Today I learned...

[SuperBacon]

There were 9 (9!!!) series of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

80 episodes. Jesus.

[Loki]

6 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

There were 9 (9!!!) series of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

80 episodes. Jesus.

This is similar to the scary thought I sometimes have, which is that someone somewhere is still watching new episodes of The Simpsons. They're still making them so it stands to reason someone is watching.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Loki

[gmoney]

I still think of the Simpsons as a "good" show, even though it was good for about 9-10 years and has been bad for 23. 

[SuperBacon]

7 minutes ago, Loki said:

This is similar to the scary thought I sometimes have, which is that someone somewhere is still watching new episodes of The Simpsons. They're still making them so it stands to reason someone is watching.

A fair point Loki, but that's The Simpsons. 

Someone (probably lots) has watched 80 episodes of Two Pints!!! 

I actually watched a recent episode of The Simpsons (blame the 10yo) where Bart wants a pair of trendy trainers (Slipreme...LOLOLOLOL!!!) and Homer gets him a snide pair which fall apart. It was alright.

[Bellenda Carlisle]

6 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

There were 9 (9!!!) series of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

80 episodes. Jesus.

13 series of Not Going Out 

[SuperBacon]

2 minutes ago, Bellenda Carlisle said:

13 series of Not Going Out 

INFINITE JIMMY.GIFS!!!!!!!

[HarmonicGenerator]

19 minutes ago, Loki said:

This is similar to the scary thought I sometimes have, which is that someone somewhere is still watching new episodes of The Simpsons. They're still making them so it stands to reason someone is watching.

[lanky316]

24 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

A fair point Loki, but that's The Simpsons. 

Someone (probably lots) has watched 80 episodes of Two Pints!!! 

I actually watched a recent episode of The Simpsons (blame the 10yo) where Bart wants a pair of trendy trainers (Slipreme...LOLOLOLOL!!!) and Homer gets him a snide pair which fall apart. It was alright.

I think the problem is just how good peak Simpsons was, as it's not been able to keep up with that level it's made everything for a very long time look even worse. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that new episodes are a masterpiece. I've occasionally caught new episodes during that "killing time before kick off to the evenings football/other entertainment" slot and while there have been episodes that haven't even raised a chuckle they were so bad, a fair few still get a couple of laughs even if they're not the 20 odd minutes of near solid laughter some of the old ones got. It probably has had it's day and could do with moving to a farm upstate somewhere, but of course they'd just keep bringing it back from the dead to increasingly diminishing returns like Futurama.

In general though it is shocking when you realise just how many "long runners" there are, when you think of how some comedies that seem almost universally loved had short runs for whatever reason some of these you never heard any buzz (or nostalgic pangs for) stay on air for so long.

[Dr. Alan Grant]

I used to watch The Simpsons every week, but stopped somewhere around series 14 back in 2002. Last week I decided I would binge the show from the beginning. Once I do get to series 14, I then have another 20 series to get through. Twenty one years worth. It’s madness. The first series is awful. The second is a little better. I seem to remember it being really good from the third to ninth. I may regret this endeavour when I’m on series 25 and I want to die. 

[Loki]

I mean, how BORED must everyone involved be by now - the cast especially?  It's not like a long-running soap part where your character ages and has different relationships and storylines - those characters are exactly the same as they were in the first season. 

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

10 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

There were 9 (9!!!) series of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

80 episodes. Jesus.

And the last one was basically Two Pints The New Class as Gaz and Donna were the only originals left trying to play off the gay pub landlord, his sex mad and angsty sister and the dumb Scouse guy. 

[Carbomb]

3 hours ago, Loki said:

I mean, how BORED must everyone involved be by now - the cast especially?  It's not like a long-running soap part where your character ages and has different relationships and storylines - those characters are exactly the same as they were in the first season. 

One of the things I heard recently - and it makes me feel really fucking old - is that the reason The Simpsons has improved a little in recent years is because it's now being written by people who grew up watching it when it was good.

[BomberPat]

11 hours ago, Carbomb said:

One of the things I heard recently - and it makes me feel really fucking old - is that the reason The Simpsons has improved a little in recent years is because it's now being written by people who grew up watching it when it was good.

The downside of that is that half the new episodes are really self-referential "remember this?" and publicity stunts like "Jacques is back!"; it's elevated fanfiction, basically. 

While there are some fantastic episodes afterwards, and some of my favourite Simpsons jokes afterwards, the last time I watched a substantial amount of it I couldn't help but think that the heart of it's gone after Phil Hartman's death, even though he was never a major character, he just added so much. Not to say that he was the reason for its quality, but there's certainly correlation, and they certainly never did anything as good as A Fish Called Selma afterwards. 

This is far from an original thought, but the celebrity guest stuff is a big part of it. They used to have celebrities voicing other characters, or making fun minor cameos, and over time it became "this week's episode will guest star..." as if it was an SNL guest host. The episodes were just flimsy justifications for getting another big name in, and not only that, it sidelines a lot of the existing fun characters; there's no place for a Troy McClure, a Krusty The Clown, a Kent Brockman, and so on, all the in-universe celebrities, when you've got the real thing.

The last "new" episode (read: ten years ago) I really remember watching was one where they went back to New York - two things stuck out to me about it; one is that Bart is still ten years old, but makes reference to the first "Simpsons go to New York" episode, which means that he is ten years old in 2012 but has been to the World Trade Center. The second is that there's loads of glamorous ads for Krusty The Clown everywhere, which just seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of his character, that he's a washed up, provincial, local TV act, not a massive star.

[air_raid]

15 hours ago, Loki said:

I mean, how BORED must everyone involved be by now - the cast especially?  It's not like a long-running soap part where your character ages and has different relationships and storylines - those characters are exactly the same as they were in the first season. 

I think the bigger problem for when I tapped out somewhere around S9/S10 was that the characters had been changed so much, for the worse. Everyone got diluted to just an amplification of one character trait. Homer had gone from being a typical American dad, oafish but loveable, stupid but always with his heart in the right place, to a one-note joke - "Homer's done/said something really stupid - LAUGH NOW!". Lisa went from a tortured genius wasting away to nothing more than a know-it-all moanarse.

I also got fed up of how many of the minor characters got fleshed out and had episodes focused on their lives, or single use jokes became actual recurring characters. Disco Stu was amusing when he was the payoff to the joke about the rhinestone jacket, he didn't need to return. I just placed a bet with myself that at some point while I haven't really been watching, a minor character like Comic Book Guy who only works in small doses, had been probably given a real name and had at least one episode properly about him - Googled it, and was right.

Sometimes something just goes on too long. There's only so much you can do with a certain cast of characters before you run out of ideas, get stuck repeating old ones, or the characters become something they aren't. One of my favourite shows ever was Star Trek : Next Gen and even that, after great consistency, suffered badly in S7 because they were running out of ideas, cycling through stories that roped back in or involved Lore, Geordi's mum, Troi's mum & sister, Data's "mum," Worf's adopted brother, Beverly's late grandmother, Wesley Crusher, Alexander and Alexander from the future, and Picard's apparent lovechild. We forgive it because it's bookended by two blinders and also has Lower Decks but it's the weakest series since the start and proof that the show ended at the right time.

[BomberPat]

2 hours ago, air_raid said:

I think the bigger problem for when I tapped out somewhere around S9/S10 was that the characters had been changed so much, for the worse. Everyone got diluted to just an amplification of one character trait. Homer had gone from being a typical American dad, oafish but loveable, stupid but always with his heart in the right place, to a one-note joke - "Homer's done/said something really stupid - LAUGH NOW!". Lisa went from a tortured genius wasting away to nothing more than a know-it-all moanarse.

I also got fed up of how many of the minor characters got fleshed out and had episodes focused on their lives, or single use jokes became actual recurring characters. Disco Stu was amusing when he was the payoff to the joke about the rhinestone jacket, he didn't need to return. I just placed a bet with myself that at some point while I haven't really been watching, a minor character like Comic Book Guy who only works in small doses, had been probably given a real name and had at least one episode properly about him - Googled it, and was right.

It's pretty telling that the name for this trope comes from the Simpsons - Flanderization; basically the process by which a character's traits become less subtle and more exaggerated over time, essentially boiling them down to a one-note version of themselves. The Simpsons has managed to do that to almost every character.

On the full names thing, I saw a bit of an episode not that long ago where Principal Skinner called Superintendent Chalmers "Gary". Not only is it completely unnecessary for the audience to have ever known Chalmers' first name, it's also a horrendous failure to understand the dynamic between those characters to think Skinner would ever call him by it, and that Chalmers would ever allow it.

Skinner is a character that used to be a constant highlight, and went through Flanderization, and then came out the other side not an exaggerated version of what he was but barely even identifiably the same character; something that's been hurt by how long the show's been running, so that its pop culture references have moved on, and its timeline has been rejigged constantly. The version of Skinner that was a Vietnam vet, hopelessly out of his depth and lacking any authority, and whose relationship with his mother was explicitly referencing Psycho, is an all-time great comedy character, and he's just not that character any more. And at least part of that comes from them fleshing Agnes Skinner out into a character in her own right, rather than just Skinner's overbearing mother. 

There was an "oral history" of the Steamed Hams sketch recently, where the guy who wrote it said that the entire premise was that in every previous interaction, Chalmers had questioned Skinner on something, Skinner had replied with an obvious lie, and Chalmers didn't care enough to push it any further, so that sketch was built around the question of what happens if Chalmers keeps questioning him, and Skinner keeps having to lie to cover his tracks, how far does it go? It works because an understanding of the dynamic between the two characters isn't just central to the joke, it is the joke. But what later seasons' writers seem to have taken from it is "people want more Superintendent Chalmers".