The Absolute Worst of Modern Simpsons

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Something really grossed me out about this episode. Marge has a line “I used to want to be as perfect as a Disney Princess” or something like that. And it’s just subliminal advertising for Disney. And it’s not funny. Old Simpsons used to bring up Disney to point out this exact type of hypocrisy, or corporate shilling. But now they’ve become exactly what they used to satire

When you have a flashback about the show's protagonist's childhood set in the same decade the show itself started, it's past the time to retire it for good.

The show started with Bart & Lisa being 90s kids. Now Homer and Marge are the 90s kids.

Bart and Lisa sharing a joint and Marge saying Maggies room was where she used to grow weed, was enough for me to realize the show was long dead.

So much of this show's foundation is built on 1990. The nuclear power plant, the conflict about whether or not to go to church, the novelty of edgy comics and video games, and America in general moving from an old-fashioned way of life to "the MTV era" as they called it. Look at the color palette and technology/industry of Springfield. It's as if it takes place in the old TMNT cartoon, but we're just watching the people instead of the superheros. Bart and Lisa feel like out-of-touch aliens when you try to put them into the situations of today's youth. Entire characters are lacking their fundamental context, like Dr. Hibbert being a parody of Cliff Huxtable with his loud sweaters, and Krusty being a parody of old hokey Howdy-Doody style TV shows. When you hack the show into pieces and try to fit it into the modern context, it's just a big pile of nonsense with absolutely no charm. They don't even have the old interesting Simpsons color palettes anymore. It's just a normal-colored world, except the people are yellow and the Simpsons' house is pink and orange.

10 years from now they’re gonna do an episode where Homer and Marge are in high school during COVID times

Julie Kavner’s voice was always gravely because she was born with a vocal chord cyst, but you can really tell the difference between the OG Marge voice and the Marge of today. When she started she was in her 30s and she’s 71 now! Her poor throat!

I agree with you about continuity. Homer’s Dad fought in WW2 but also has a kid who was in school for Y2K

The Simpson's used to write jokes about The Krusty The Clown show, in which a dried up comedian just stopped caring about anything other than a quick buck. The fact that Krusty kept dragging the show out for decades after this point was the joke. Little did we know that the entire gag would be a premonition of what The Simpson's itself would become.

Okay. As someone who hasn't watched an "new" episode of The Simpsons in... dare I say a decade? hearing what Marge sounds like now is honestly heartbreaking. Now I'm just sad.

it’s crazy how i went from hoping this show would never end, to hoping the show would just hurry and end before they lose the remaining respect they still have.

So Marge was in high school in 1999. And later, in 1989, she was married with three children. This is why it's best on shows like this not to reference things that can be so easily dated. Of course, this problem could have been avoided if they ended the show when it was last funny, around 1999.

Their decision to modernize the characters and the show killed it.

Whoever told you Modern Simpsons is good again were absolutely trying to bait you into having a bad time

The over-reliance on guest stars is another problem - when it was done in the golden years, it was in a way that actually made logical sense to the plot, or else, the celebrities would voice a new character. Now, they've got all sorts of random stars just dropping in on Springfield and befriending the Simpsons, and the writers don't think the audience is smart enough to know who they are, so there's always some forced dialogue of Lisa stating the celebrity's name and what they're famous for, just to make sure we get it. This is something that used to be a desperation move to juice the ratings on a tired, declining sitcom - have some celebrity show up and build an episode out of it, in other words, the sort of thing the Simpsons used to mock, but, now, its become their whole business model.

What annoys me is how the show is now one big commercial for Disney. They constantly have to remind you their owned by Disney

I think you hit the nail on the head when you stated that originally the writers were drawing from their own experiences, while now it’s just a bunch stale stereotypes

The show looks so unusually clean and polished, sanitized compared to the early seasons.

I didn't think it would get weirder than Bart and Lisa having no idea what a CRT TV is, but here we are with Marge having made a high school production about Y2K when as far as we can tell she was already a mother of three in 1989