[cabaalis]

How much of this is not attributable to quality but instead to streaming options?

I watched The Simpsons for most of my childhood, up until college when I was too busy working and studying--most of my TV time then went to Stargate SG-1 and other Sci-fi.

Futurama and Family Guy were in the mix as well up until that time. However, I HAVE still watched Futurama and Family Guy in adulthood, because they were available to stream online! If there are good Simpsons options to stream, without picking up another monthly charge, I'd probably still watch them.

[kevinmchugh]

Planet Simpson was published in 2004 and has a very similar definition for the Golden Age to the one used in this article and its predecessor. If memory serves, Planet Simpson explains the definition using contemporaneous online reactions to "Principal and the Pauper". Either way, both Principal and the Pauper and Planet Simpson predate the streaming age by many years.

[tombert]

In some fairness, buying the DVDs used on eBay for the first 10 seasons isn't terribly expensive. I got some of them as cheap as four dollars. I spent a few afternoons ripping all of them and adding them to my streaming server.

I realize that most people don't have streaming servers, but I think most of the people here probably have something that can read off a flash drive?

[PacifyFish]

As crazy as this feels to say, ordering a dvd and figuring out a way to consume it in this day and age is a huge ask! I haven’t had a DVD player in my house for about 6 years now & no CD-ROM drive in my laptop.

And, again I can hardly believe I’m saying this, it would be such a hassle to physically insert the disk when I felt like watching!

It’s got to be on HBO/Netflix/Hulu/Amazon or available on demand from my tv provider or I won’t watch it outside of theaters. Convenience has bested my better judgement shrugging emoticon

[Retric]

If the show is not worth inserting a DVD then it's probably not worth watching IMO.

PS: External DVD drives are ~25$.

[gutnor]

That's not the whole effort involved though.

You first need to either remember, or somehow get hints somewhere that the content exists.

Then you need to search it, in this case, first on all the streaming option.

Then you need to find it on a physical media, which means delivery. Each season of the Simpson is worth 1 to 2 months of Netflix. Watching all the episode is going to cost you the equivalent of 2 years of streaming across all the platforms you use.

Then you still need to go to the trouble of using the physical container. Which is not guaranteed to work even if you have the hardware. DVD DRM have not become more tolerant over the years and if you have older hardware you may not be able to use it at all.

This is some non negligible commitment, you really have to want to watch the Simpson or need a serious shortcut in some of those steps (eg: finding a pile of Simpsons DVD at goodwill). There is just too much competition for people time.

[darpa_escapee]

People drive to Redbox locations to rent DVDs from vending machines. I think you're overestimating the amount of effort it takes to buy DVDs on eBay.

[tombert]

I actually bought my DVD drive specifically for this Simpsons-project, but I've found it has been handy since then to have it lying around. Occasionally I have an old DOS game I want to play, or a more obscure CD that I want to rip, that I wouldn't have bothered with before, but now, why the hell not?

[drb91]

I would not. The Simpsons seem inherently antiquated now. (To me! This is an opinion, not an assertion!) It’s hard to put my finger on why I feel like this, but I think a large part is that it only recognizes the stresses and anxieties we had leaving the reagan era.

This is not to say, by any means, that the humor doesn’t hold up. It does! But it doesn’t help soothe living in a capitalist-realist society the way, say, Futurama or Idiocracy do. It seems to more address the anxiety of trying to meet the impossible standards of society.

EDIT: meanwhile, someone in another thread introduced me to Max Headroom. That still holds up today.

[this_user]

The Simpsons were pushing the envelope when the show came out, doing things that were considered almost radical at the time. But they are just stuck in time, following their formula while subsequent animated shows (e.g. South Park) have gone much farther than the Simpsons ever did.

The show often also feels like the writers are just rehashing old ideas, and there seem to be a few archetypes of stories that just keep popping up over and over again: "Homer is an incompetent idiot, but comes through for his family when needed", "Lisa feels alienated, because she's much smarter than the rest of the family", "Bart is a bad student and gets into trouble", "Marge is bored with her existence as a housewife and tries to break out of the monotony". At some point you should just admit that you have done everything you would with a concept and call it a day instead of dragging things out.

[ghaff]

That's true of a lot of long-running shows. Even if they don't become worse in the sense that individual episodes are worse taken in isolation, they're often just repetitious and, as you say, stuck in time.

You see this elsewhere too. In comic strips, for example, Dilbert is mostly stuck in some 90s version of cubicle life at a big company like Pac Bell. Don't really reaad it any longer but even when nothing is wrong with a given strip I've probably seen some version of it 10 times before.

[gaius]

Dilbert is mostly stuck in some 90s version of cubicle life at a big company like Pac Bell

And Garfield. The cat hates Mondays and loves lasagna, we get it...

[eqdw]

Strong disagree. The farther I get into my career the more Dilbert feels like exactly my current experience.

[Nasrudith]

I think it is economic and educational and the norms shifting. Their circumstances are increasingly implausible and things are pretty decomputerized. They have accidentally become a period piece as time passes them by.

While the house quality varies according to gag it is a large and well appointed house with one income from someone without a college degree from working at the plant in a physically undemanding is if not anchronistic increasingly less and less everyman representative. Even married people who are well off tend towards dual income households these days for one. The economy is far more service than industrial and the industrial has largely skilled up and automated. And that goes without discrediting of so many past tropes by time. Well meaning wholesome dolt manages to fail to fit the milieu in many ways and has been considered still overused decades ago even with their disapperance.

[grenoire]

The average ratings are unlikely to be influenced given the high sample sizes for the ratings on IMDB. I don't really see how else you are connecting ratings to streaming options...

[chrxr]

If you have any reasonable cable package or something like Sling, you get access to the Simpsons World roku app or site which allows you to stream every episode.

http://www.simpsonsworld.com/

[adzm]

Is there even a way to (legally) stream all of the Simpsons? I have never been able to find a place that streams the older seasons. I'd even pay for something if it was a reasonable service. I remember being disappointed that Hulu had the Simpsons, but limited to only the newer ones we don't enjoy.

[stupidbird]

If anything, it would be fairly minute. The decline in quality is apparent.