I disagree. I only got cable after '01, so I watched episodes from seasons 13-16 in parallel with reruns of the older ones (sometimes one after the other) and I thought the difference was clear. In fact, I stopped watching when I ran out of unseen reruns.
I still watch it, but it's more like comfort food now.
I couldn't honestly say whether I think the show itself has declined though. When I first started watching, a member of the family had got cable TV (a rarity in those days), and taped episodes for us. We'd get a VHS full of episodes on grainy long-play once it was full, and we'd binge on them. I'm still not sure if I've ever seen the end of the episode where Bart goes to france on an exchange trip, and Springfield gets an Albian spy in return.
But it felt so new, so American, and so different to anything else we had on terrestrial TV. It was like TV was misbehaving!
If it had never happened, and started today fresh, it'd have nowhere near the same impact. There's a higher level of quality, and a higher level of access to it, than any sane person knows what to do with.
It was a diamond in the rough. I don't think it is anymore. But the rough has changed so drastically, that it's difficult to draw an isolated comparison.
Certain types of humor lend themselves to repeating and reliving, and get funnier that way. Think of all the people who quote the Simpsons to each other, or Family Guy, or heck even going back to Monty Python.
It's really hard to account for that aspect of people's feelings about old vs new Simpsons. Some jokes that were probably light chuckles at first viewing, have become iconic fodder for further humor in the years since. This is reinforced by time, but also by syndication.
It gets to the point where no possible new Simpsons joke will get the reaction as the old ones. New jokes just work in the brain differently from jokes we've lived with and referenced for years.
This is not unique to the Simpsons, it happens with any long-running show. The SNL "cowbell" or "David S. Pumpkins" sketches seemed kind of funny at first viewing, but the constant references since have made them seem way funnier.
This is wrong based off the wealth of Simpsons Instagram Meme accounts there are.. I am talking thousands of memes... Zero of them based off content past season 9 .. Why is that?
Because most people who saw the first 9 seasons over and over and over, thanks to syndication and DVDs, etc., haven't seen the seasons past 9 nearly as much. That's certainly true for me. I haven't seen most episodes in the past 5 years more than once or twice.
Also, the first 9 seasons were just that much better.
Thats a good point, but I have tried to watch the the show every year or two, just to see if it got funny again.. And the jokes are all bad, all satirical, homer is too stupid now.. also the characters voices are starting to sound weird and old..
It could be for some, though I remember distinctly feeling, years ago, that the episode called Homer Simpson vs The State of New York was the last solid episode, and the one with N*Sync was the first that I really didn't like and it was a marker for the transition to more farcical humor with celebrity cameos. It's just not my thing, and I gave the Simpsons many chances after that. There's a reason nearly all the current Simpsons memes come from the Golden Era.
I've been watching "The Simpsons" since season 1 and I think the decline described here is absolutely correct. The show is a zombie version of itself, but I still watch it.
I'd say there are usually about 4 really good shows per season. Most of them are pretty forgettable, and none of them are as funny as the show was 25 years ago.
Interesting it's possible, but there are explanations out there that aren't based on nostalgia but actually joke complexity among other things: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk
Keep in mind the decline started over 20 years ago. It probably stopped declining a long time ago (around 15 years?), and reached what people consider its current quality level.