T w e n t y S i d e d

My understanding of when Flandersization kicks into The Simpsons was faulty. I was led to believe that as early as Season 4, Ned Flanders had become a complete caricature of himself. In fairness, it’s not as though somebody directly told me this, but it was the information that I sort of gathered by discussion. I was wrong. It seems that the consensus is that the true distillation of the character didn’t happen until far later, and I can see that now for sure. To be honest, I got into the show long after the golden years were over, so I have always had a few ideas of what the characters were like and didn’t think there was any sort of great shift.

I got into The Simpsons when it started getting syndicated on TBS back in the day. I never watched the show when the “good” seasons were coming out. The series is far from new to me, but I always had a mixed jumble of episodes from Seasons 2-10ish episodes randomly sprayed at me, as opposed to keeping up with new episodes week by week. When I DID tune in for new episodes it was around Season 16. All the tropes were established and I knew what to expect. So I understood that the show had lost its shine, but I never got to see the gradual fade from greatness that everyone else saw before me. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to do this series of write-ups and watch through to see where my mind has changed.

One MASSIVE shift I’ve noticed is that I no longer hate Lisa. When I was younger I always saw her as the whining, obnoxious brat obsessed with having the moral high ground. She felt far more like an obnoxious small adult than an actual child. Having now seen the show from the beginning, I’m seeing how sweet and fun Lisa used to be. She was written as a precocious child instead of as the self-appointed moral center of the family. You see her love for her family. You see her playing and genuinely having fun with Bart instead of being his victim. I’m massively saddened by how awful her character gets treated by the writing later on, because I love her in the era I’m currently watching.

The whole cast has started to settle into their grooves at this point and the writing has gotten markedly better than the first few seasons. I think that if I were to say where The Simpsons truly hits the point where it’s consistently great is Season 5. There’s good stuff prior but most of the time is spent giving a warm smile instead of an actual laugh while watching then. My favorite episode has always been Bart After Dark in Season 8 and that holds to be true so far, though Hurricane Neddy is an absolute banger. Seeing Ned finally get pushed too far felt a lot more real to me now, having had more experience trying to pretend everything is fine for the sake of everyone else.

I feel like I now have a firmer understanding of what people are saying when they refer to the “golden years” of The Simpsons. At least the start of it. I’m now dubiously interested in where it starts to take the turn downhill. Most of what I’ve seen people say online is somewhere between Season 8 and Season 12. Currently I’m enjoying the series more than I ever have, so I doubt it’ll be as soon as the next few episodes, but I’m locked in now. I want to go into things with as open a mind as possible and leave my Simpsons-apologist self behind to truly assess where things in the series lie.

And by the way, thanks for the honest and fair feedback on the last installment. I should have done a bit of research instead of just trusting what I thought was “common knowledge” when I based that idea on nothing with any solid basis.

Ethan Rodgers