Was this jumping the shark?

naw who cared about Maude?

>>82596495
no, thats killing maude

why did she have to die?
what did Ned do to deserve this

>>82596547
his faith wasn't strong enough

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>>82596495

>>82596547
he believed
see: Job
..this God guy is quite a prick

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?

>>82596495

Armin Tanzarian was

>>82596635
>>82596616
i'm not gay but homer thicc af

>>82596547
Jebus was testing his faith.

>>82596658
you're just parroting that harry shearer quote (which is laughably pretentious, the audience was not "invested" in skinner's backstory)

>>82596495
No, that was a well-done episode about tragedy and faith.

You could argue the Frank Grimes episode was the jumping point.

>>82596495

no, Armin Tamzarian was

>>82596933
see >>82596858

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killing maude is the mement the series died
but for the reasons you think
the voice actress for maude wanted a raise, or to have her lines recorded all at the same time
because it cost more to fly in to the studio, than she was being paid
the writers killed her character off to stop hearing her whine
eventually, the other actors went on strike, asking for million dollar contracts,
and got them
as a result,
fox cut money from the writers budget and big names like conan quit due to lack of opportunity

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>>82596495
No this was

>>82596547
>maude killed
>edna killed
>failed business
>broke
>two weird ass retarded sons
>retard neighbour who hates you and steals all your shit

>>82597027
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT

>>82597010
conan was gone for years by the time maude was killed off

>>82596903
It's an alright episode but Homer is unrecognisable in parts of it. He is an awful, awful human being to Ned and not in a "ha ha he's gone and nicked his strimmer" sort of way, in a really mean-spirited, depressing, "I literally got your wife killed and feel zero remorse for my actions" kind of way.

>>82597315
>Homer is unrecognisable in parts of it. He is an awful, awful human being
that's kind of the point though

the show is always from a point of view of the simpsons, but now we see grimes viewpoint and he is irritated at homer so his every move is exaggerated in his head

>>82597483
He isn't referring to the Grimes episode, you illiterate fuckwit.

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>>82596547
and he was supposed to hooked with this girl but it was never addressed again

>>82597544
me on the far right

>>82596903
>well done
>homer kills maude and doesn't apologize or feel bad, and in the end is forgiven despite it for 0 reason

>>82597583
dang you look cool

>>82597315
This. Homer is actually a disgusting human being.

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>>82596495

everybody knows the real moment

>>82596495
It was the point of no return.
Tamzarian was the first undeniable example.

I think "jumping the shark" refers more to the point where a show has been going on for so long with so few ideas and so little quality that when they do a big stunt like "jumping the shark", it comes off as worse than if they'd done nothing at all. Season 9 was the first not-good season, not the rock-bottom.

>>82596495
>>82597857
>>82597915

No, a jump the shark moment is a moment so bad that nothing after can be considered good. Neither Maude's death or the Tamzarian episode are shark jumping moments because there were still good episodes afterwards. Well, maybe with Maude's death, but not the Principal and the Pauper, it happened in early S9 and S9 is still a GOAT Simpsons season.

>>82598000

nice trips, but you mean destroying the whole character of Seymour Skinner wasn't a "jumping the shark" moment ?

>>82598027
not him, but i don't think so. it is just a massive continuity error. but since everything goes back to normal at the end of the episode, it has no real impact on the following episodes. if the episode hadn't aired, you wouldn't have noticed much of a difference between episodes before and after that one

>>82598027

It wasn't so bad that it invalidated the rest of the season for me. For other people it may have, but S9-11 are still decent Simpsons. After 9 it was a slow decent to shit though. I don't think they really had a definitive shark jumping, just a slow and steady decline.

>>82597315
yeah, that was pretty bad

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>>82598000
>>82597915
I was under the impression that a 'jump the shark' moment isn't when there are no good episodes to come, it's simply when the show demonstrates that it has passed the high water mark of quality. There can still be good episodes but they'll never reach the same quality of the episodes before that point.

So for my own part I would say it's Season 11, Episode 19: 'Kill the Alligator and Run'. It has all the hallmarks of later zombie simpsons

>Homer acting OOC as retarded or lolsorandum as the focus of humor
>Simpsons travel to yet another zany location
>No overarching plot between beginning of episode and end. Homer's depression was just an excuse to get the family to Florida
>Rest of Simpsons family relegated to background unless episode is specifically about them
>Celebrity cameos for the sake of themselves which have no bearing on the plot itself.

>>82598000
Google says "(of a television series or film) reach a point when far-fetched events are included merely for the sake of novelty, indicative of a decline in quality."

Maude's death was a bad move, done to be edgy, but in my mind "jumping the shark" is when celebrity cameos really went off the rails, Marge and Homer stopped being a loving if rough-around-the-edges suburban family and started being sex freaks, and the show stopped combining topical elements into its narratives and just went "hey look at this thing from two months ago - the Simpsons are doing it!".

I think the Skinner/Tamzarian thing wasn't meant to be a cheap "jump the shark" trick, it was meant to edgily deconstruct the format of situation comedy like Frank Grimes did, but it massively missed the mark, because people were still invested in the more-realistic-than-not, lived-in world of the show at that point and didn't look at it like "ha ha, they made fun of everything going back to normal at the end of the episode", they thought "what the fuck did they do to Skinner's character".

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>>82598119
>>82598124

ok i agree with you, here have Lisa goes Gaga

>it's a Ned has a new romance that puts his faith in question episode

>>82598186
>Kill the Alligator and Run
seconding this for possibly jumping the shark. the whole plot has nothing to do with the actual characters, you could replace every single one or all of them and it wouldn't make a difference. it is where the episodes began to be completely detached from everything classic simpsons stood for, this could have been a family guy episode. the writers showed they have no idea howe to write actual 'the simpsons' episodes, it's just a random cartoon

>>82598186
I think it's tough to decisively plot a singular moment of "jumping the shark" for the Simpsons because 80% of what came after season 9 was a progression of "jump the shark moments".
Of course, if one identifies "jumping the shark" (incorrectly) as the point on the curve where quality goes down, then the Skinner episode is definitely where that takes place, especially since the last "classic" episode in my opinion, the New York one, aired right before it.

The Skinner and Maude episodes were tasteless and completely off the mark, but they weren't "bad" in the same low-quality way as a few of the episodes of the 9th season, or the real stinkers that came afterwards. "Natural born kissers" is definitely post-shark in my mind.

>>82598254
>it's a Ned marries offscreen a completely different character to try and revitalize both tired characters but they're so tired the voice actor dies before it can go anywhere episode

For me, the jumping the shark episode is when Homer becomes an assistant to Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

Season 10 is a whole jumping the shark season, really. Even though there was a decline in quality since season 6, or so, 10 cemented that the show was long gone.

I hate how the Principal and the Pauper is always singled out. They always played fast and loose with continuity. In Homer the Great it's revealed that almost every male character in Springfield is a member of a secret society that is never mentioned again after the episode. Yet that episode is almost universally loved and everyone always spergs out over TPAP and make melodramatic claims about it "destroying Skinner's character". Why is revealing that he pulled a Don Draper years ago so terrible but revealing he was a Beatles-esque famous Barbershop singer fine?

>>82598194
Grimes misses the point of the show way more than Tamzarian does. I have no clue why it gets defended or ignored by Simpsons fans who jump at any flaw of the show. That episode is the point where the writers start to paint Homer as a selfish, braindead moron and not the well meaning oaf. Every problem with Homer stems from them thinking he needed to be knocked down a peg in a meta-episode.

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>>82597051
>edna killed
Wow, I didn't even know. Nor did I know she was ever in a relationship with Ned. Probably because I stopped watching new episodes ages ago

>>82596547
Dude religion lmao Fuck Bush

>>82598536
One implies a permanence, whether or not it's mentioned again. The other is just a tangent that very well may or may not have happened.

>>82597027

Worker and Parasite's one of the best things in any Simpsons series. You already knew that.

>>82598536
They also ignore that bad boy flashback Skinner is maybe the funniest he's ever been

>>82598587
If you can rationalize one you can rationalize both

>>82598559
The voice actress died.

>>82598554
I acknowledge it as actually funny, but it's tonally inconsistent with the humour of the Simpsons and it basically says to the show and everyone who likes it everything Grimes said to Homer.

>Every problem with Homer stems from them thinking he needed to be knocked down a peg in a meta-episode.
I wonder if that's how they saw it, or whether they thought "people like this guy because he's stupid and ignorantly violates conventions of decency", and thought they were improving the show by "upping the ante", rather than making any qualitative changes.

>>82598561
You're a simple son of a bitch, anon. It's because Maud's voice actor'd been bucking hard for a higher salary but the relevant decision makers decided to prove they could do without her instead.

>>82598596
Now it's pokemon go parodies
It's been a long way

>>82598536
I think the real problem with that episode isn't that it destroyed Skinner's character or that it ruined the continuity of the show. The real issue with the episode is that unlike the Stonecutters episode or the Bee Sharpes episodes, both of which were simply stories with a clearly defined arc within the episode, the Principal and Pauper felt as though the episode itself was completely redundant. It's one thing to recount Homer rising and falling in the Stonecutters or the humorous success and failure of the Bee Sharpes, but Skinner being revealed to be a fraud had no arc within the context of the episode itself. It was just
>Principal Skinner isn't actually Principal Skinner
>Oh well who cares lmao

It just felt weird, see? It felt as though the writers got a plot point and focussed on it until that became the plot of the episode itself.

>>82598655
I agree that's a shitty state of affairs. For Pokemon Go.
:sting:

>>82598627
But in saying that they ignore every decent thing about Homer. They don't show him in the universal struggle to be a good dad and husband, or admit when he's wrong and fix things, or inadvertently save the town. He's only show being loud and dumb, his financial success is emphasized despite the family usually being near broke, how unqualified he is for his job had been a joke forever but now the audience is asked to be outraged along with Grimes, etc. It's all so misguided to me.

>>82598658
>the Principal and Pauper felt as though the episode itself was completely redundant.

To be fair, every episode is redundant because everything returns to normal by the end.

What season do i stop watching so as to not ruin the show for myself?

>>82598737
I agree, I think the writers of the Grimes episode might have thought the audience would laugh at the (previously minor) portrayal of those characteristics as much as they would, but ironically what they criticised the show for doing, they went on to do and run the quality of the show into the ground.

>>82598771
Stop after episode 1 of season 9. They literally drive off into the sunset.

>>82596635
Does Homer have a tail?

>>82598771
the one that has 2 episodes back to back, one with gay marriage and the other about bart going to a rap show

Flanders would still get screwed if the reversed happened and Marge died considering Maude would probably cheat on him with Homer.

Now this I'm pretty curious about. How would things have branched if Marge had been killed instead of Maude and the series was about a struggling, widowed single father?

>>82598788
Im already well into s9 and im still loving it

>>82596547
Voice actress was fussy so they killed her character off.

>>82598771
It starts to go downhill in season 8 but stays watchable through 10. There's still funny lines and stories there. 11 is a shockingly drastic drop for me, I never saw more than a few episodes of it.

There is Simpsons before and after "When you dish upon a star". Every "bad" episode before that is forgivable in some way and episodes like Pauper could be shrugged off as non-canon because the writers fucked up. The Simpsons was never again the same after the earlier mentioned episode.

>>82596495
>American humour

>>82598838

What the hell is this post?

>>82598888
It's definitely part of a moment when bad episodes start to equal the number of good ones

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>>82596521
>>82596519
>>82596547
>>82596495
MAUDE IS DEAD?!!?!?

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>>82598888
>there are seriously people who don't get the principal and the pauper so they hate it.

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>>82598634
>>82598873
All the producers did was prove that they're soulless cunts. She voiced more than just Maude Flanders (she did Helen Lovejoy, Mrs. Hoover and Milhouse's mom as well, plus numerous smaller roles), and the pay dispute was because she lived in Colorado and had to fly out to do her voiceover work every week. They were only paying her at most $2,000 per episode and she asked for a raise up to $6,000 because of her travel expenses, so the cheap fucks just fired her and shit all over her main character. Then three seasons later they just re-hired her anyway and fired her replacement.

$6000 an episode is nothing when you're the biggest show on television in an era where primetime TV is at its peak popularity. Fucking Bazinga-man gets paid over $1 million for each episode of The Big Bang Theory.

The Mel Gibson one.

Maude contributed nothing as a character, any joke that was written for her could easily be re-written for Ned with zero loss to quality.

Lionel Hutz and Troy Mcclure was a much bigger loss.

Whats the best season? Is there any better than 8?

>>82599223
4 is the best.

>>82599041
In their defense why would she live in Colorado but work in (presumably) LA?

>>82599223
season 4

>>82599298
>>82599249

Looking through the episode list it does seem that season 4 is probably the best.

>>82596495
the furious D "LOL WHAT IF JOCKEYS WERE ACTUALLY GOBLINS AND SHIT" was even worst tbqh

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>>82599223

5

>>82599223

I like 5 and 6 also 3 is very good too. I also love the bleak atmosphere the first season had.

>>82599294
Her husband moved the couple's small voice acting studio there because that's where he grew up (also probably because living in LA is shit). But who cares what the reason is, they could extremely easily have afforded to pay her a measly $6k an episode, and she was willing to do weekly flights for them (which was doubtlessly a huge pain in the ass)

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>>82596495
This was.

>>82599605
why won't them let her just record her lines in her in-house studio and send them the recordings?

>>82599722

why do personnel who do nothing but fill in excel spreadsheets have to enter large buildings and hold up traffic every day? Because people in charge of companies are old and don't understand technology.

>>82599722
I think it was before they let Harry Shearer do exactly that.

>>82599722
This was back when they actually cared about tonal interactions and real spontaneity in the voice acting. A big reason some of the funniest jokes on Simpsons don't take off is because they phone in their lines now rather than having more authentic interactions between the voice actors. All of the characters feel disconnected from one another.

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Did you know Marvin Monroe's death was retconned in season 15?

jumping the shark means the moment you realized that a show will never be as good as it once was

so people fucking saying that simpsons jumped the shark in season 20 something are fucking retards because that shit happened in 9

People who say The Principal and the Pauper is the worse episode need to return to reddit immediately. The episode is funny as fuck, the only way to be upset about it is if you are some kind of hyper-autist who cares about Simpsons "lore" or whatever.

jumping the shark can mean whatever the fuck you want!

>>82597027
ENDUT!
HOCH HECH

>>82599722
That would honestly ruin the performance, like those movies that have actors shoot their scenes separately on a green screen and then compositing the shot

>>82600104
for what reason?

>>82600215
whats one actual joke in that episode?

>>82600412
Up yours, children!
My dreams all involve combing my hair!
Skinner selecting washing detergent

those are just off the top of my head, i haven't even seen the episode in years

>>82600356
You know actors in cartoons almost always record separately, right?

>>82600401
new writers just googled "old simpsons characters" and included him as a gag, they didn't care who he was

>>82600603
it's not the same thing recording with the voice acting director/writers/sound people etc and recording it by yourself

>>82600605
sadly, that may as well be the truth. i once read an interview with a writer from the latest seasons who admitted to not having watched the simpsons while growing up, so they have no feeling for the show.
>tfw people younger than me write for a show i used to watch and love as a kid

>>82599979
>>82600356
I know, but still seems a way better solution than LOL WE FIRE YOU AND KILL YOUR CHARACTER

>>82598194
>I think the Skinner/Tamzarian thing wasn't meant to be a cheap "jump the shark" trick, it was meant to edgily deconstruct the format of situation comedy like Frank Grimes did, but it massively missed the mark, because people were still invested in the more-realistic-than-not, lived-in world of the show at that point and didn't look at it like "ha ha, they made fun of everything going back to normal at the end of the episode", they thought "what the fuck did they do to Skinner's character".

This is absolutely right. Both the writers and the audience share the blame. As a cynical, meta episode, it works great. But people weren't prepared for it after all the sweet genuine moments we had had previously, say in s8.

>>82598857
In that case, stop after the end of s11.

"Behind The Laughter"

>>82600104
He was never popular

Also
>retconned
>In a show with no continuity

You need to relax

>>82601902
>>retconned
>>In a show with no continuity
Maude is still dead. Bleeding Gums Murphy is still dead. Mrs. Krabappel is still dead.