Þessi grein er á http://slate.msn.com/id/2078501/
Einnig eru að birtast margar greinar á netinu núna út af því að þáttur nr. 300 er að koma út nú um helgina, yfirlit yfir þær er á http://www.snpp.com

Who turned America's best TV show into a cartoon?
By Chris Suellentrop


At some point during its 14-year run, The
Simpsons turned into one of the best sitcoms on
television-and that's not a compliment. At one
time, to call The Simpsons the best show on Fox
would have been a vast understatement; to say it
was the best sitcom on television would have been
inadequate; and to describe it as the greatest TV
show in history would (and still does) minimize
its importance by limiting its cultural impact to
the small screen. Who knows when it
happened-maybe it was when Homer visited the
leprechaun jockeys in Season 11, or when he was
raped by a panda in Season 12-but for several
years, watching The Simpsons chase Ozzie &
Harriet's record for the longest-running sitcom
has been like watching the late-career Pete Rose:
There's still greatness there, and you get to see
a home run now and then, but mostly it's a halo
of reflected glory.

The hype surrounding this Sunday's 300th Simpsons
episode (actually the 302nd because Fox isn't
counting two holiday “specials”) has underscored
the show's decline. To celebrate the milestone,
Entertainment Weekly picked the top 25 episodes
in Simpsons history: Twenty-four of them come
from 1997 or before, meaning that only one comes
from the past five seasons (which, not
coincidentally, is the time period from which EW
selected its “Worst Episode Ever”). Similarly,
USA Today published a top-10 list written by the
fan who runs the best Simpsons site on the Web.
He picked nine shows from 1993 and before, and
the other was from 1997. The newspaper also asked
Simpsons staff members to select their 15
favorite moments and episodes, and only one
person (Al Jean, the show's executive producer)
chose something that happened within the past
five years. Even as fans, critics, and staff
members rejoice in the show's amazing longevity,
they all agree: The past five or six seasons just
haven't been up to snuff.

Who's to blame for this state of events? Some of
the die-hard fans who populate the news group
alt.tv.simpsons have settled on a “lone gunman”
theory-that one man single-handedly brought down
TV's Camelot. One problem: They don't agree on
who's hiding in the book depository. Many fans
finger Mike Scully, who served as executive
producer for Seasons 9 through 12 (generally
considered the show's nadir). Others target
writer Ian Maxtone-Graham. Scully and
Maxtone-Graham, both of whom joined the show
after it had already been on the air for several
seasons, are cited as evidence that The Simpsons
lost touch with what made it popular in the
beginning-Matt Groening's and James L. Brooks'
conception of an animated TV family that was more
realistic than the live-action Huxtables and
Keatons and Seavers who populated 1980s
television. Unlike other TV families, for
example, the Simpsons would go to church, have
money problems, and watch television.

But under Scully's tenure, The Simpsons became,
well, a cartoon. In A.O. Scott's Slate
“Assessment” of Matt Groening, he wrote that
Groening is “committed to using cartoons as a way
of addressing reality.” But in recent years, The
Simpsons has become an inversion of this. The
show now uses reality as a way of addressing
itself, a cartoon. This past Sunday's episode
featured funny references to Spongebob
Squarepants, the WNBA, Ken Burns, Tony Soprano,
and Fox programming, but the Simpsons themselves,
and the rest of the Springfield populace, have
become empty vessels for one-liners and sight
gags, just like the characters who inhabit other
sitcoms. (Think Chandler Bing.)

The Simpsons no longer marks the elevation of the
sitcom formula to its highest form. These days
it's closer to It's Garry Shandling's Show-a very
good, self-conscious parody of a sitcom (and
itself). Episodes that once would have ended with
Homer and Marge bicycling into the sunset
(perhaps while Bart gagged in the background) now
end with Homer blowing a tranquilizer dart into
Marge's neck. The show's still funny, but it
hasn't been touching in years. Writer Mike Reiss
admitted as much to the New York Times Magazine,
conceding that “much of the humanity has leached
out of the show over the years. … It hurts to
watch it, even if I helped do it.”

But can you blame one person for it? It would be
nice to finger Maxtone-Graham, who gave a
jaw-dropping interview to London's Independent in
1998. In it, he admitted to hardly ever watching
The Simpsons before he joined the staff in 1995,
to brazenly flouting Groening's rules for the
show (including saying he “loved” an episode that
Groening had his name removed from), and to open
disdain for fans, saying, “Go figure! That's why
they're on the Internet and we're writing the
show.” But just because Maxtone-Graham is a jerk
(or at the very least, shows colossally bad
judgment in front of an interviewer) doesn't mean
he's a bad writer. On top of that, a show like
The Simpsons is the product of so many creative
individuals that it's difficult to blame one
person-even Scully, the onetime executive
producer-for anything.

So, instead, there are a few conspiracy theories
for the show's not-quite demise. Perhaps the
problem is too many cooks, as staff legend George
Meyer implied to MSNBC.com: “We have more writers
now,” Meyer said. “In the early days, I think,
more of the show, more of the episode was already
in the first draft of the script. Now there's
more room-writing that goes on, and so I think
there's been a kind of homogenization of the
scripts. … Certainly, the shows are more jokey
than they used to be. But I think they also lack
the individual flavor that they had in the early
years.” Another theory lays the blame on the
show's many celebrity guest stars, which have
made the show resemble those old Scooby Doo
episodes where Sandy Duncan, or Tim Conway and
Don Knotts, would show up just for the heck of
it. Still others think the problem is the show's
brain drain: Long-absent individuals include
creators Groening and Brooks, actor Phil Hartman,
and writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss (who both left
briefly to do The Critic), Greg Daniels (still
doing King of the Hill), and Conan O'Brien (who
has been linked to the show's decline so many
times that Groening once called the theory “one
of the most annoying nut posts” on the Internet).

But maybe no one, not even a group of people, can
be held responsible. Simpsons determinists lay
the blame on unstoppable, abstract forces like
time. The show's writers and producers often
subscribe to this line when they publicly abase
themselves for not living up to the show's high
standards. Maxtone-Graham told the Independent,
“I think we should pack it in soon and I think we
will-we're running out of ideas,” and Meyer
admitted to MSNBC.com, “We're starting to see
some glimmers of the end. … It's certainly
getting harder to come up with stories, no
question.”

An incredible anxiety of influence hovers over
Simpsons writers, who realize that they are
judged not by the standards of network
television, but by the standards of their own
show's golden age. By the end of his tenure as
executive producer, Scully was making nervous
statements to the press like, “Basically, my goal
is just not to wreck the show” and, “Yeah, we
don't want to be the guys that, you know, sank
the ship.” Maybe The Simpsons is killing The
Simpsons by setting expectations too high. After
all, even while you're wincing or groaning at a
particularly lame gag, you're hoping that the
show will stay on the air longer than Gunsmoke.
It's hard to imagine television without The
Simpsons. If it sticks around for another 300
episodes, maybe, someday, the wound of the past
few seasons will be remembered like the one
Maggie administered to Mr. Burns: an accident,
and not a fatal one.