this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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The Simpsons
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Welcome to TheSimpsons, a community for discussing everything related to America's non-prehistoric cartoon family, The Simpsons!
Right about now, you're probably saying, "Troy, basically every post starts with 'Guess the Episode', is that all this community is?"
To which I say you've got some attitude, mister.
But no, any Simpsons content is allowed in this community, although we do ask that you keep the shitposting over in !simpsonsshitposting@sh.itjust.works.
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Guess the Episode "Rules"
- Post a screenshot from an episode of the Simpsons. Frinkiac being a popular source.
- If posting a GIF the file size should be less than 1MB, otherwise it may not be animated.
- Easy, a screenshot any who's seen the Simpsons would get.
- Medium, a screenshot that would take a moment for most people to get.
- Hard, a screenshot that someone only gets after you explain it to them.
- Genius at Work, a screenshot that makes someone go, "Yeah, that's from The Simpsons, the one where the family does the funny thing".
These "Rules" aren't real, so if you think of something clever, do that instead.
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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...
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?
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.
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:
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.
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?