Channel Awesome
Tamara and Taylor check out the first season of The Simpsons. Does this cartoon age well? Find out now!
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0:36 Hi, I’m a dinosaur!!!
Season 1 is good because it was a deconstruction of the happy-clappy 80s family sitcom (Growing Pains, Mr Belevdere, Family Ties) and told some stories with a lot of heart. It was rough, but revolutionary for it’s time.
Seasons 2-10 are actually better, they keep the heart and get sharper jokes and strike a nice balance between absurdity and social commentary.
Season 11-12 is where you start get this weird mix of amazingly witty or amazingly shitty episodes…then it sort of goes into auto-pilot and becomes zombie Simpons until the present.
Oh, same wavelength!
I personally enjoy season 1, its rough around the edges. But its definitely the most unique series of the entire franchise.
What I really find funny is that Krusty (My Fave Character) actually ENJOYS his job in season 1 and 2. Maybe he was burned out by season 3.
Did it ever occur this is all shit you’ve seen before because this is the show everyone took their ideas from? To quote South Park “Simpsons did it”.
And if you’ve seen that episode of South Park, you should have paid attention to it’s message: that TV shows have liberally been borrowing ideas from other shows for decades, long before The Simpsons came into existence. In fact, The Simpsons itself has borrowed plots and ideas from earlier series, right down to it’s home town being named Springfield, which was the name of the town in Father Knows Best.
While Tactlesscat sort of lived up to his name in the blunt way he expressed it, his point was still quite valid. As you said, the Simpsons did borrow story ideas and tropes from other sources, but the Simpsons popularized them to a far greater extent and compiled them into a single place in a way that had not been done before. While they may not have always been the very first, they were still at the forefront of many of the plotlines and tropes that have become mainstays in television series today and played a role in paving the way for the very series that Tamara and Taylor said they were reminded of when watching these episodes.
I would also argue that it is important to remember just how long ago this series started when discussing whether or not it was “ahead of its time”. While many of the concepts seem old and tame now, and have for years, that was not so much the case in 1989-90 when the series first came out. Once again, it was largely because of the Simpsons that these ideas became commonplace and accepted in television.