[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.