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”.
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).
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.