I have been undertaking a massive project, an on-and-off thing, where the goal is to watch and review every single Simpsons episode. My initial goal with this project was to find when, why and how the show declined in quality, and I believe now I’ve figured out this mystery, and could explain it to you, using various qualifiers that combine into making what was once a great show decline in quality.
But first, some history. Being a person who’s young life was dominated by the show, I didn’t realise back then that the show had changed in quality. I suppose when you’re young, you don’t know what sucks. If you grow up on a diet of bad TV or on bad video games, then you’ll learn to think things that are bad, as good somehow.
My history with the show is fairly complex. I grew up during the teen seasons of the Simpsons, so I missed the Golden Era. I saw re-runs of many episodes on Sky, since they broadcasted them. I have had Simpsons games and merch through my childhood. However I wouldn’t until quite recently understand what made the show as good as it was, and construct a model which I could review each episode on and determine how good each episode was on its own merits. Of course this process would be subjective. An episode’s rating would be determined by my reaction to it. If an episode is widely praised but I didn’t see much in it, this would get a lower rating from me, because what matters in this series is my reviews of each episode. If you want an overall view from many more people, you can search the episodes up on IMDb and the ratings for them will pop right up. Likewise, if an episode is not liked by the masses, but I personally liked it for whatever reason, that episode would get placed higher in my rankings, because again, it’s about my views of the episodes.
The idea for such a project stemmed from PieGuyRulz, who was making a series reviewing every single SpongeBob episode, and I was itching more strongly for that Every Episode of the Simpsons Reviewed series. There was a series that went up to Season 8, but I think it has been deleted now. However, that series had terrible audio, glitchy visuals, and the audio and visual content of the videos didn’t sync up at all. Also I thought the reviewer was forcing bad ratings for episodes that didn’t deserve them, and their reasoning was pretty poor.
Anyway, what matters is how I review episodes. My reviewing system has adapted as I’ve gone further into the series. The initial idea was a five rating system that went as follows:
Golden Episode — A great episode, I enjoyed it a lot, and couldn’t see many flaws in the episode. The good strongly outshone the bad
Good Episode — A good episode, it was enjoyable and had more positives than negatives.
Meh Episode — An episode that either didn’t offer much to say, or had highly contrasting aspects which were both good and bad. These are average.
Poor Episode — A subpar episode, that had more negatives than positives. Maybe it was boring, or the characters weren’t written properly. There were some serious flaws.
“Treehouse of Horror” Episode — A terrible episode, with huge problems that aggravated me to watch. A ToH rated episode must exude a visceral negative reaction from me to get here. This is not to be confused with the Treehouse Of Horror series of episodes of the show.
This seemed sufficient, but I immediately realised I needed more nuance, so I ended up splitting each rating into three sub-ratings, which could either be “Low” “Med” or “High”. So a “High Meh” episode would be short of “Low Good” for example. However there was one more change. Everything was going well with this rating system until Season 4, when there were episodes that were so phenomenally good, I had no choice but to create a rating above “Golden”, which became the “Diamond” rating. This didn’t have three sub-ratings, but was simply a rating that was given to the best episodes of the entire show. These episodes I thought were simply phenomenal, and not even a High Golden rating could codify that. All in all, this left me with 16 ratings in total, and thus I end up rating episodes on a 1–16 scale.
Alright. So now we begin. Click this link to get to the hub, where each article will be linked.
