this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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I just think they're neat!
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It’s quite jarring how everything pre-season 7 is compared to the rest. Like most the characters are quite deep with conflicting emotions and not caricatures. Especially season 2. Like “Bart gets an F” episode, that kind of empathetic emotional portrayal of bart would never happen post season 10.
And we really went from Homer is a dumb guy who genuinely loves his family and is suffering under an oppressive system, to well “jackass homer”.
This process is called Flanderization, whereby a character on a long running show becomes a self-parody as their most distinctive traits and behaviors are amplified again and again. It's named for a popular side character Ned Flanders, from the show the Simpsons. Though arguably Ned undergoes more permanent personal growth than any other character on the show.
Ironically, Flanders is nothing compared to what happens to say Lisa.
Shortening attention spans had to be part of it. It was probably hard to compete with other shows that had rapid-fire jokes and shorter time to pay off. Building up complex characters and creative situations takes a little more time and probably loses eyeballs.
Sort of analogous to long form vs short form videos now (but obviously both are much further down that road in comparison).
I sometimes wonder if Family Guy had anything to do with it.
Because Homer went from being quite his own character to basically Peter Griffin lite in the 2000s.
Wouldn't surprise me a bit, that show was crazy influential, at least initially. Punchlines came way faster than we were used to, sometimes deliberately abruptly (iconic example of that for me is Peter's instantaneous face-plants, which I still find funny TBH). And people liked the endless gags that were just random non sequiturs of dumb stuff happening that had nothing to do with anything. Fun at first, not enough to scaffold a whole show around IMO, but most folks couldn't get enough.
That kinda stuff really cheapened humor ("mainstream humor"? is that even a thing?) over the long run, according to me. I started to say I'm just crotchety and old, but actually I wasn't then and I thought it was lame pretty quickly after the initial "fun new show everyone's into" vibe wore off.
Then again if it wasn't them it would've just been another, audiences were just kinda "ready" for that sort of humor I suppose, obviously wouldn't have been the runaway success it was otherwise. I'd be shocked if The Simpsons weren't influenced, seems almost impossible with the cultural swell around Family Guy at the time.
Also they had to reduce the episode runtimes to make room for more ads. I recall an interview where one of the writers said this made it really hard to have a b-story to accompany the main plot.