The Absolute Worst of Modern Simpsons

The Simpsons is currently on its 33rd season, and kicked off with a rough one: "The Star of the Backstage", following Marge trying reassemble her 1999 high school musical. The Golden Age is...long gone.

[nickwood]

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

[MrOrgeston]

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.

[Dinosaurprince]

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.

[ultramagnus]

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

[JakeWerkmeister]

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.

[AndorRobotnik]

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

[pearsareawful]

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

[RideMyLighting]

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

[SirIkeMedia]

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

[starkillersneed]

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.

[Kaboomboo]

The show has been bad twice as long as it was good. That fact that we can still regard it as a "great show", or at least "once a great show" despite so many years of mediocrity, tells you how good it truly was.

[dingdongfootball]

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!

[grahamphillips]

When the show began, Homer was a Boomer. Now, he's a millennial.

[JtTorsoWinabego]

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

[JTMitchell]

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.

[CJ-]

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

[Foxheart]

I've heard people mention how bad Julie Kavner's voice had gotten but my god... hearing it here for the first is absolutely blowing my mind. Let the poor lady's vocal cords rest

[tubeguy]

Marge was in highschool during y2k? Jesus Christ, just imagine in ten years they will be showing Homer in school when LMFAO was a thing lol

[cormacthem]

I can appreciate the fact they kept the same voice actress but Marge’s voice is unfortunately tearing my eardrums in its current condition. Maybe they could modify it somehow to both put less strain on Julie Kavner and on us.

[abysses]

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.