You know, I'm not a very big Simpsons fan. I'm not. I liked it when it started out, and maybe it's only because I've seen all the old episodes a billion times because they get repeated so often, but I just don't see the lasting charm. I'd rather watch new episodes that are repackagings of stale concepts than watch the original ideas from 20 years ago.
I have friends who've been buying up the DVD sets, and I ask them why. They say "the old episodes were the best, I'm only buying the first 5/8/10 seasons" (variable from friend to friend). I still ask them why. Those episodes are indelibly etched into my memory and I'm well sick of them. Play any episode of the Simpsons from the first 14 seasons and I will tell you what episode it is within three seconds - sometimes I even know from the first frame of animation, able to distinguish between the dozens if not hundreds of episodes that start with an almost identical external shot of the Simpson house. I wish this was a talent I could be proud of, some sort of savant-like eidetic memory trick. It's not. It's from Channel 10 playing and replaying The Simpsons over the course of my entire goddamn childhood. We often get new seasons a year behind their US launch dates.
I seldom see The Simpsons on TV these days, an episode a week whenever a network decides to actually cough up a new one among a tsunami of repeats is more than enough. I'll enjoy watching it - and there's actually few episodes where I stare blankly at the end credits and deliver a flat "what".
I've actually missed (or plain not bothered to watch) so many episodes over the last five years that I'm actually now seeing repeats that are entirely new to me, and i'm surprisingly ok with that. So much in narrative is recycled, so much of the Simpsons are based on references to other fiction, that it all just kind of blurs together anyway.
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