The Simpsons is memetically famous for its Seasonal Rot. However, a lot of the problems with the show started back in the "golden age" of the show, if not its very beginning. Enough so to warrant its own page.
- Back when it started, the series was revolutionary when compared to other cynical shows centered on a Dysfunctional Family because it was an animated show set in Comic-Book Time and with Negative Continuity. The family could go anywhere, interact with anyone, and do anything without having to care about budget constraints, actors that wanted to leave or children that grew up. However, after 20 years that original strength has turned into its biggest constraint. Bart and Lisa behave like teenagers, but they are still 10 and 8 and go to the same elementary school, so the writers can't make them face the actual teenage (or young adult, or middle-age) problems they would be dealing with by now if the show was live-action or used Webcomic Time; Marge and Homer have gone through countless marriage crises and been thrown into jail countless times, but they have to go back home together at the end; Maggie feels more like a prop than a character in most episodes because the writers can't think of new plot-lines starring a baby, etc. As a result, the show has become stalled and boring.
- The blog Dead Homer Society argues that the show's decline began in earnest as early as Seasons 7-8
, generally considered part of the show's Golden Age. Due to several circumstances, from the show's popularity and exhaustion of fresh story-lines to turnover on the writing staff, the show began more frequently incorporating the same hoary sitcom Tropes and cliches that, until then, it had eschewed or mocked. Examples cited include "Marge Be Not Proud", a Very Special Episode with more hamfisted emotion and character beats than similar, previous episodes; "Burns, Baby, Burns" which both incorporates a celebrity guest star (Rodney Dangerfield, in this case) who is poorly integrated into the show's world and features an absurdly convoluted Zany Scheme by Homer to resolve the plot; "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", which begins the writers' habit of sniping at critical fans; and, more generally, an increase in wacky sitcom stories complete with broad humor, exaggerated characterizations, and over-the-top action scenes (not helping is that many of said action scenes also have the problem of being without either believable peril or compelling stakes). These flaws are usually held in check and the seasons remain mostly solid, but it's clear that the faults ascribed to Mike Scully's tenure as showrunner (which began in Season Nine) were already present in abundance. - A specific instance of this was "Homer's Enemy" - it's well-remembered as one of the show's best episodes, but it also spelled trouble in that it's essentially the show finally admitting how far it's strayed from its original premise. The initial concept of the series, after all, was that the Simpsons were a more realistic family than others on TV and had to face actual problems (dysfunctionality, money troubles, an uncaring community), and "Homer's Enemy" is based on the premise that the family seems undeservedly Born Lucky, and has experienced constant luxuries as a result of being cartoon characters, which would make their experiences alien to a normal, hardworking individual. Part of the reason it was well-received (and that the writers did it to begin with) was that it was believed the show was in its twilight years, and therefore a little Lampshade Hanging of how silly the show had gotten wasn't a bad thing. (Indeed, "Homer's Enemy" remains one of the most popular choices for Fanon Discontinuity-steeped "this is the last episode" declarations.) But then, the acknowledged premise of this episode became the show's status quo, and the series continued for several more seasons, probably to eternity, leaving many viewers in a similar position to Frank Grimes.
- Pop culture references, including cutaway gags and episode-length spoofs, were a staple of The Simpsons even in its earliest seasons (eg. "Bart the General" riffing on Patton, "Kamp Krusty" on Apocalypse Now, "Stark Raving Dad" on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "Rosebud" on Citizen Kane, etc.). Generally, though, earlier episodes tend to spoof classic movies and TV shows, where later episodes tend to parody then-recent films or cultural trends. Which wouldn't necessarily be bad, except most such episodes wind up only spoofing a film/show's most obvious aspects, and their subjects are far more likely to become completely forgotten soon after (if they haven't already). This isn't helped by the episodes taking at least a year to make.
- One of the show's favorite tactics since the earliest seasons is to start off the first act with an unrelated plot. For instance, "Homer Badman"'s first act is about Homer and Marge going to a candy convention, while the rest of the story deals with Homer being falsely accused of sexual harassment and dealing with the fallout. It worked in earlier episodes because the opening plot always leads into the main plot (Homer is accused by the babysitter after he tries to pull a piece of candy he stole from the convention off of her butt). As time went on, though, the transitions between plots became increasingly abrupt and threadbare, to the point that these first-act plots could probably be cut from the episode entirely, and are used as little more than padding because the main plot can't stand up on its own. Worse, if the main plot is too weak, the audience ends up wishing they had settled for the first-act plot. For example, one common criticism of "Simpson Safari" is that the initial plot about the strike is an interesting story that deserved a whole episode, while the main plot is just the typical "The Simpsons travel to X" story.
- "Lisa Goes Gaga" is widely seen as the nadir of the show in terms of celebrity guests, with many people being disgusted by how the series treats their Celebrity Voice Actor as a glorious, messianic figure who saves the family. But the root of this issue lies in Season 1's "Moaning Lisa" and Season 2's "Lisa's Substitute", often considered some of the show's most soulful episodes — they even focus on Lisa, just like "Lisa Goes Gaga." The difference is that in those episodes, neither Ron Taylor nor Dustin Hoffman note play themselves — they're likeable, competent, friendly characters who happen to be played by celebrities, which makes it feel like the celebrity lent their talent to bringing the character to life. When celebrities do go As Themselves in earlier seasons, it's in incidental roles, with no small amount of Adam Westing (for example, Leonard Nimoy is portrayed as an insufferable weirdo, Mark Hamill is a whiny Butt-Monkey and a sell-out, Gary Coleman is a Cloudcuckoolander security guard and Stan Lee is a senile fool who can't tell reality apart from fiction). These celebrities are either used to further characters or add jokes to an episode, not being added for their own sake, and never in such a manner that makes the episode feel like it's fellating their ego — something that later episodes roundly ignore.
- "Homer at the Bat" and "Krusty Gets Kancelled" in Seasons 3 and 4 respectively could be seen as harbingers of things to come. Both feature a record number of celebrity guest stars in plots that mostly glorify them (a lineup of baseball stars presented as the greatest in the world, a gaggle of Hollywood personalities depicted as the cream of the A-list), with jokes that, while funny, take their awesomeness for granted (think of Bette Midler blasting Snake off the road out of her strident defense of the environment). What makes it work in those episodes is that the former spends most of its runtime gleefully clobbering its guest stars with misfortune, while the latter confines its guest stars to the third act and treats them as mostly incidental — and gets laughs out of that.
- The Season 3 opener "Stark Raving Dad" is another harbinger. Michael Jackson doesn't appear As Himself, but rather someone who affects his voice and personality, and performed under a pseudonym as Dustin Hoffman had in "Lisa's Substitute" — he didn't even perform the character's singing. However, from its original airing, it was an Open Secret that he was the guest voice—and more importantly, the real Jackson is beloved by all in-universe, which is why it's a huge deal that Homer is apparently bringing him to the Simpsons' house and why Leon Kompowski adopted his persona in the first place. Between this and Leon helping out (again!) Lisa regarding her Forgotten Birthday, it's as idealized a celebrity portrayal as any the show had, and next to no comedy is mined at Jackson's expense. This is partially because he explicitly approached the show to perform on it and had a hand in shaping the episode's plot. The portrayal ultimately factored into why it became a Missing Episode in 2019note , in that the producers realized that his doing the show (and also having Bart and Homer make appearances in the music video for "Black or White" a few weeks after the episode's premiere; prior to this, he'd also written "Do the Bartman" under a pseudonym) may have been a way to burnish his image with kids for sinister purposes connected to his allegations.
- "Rubber-band reality" is a term coined by Matt Groening that was originally meant to allow for more out-there gags. It dictated that the show could have absurd, silly, or unrealistic gags, so long as they were only gags and quickly ignored afterward — essentially, they could "stretch" the reality of the show, but they would always have to let it "snap back." For instance, in "Last Exit To Springfield," Burns breaks out a pair of Killer Robots in the hopes of using them to replace his striking employees, but the scene only lasts a few seconds and has no bearing on the plot, which remains fairly down-to-earth. As the series went on, the "rubber band" of reality would be stretched further and further, to the point where they started forgetting to snap it back altogether — as early as Season 6, one episode features berserk theme park animatronics not far distinct from the earlier robots trying to murder the family as the episode's climax. By Season 11, which features magical jockey elves, octuplets, tomacco, and the family casually hanging out with celebrities, the rubber-band reality turned the Simpsons universe into a World of Weirdness.
- A common critique of later-run "Treehouse of Horror" episodes is that they lost their original horror theming, with most later episodes parodying standard Hollywood blockbusters. As far back as "Treehouse of Horror III", there's "King Homer", which does parody an old-school monster film but isn't really horror-themed specifically, but it's the odd one out, and King Kong (1933) does fit somewhat into the usual fare. However, the first episode to really exemplify this is "Treehouse of Horror X"'s "Desperately Xeeking Xena"—a pure Superhero Episode with little to no horror involved. It tends to be regarded as one of the funnier episodes of the season, and that segment is easily the most popular of the three. Before long, though, having at least one segment that isn't parodying a horror story or franchise became the norm, and a few, such as "XXII", feature no horror segments whatsoever, meaning the only horror theming involved is being more willing to kill characters off. It certainly doesn't help that the show started to do considerably more Three Shorts-based episodes with a similar non-canon conceit, such as "Simpsons Tall Tales" or "Simpsons Bible Stories", which made "Treehouse of Horror" a lot less special.
- Compounding the issue, the Treehouse of Horror episodes' popularity led to concepts usually exclusive to it to bleed into the rest of the show, including the infamous "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner" episode, about a trip to Kang and Kodos' planet. Other episodes that function as glorified "Treehouse" episodes include "Halloween of Horror", "The Serfsons", "Thanksgiving of Horror" (another production-friendly Three Shorts special) and "Not It". But the issue goes back to, again, "The Springfield Files" - the first appearance of one of the "Treehouse"-exclusive aliens outside its element.
- The Couch Gag was one of the show's most beloved elements from the start for providing new jokes and weird imagery, but on occasion, as early as Season 4, it was used to stretch a rather light episode out. In particular, the "circus" couch gag from "Lisa's First Word" was explicitly created to pad the run-time, being twenty-three seconds (not counting the rest of the opening), and went on to appear in a total of eight episodes. One episode (which, to be fair, is a Clip Show) plays twelve couch gags in succession, including the circus gag, taking up a whole minute of screen-time. The thing is, in early seasons, long couch gags are rare; aside from the above two and not counting the changed credits for Treehouse of Horror, not one Couch Gag in the first eight seasons goes over fifteen seconds, and most last about four. It is, after all, a gag — a quick joke. By the later seasons, though, long couch gags started to show up more and more often, with the show breaking its own record multiple times; post-Season 20 or so, a twenty-three-second couch gag wouldn't even be in the top half. The show even turned the gag into a publicity stunt, doing things like hiring other animators or making extended references to other shows airing. Making things even worse is the shift to a four-act structure and episodes getting noticeably shorter in run-time to squeeze in more ads, meaning that on top of being longer, the extended couch gags began to eat up larger portions of the episodes. It's estimated that some episodes would, with their opening sequences removed, be about six minutes shorter than their older counterparts.
- "That '90s Show" is despised for its attempt to invoke a Sliding Timescale... which was around even in the celebrated original set of flashback episodes. Most obviously, "I Married Marge" is dated to 1980 and "Lisa's First Word" to 1984, even though they take place two years apart. note But overall, bar a few jokes about The Empire Strikes Back and the '84 Olympics, the episodes fit into Broad Strokes well enough for viewers to accept that they were born in the early '80s, especially given that it was a difference of only two years. However, "That '90s Show" dates itself to ending at 1998, and with events that are supposed to take place before the other two, a difference of eighteen years — that's a bit much. What's more, the earlier episodes are clearly based around questions like "how did Homer and Marge get married?" or "what was Lisa's birth like?", with the '80s references being set dressing. Meanwhile, "That '90s Show" is built from the ground up around the question of "what were Homer and Marge like in the 90s?" and consists of nothing but references to 1990s pop culture—particularly baffling when the answer to that question is "the first eleven seasons of the show." On top of that, a previous flashback episode, "Lisa's Sax", more successfully applies the Sliding Timescale by being set in 1990 while having her still be a toddler.
- Many people dislike later seasons' tendency to focus heavily on liberal social/political issues. Thing is, the show had episodes like this back in the Golden Age, like "Lisa the Vegetarian" and "Homer's Phobia". The main difference is, in the older episodes, it feels as if the writers truly cared about the issues in question, and episodes such as "The Cartridge Family" and "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" present the whole thing as at least a bit nuanced. In later seasons, it seems like the show only cares about liberal issues to appear progressive, and it frequently ends up bungling that (including the notorious "There's Something About Marrying", which indulges gay stereotypes heavily and can even come off as regressive due to its ending, in which Patty dumps her fiancee, Veronica, at the altar when Marge reveals that she's actually a man. Viewers wouldn't be to blame if they interpreted it as a transgender woman being humiliatingly outed).
- The infamous Season 9 (and created as part of Season 8) episode "The Principal and the Pauper"—where it's "revealed" that Principal Skinner is actually a Former Teen Rebel named Armin Tamzarian, and Agnes isn't really his mother—is often cited as a major turning point for the show, with some fans even citing it as the beginning of its Seasonal Rot. Viewed on its own, though, most of Season 9 (including "Principal") isn't bad; there are plenty of memorable stories, great lines, and funny jokes, and the show's writing didn't go noticeably downhill until a few seasons later that. But "The Principal and the Pauper" is still infamous because it's one of the first episodes that throws a character's established backstory and characterization out the window for the sake of a joke, demonstrating that the writers had started to care more about getting laughs—at any cost—than about building memorable characters and believable stories, when previously the show had derived much of its humor from character comedy and interaction. Because of that, it's often held up as the moment when The Simpsons started to lose the elements that made it so unique in its golden years.
- The root idea of the episode, a massive retcon to an established character's backstory, was fairly common, especially in the prior few seasons. Season 7 alone has episodes focusing on the reveals that Homer has an estranged mother, Jebediah Springfield was a criminal, Abe is a war hero, Apu is an illegal immigrant, and Itchy and Scratchy were plagiarized. The difference is twofold: first, while these episodes are retcons, they don't outright contradict much, nor did they significantly change how the audience viewed those characters. Second, all of these revelations were pretty easy to spin into comedic stories. "The Principal and the Pauper" not only overwrites Skinner's well-established personality, but the concept turned out to be so convoluted that it drags the episode down as a whole. Between the need to establish Skinner's new backstory, the attempts to show the various emotional impacts, and the attempts at meta-analysis common to the era, it ended up being too light on jokes for the audience to not take it seriously. Indeed, Status Quo Is God is invoked to bury the revelations about Skinner within the same episode, which the writers admitted is a jab at what they believed fans would do if something didn't go their way. After a while, the revelations themselves were retconned entirely.
- Homer's shift from a lazy, dimwitted everyman to an obnoxious asshole who wouldn't be out of place among the Looney Tunes can be traced back to "Homer Goes to College", which even named the trope Zany Scheme due to Homer's continual attempts at making wacky plans and pranks. The difference is that this is meant to be out-of-character; the entire point of the episode is that Homer is doing this because he's copying college movie tropes and thinks this is what he's supposed to be doing, and the other characters react to his antics realistically. Later seasons, though, turn it into his default mode of behavior, and make him a hardcore Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist.
- While Apu wasn't always the best representation of Indian and Southern Asians, his depiction didn't become too problematic until after the series' Golden Age ended. During the Simpsons' start and subsequent Golden Age, Apu was one of the few positive depictions of a Southern Asian on mainstream American television in the 90s. While Apu was a stereotype, he did have some nuances as he wasn't overly defined by his Hindu faith, can run a successful business and is generally a flawed but nice guy. It also helps that many initial Apu-centric episodes like "Much Apu About Nothing" endeared him as a hard-working immigrant who genuinely loves his adopted country. However, as the show progressed, Apu's stereotypical traits were gradually exaggerated — if anything, they got worse — with later seasons turning him into a dishonest salesman whose workaholic tendencies are just an excuse to avoid his family. It also didn't help that the writers began using Apu more as a punchline for racist jokes like when "Midnight Rx" showed Apu getting bullied by Flanders for his Hindu faith and was later mistaken for a Muslim terrorist. Rather than evolve with the times to become more respectful of Indian representation, Apu only regressed into an unflattering and problematic caricature.
- Many fans complain about how the vast majority of later Sideshow Bob episodes (starting with "Day of the Jackanapes") focus on him wanting to get revenge on the Simpson family in general and Bart in particular, as opposed to earlier episodes where his goals are more varied. This, they contend, turned Bob into a caricature of himself, thus making him a less interesting character and villain. What many of these complaints don't address is the fact that, even in early episodes, Bob often makes death threats against Bart (or tries to do worse to him) and is a thorn in the Simpsons' side note . The difference is that Bob avenging himself on the Simpsons is usually a side goal, rather than his main objective or underlying motivation. Not helping matters is the fact that Bob's monomaniacal focus on the family seems almost compulsive at times and makes his episodes far more repetitive, which the writers try to compensate for by making his plans increasingly complicated note , a tactic that inevitably brought diminishing returns—especially since they became more and more reliant on factors he has no reasonable way to predict, influence or account for.
- When public response to the 2021 Disney+ Fake Crossover shorts that cross the Simpsons' universe with those of Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was largely disappointment at how the series was "reduced" to a promotional tool for other Disney-owned franchises. Some viewers point out that the show did crossover episodes in the Golden Age, with "A Star Is Burns" (The Critic) and especially "The Springfield Files" (The X-Files). However, while the former was controversial at the time — Matt Groening found the concept of using his show to boost a newer one distasteful enough to leave his name off the episode — both episodes have clever plots that could have easily been retooled into standalone Simpsons stories, with extra spice via the cheeky incorporation of characters from other shows. By comparison, the Disney+ shorts are more trend-chasing stunts piggybacking off of more popular franchises, dependent on the crossover to exist at all.
- Entering its fourth decade, the show has been criticized for giving unsympathetic characters happy endings, which clashes with the original portrayal of Springfield as a dysfunctional town full of unhappy people. Of course, Homer and Marge are a textbook example of Ugly Guy, Hot Wife, even if earlier seasons did imply Marge looked somewhat dowdy and plain, producers made clear Homer was "lucky to have her". But later seasons put several characters in a similar position - Comic Book Guy's wife is a Genki Girl who looks to be about half his age and seems to be a wish fulfilment fantasy, a Japanese manga artist who loves cosplay and is strangely devoted to him. Moe's fianceè, despite her short stature, was considered beautiful by Homer and the other barflies, took him back despite his insulting behavior and accepted a crappy marriage proposal, abandoning her nice house to live in his basement apartment. The annoying failure and Sadist Teacher Mr. Largo suddenly married a polite-looking gentleman, Obnoxious In-Law Patty is shown having a recurring girlfriend, Violent Glaswegian Groundskeeper Willie got an episode where he married his attractive former flame who's willing to move into his shack with him, and even Krusty and Mr. Burns got happy endings in relationships with a former fan turned TV host and retired actress, respectively (although those last two were ignored due to Negative Continuity.)
- The tendency for the show to depict Bart as a Future Loser stretches back to "Lisa's Wedding", which depicts him in his mid-20s as a wrecking-ball operator and double-divorcee who frequents strip-clubs. While dark, his portrayal there still feels relatively positive given that Bart isn't the focus of the episode (which is instead predominately about the relationship between Homer and Lisa), and he seems fairly happy with his own life and is shown to have a good relationship with his family* Later Flash Forward episodes would focus on Bart instead being utterly miserable and estranged from his own family, a trope which would come off as more cruel and depressing given that it amounts to punishment to him being a bad kid in 4th grade.
