What were you doing on January 20, 1991? The day that ‘The Simpsons’ began their journey on TVE 1 with ‘The babysitter attacks again’, and they did not leave our houses until In October 2017, Antena 3 decided to remove them from working noon and, a year later, also remove them from the weekend. The 26 years that the series aired on a large channel in Spain before making the leap to Disney+ were a paradise in which the episodes were repeated over and over again until all of us millennials learned their jokes by heart. And now we have to face the hardest truth in the world: ‘The Simpsons’ are a thing of old.
I was cool but then they changed the vibe
Do you remember when our parents They told us about series like ‘Los chiripitifláuticos’ or ‘Los payasos de tele’ And what did things from a billion years ago look like to us? From the end of the first example to the first episode of ‘The Simpsons’ in Spain, 16 years passed. For comparison, season 34 of Matt Groening’s series is being broadcast… And Gen Z she has gotten so bored with our constant references to episodes from more than two decades ago that have directly come to nod in agreement and ignore the subject.
I’m not saying that ‘The Simpsons’ was a bad series, far from it! But yes that the phrases that many of us thought were going to become a new proverb modern (“The moral is: don’t make an effort”; “For alcohol, both the cause and the solution of all life’s problems”; “He will have all the money in the world, but there will be something he will never be able to buy: a dinosaur” …) now they are old. In a very short time we have gone from being young repeating phrases that only we understood to become Grandpa repeating “Sink the carrier!”.
Think about the feeling of starting to watch ‘The Simpsons’ around season 14 or 15, and all you see is those caricatures of themselves, with nasty plots, unfortunate jokes and for whom it is impossible to feel affection. Chances are you have no intention of seeing if indeed the “good seasons” are, and you let them fall into oblivion as a faded pop culture icon. The undeniable decline in quality for almost twenty years has greatly affected the perspective of the inhabitants of Springfield in an entire generation that did not experience the crushing and repetition of episodes with excellent quality.
Old man yells at a cloud
Times have also changed for animated series for adults. In the 90s there was (in the mainstream) nothing more transgressive than ‘The Simpsons’, and its writers room had stars of the future like Conan O’Brien or tireless writers like John Swartzwelder in a perfect team. Now there are so many “transgressive” series that it is very difficult to gather the stars of yesterday in a room: how are we going to ask a fifteen-year-old boy to watch a series from more than thirty years ago if he has ‘Rick and Morty’, ‘Solar Opposites’ and ‘Family Guy’ at a click?
The break that Matt Groening’s drawings represented with what had been done up to that moment was immeasurable, but its inevitable absorption into popular culture it made Bart the most likable rascal on television (as was accentuated in an episode of ‘South Park’ in which Cartman met him and made a fool of him) and Homer a recognizable figure rather than a chiaroscuro character. ‘The Simpsons’ are to a new generation what ‘I love Lucy’ is to us. Nobody denies its television importance, but only a few brave people will dare to see it.
To add sauce to the subject, it is true that the series has improved remarkably in recent seasons, but becoming a new type of format: the self-referential. The current ‘Simpsons’ are funnier the more you catch the references they make to its more than 700 episodes, basing entire episodes on the transgression of what happened a lot of seasons ago. In other words: the series itself is fencing off access to whoever wants to start over.
Everything has gone to ask of Milhouse
As much as the media insist on saying that they continue as usual or that they have not lost their bite, ‘The Simpsons’ have lost validity, interest and position, going from being one of the best series ever to simple Disney mascots and instantly recognizable merchandising objects. It is not strange: after all, they are currently addressing an audience with economic capacity that may no longer watch the series but, moved by nostalgia and routine, He is going to get the dolls that are needed.
‘The Simpsons’ are Facebook, a thing that is still there and that you remember but to which only the same ones who did ten years ago continue to enter, and in which young people have no interest. This does not mean that we have to change our references for others that have replaced them, nor that we should stop finding a happy place in the classic episodes: simply you have to be aware that what used to be a status of youth is now that of old age. And nothing happens.
‘The Simpsons’ is my favorite series from season 3 to season 9. I think that such a perfect conjunction of Untouchable scripts, infinite cast, perfect jokes and plots as intelligent as groundbreaking. But it’s perfectly normal for a teenager to be at a loss for what to say if we tell them they can’t win anything with a salad, croon something about bouncy loafers, or wonder if something’s happened to Lenny, our Lenny. It is the law of life.