there are a lot of memorable ones:

• "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords"
• "You don't win friends with salad"
• " I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was, and now what I’m with isn’t it. And what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me."
• "Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter"
• "Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos"
• "My cat’s breath smells like cat food"

But, none of those is from a 2 digit season number, and we're now on season 37? 38?

What's especially amazing is how the quality and cost are going in opposite directions. The good seasons, 1-8, were ones where the voice actors were paid $30k per episode. 1998-2004 they were paid $125k per episode. That's about seasons 9-15 when the quality was already clearly dropping. Since around 2013 they're making about $400k per episode. That's season 24 or so, and look at how much the quality has already dropped. It's just amazing to me that it's profitable to have a show that's that expensive to make and yet is so consistently mediocre these days.

From the Wikipedia page:

The Simpsons has been named by Time as the greatest television series of the 20th century.

The 20th century ended in 1999. The last Simpsons episode from the 20th century was season 11 episode 9. You can see it was already in decline by then. The vast majority of the episodes were released in the 21st century. We're a quarter of the way to the 22nd century and they're still releasing them. But, it hasn't been good since the last century even if Homer's probably saying "it's just a little slimy, it's still good, it's still good!" (S7E5, 1995)

Good points. But I would argue that voice actors have far less control over how good an episode is going to be than the rest.

Yeah. It's just that the salaries of the voice actors are well known, and probably represent a large fraction of the cost per episode.

I really wonder what the writers' salaries are. That was what made the Simpsons so good, with so many quotable lines in the first 8 or 9 seasons. My guess is that the writers make a tiny fraction of what the voice actors make. If they paid writers $400k per episode, could they attract superstar writers who could re-capture the magic of those early seasons?

An absolutely goated show. You’re right, I should watch it again.

The Simpsons is like pizza, oral sex, or Star Trek. Even when it's bad it's still pretty good.