The point of FaceTube, YouTwit, Tokgram and Instabook is that the audience and the platform make the same unwritten contract that existed in the days of print, radio and television media. I look at stuff and you sell the space to advertisers. The whole point of the algorithms as far as the platforms are concerned, is not to give the user a personalised experience but to give the super specific advertising.
In addition to wanting to show me videos of old NASCAR, Super GT, and Supercar races, as well as science, maths and history videos, the YouTube algorithm which is purely designed to keep my eyeballs paying as much attention to it as possible, has lately in its automatic unknowable wisdom, decided that I need to watch videos about Thomas The Tank Engine lore, why the puppies in Paw Patrol are expendable and how they might be actually dead, and clips from TV shows that I Here's the problem. The show is kind of permanently stuck in about 1992; in a land where a family can keep and maintain a household and a mortgage and two cars, on a single income and that's apparently normal. That may have been true in the very first iteration of the animated nuclear family genre with The Flintstones in the late 1950s and with the updated tilt at the story with the Jetsons in the 1960s but by about 1992, the idea was already beginning to be on the slide. In 2022, it is impossible. It is so impossible in fact that NPR's Planet Money has recently run a program exploring how impossible The Simpsons would be in 2022.
don't watch; including The Simpsons.
As I am a member of Generation X and therefore old, I still remember a time before the internet and when watching real-time broadcast television was a thing. In consequence, I like many people am reasonably familiar with about the first 9 seasons of The Simpsons and of nothing beyond that.
The Simpsons was a cutting edge satirical comedy program once upon a time. However, over 30 years, the show is now about as stale as week old pizza. Or rather, it probably is as stale as week old pizza according to people who do actually watch The Simpsons. I have no idea as I doubt that I have seen a single episode of The Simpsons in about 15 years.
In principle The Simpsons now runs on tropes that it has built for itself, after having established a very vast and cohesive universe. The problem is that that world upon which it was based, no longer exists and so from everything that I have read, it no longer occupies the position on the cutting edge that it once did.
As someone who doesn't watch The Simpsons any more, it doesn't bother me. However, the YouTube algorithm thinks that because I am old enough to remember the days of yore, that I might do. It also thinks that I might like to watch videos complaining about how good The Simpsons was and how it is no longer that great.
How do you fix something which was great and now no longer is? You either keep on writing mediocrity until it is no longer viable (which is apparently the current strategy), you kill the show entirely (which is often the best way), or you refresh the show. I put forward that the answer should be in 2022 to reboot The Simpsons with a very hard reset.
A very very long running drama series like The Archers on BBC Radio 4 has characters come and go all the time. The Archers will probably go on to celebrate a century on the radio if it ever gets that far. The Simpsons doesn't quite have that luxury but it does have a very strong sense of place and the world that it has built. That is in fact its greatest strength.
We are also at a very interesting point in time where the maths is just perfect to make this work properly:
In 1992:
Homer Simpson who was born in 1951, is 41 years old.
Marge Simpson who was born in 1953, is 39 years old.
In 2022:
Bart Simpson who was born in 1981, is 41 years old.
Lisa Simpson who was born in 1983, is 39 years old.
The parallel is obvious.
The intergenerational conflict that The Simpsons had in 1992 was that Homer Simpson seemingly had everything given to him as a Baby Boomer and His father who presumably was from either the Silent or Lost Generation, had to work for everything.
The intergenerational conflict that The Simpsons has in 2022 is that Bart Simpson has not lived in the world where anything was given to him and his father, as a Baby Boomer, is unable to appreciate this fact.
I would imagine that the 2022 version of The Simpsons probably does have Bart as the central mainstay of the show, with a wife and some kids; who themselves are living in a very different world to the one he grew up in. At some point you would imagine that Lisa is likely to have made something special of her life and perhaps Bart and Maggie as the two kids who have not, also have a sibling rivalry.
Looking the other way, the intergenerational conflict between parents and children is pretty well much universal. Children are always going to try on anything that they can get away with because of the universal conflict that children are monsters and parenthood is about fashioning them into some degree of being less monstrous. Bart and Lisa would be Generation Y parents trying to wrangle Generation Alpha children and that means that there will be different solutions to the problem.
In essence comedy is not a lot different to the operation of any other story form. All stories have some conflict which is resolved in some way. Jokes are about the most efficient story delivery system ever invented. The Simpsons as a comedy program, which has a sense of place has lost its sense of time. A hard reset would restore that sense of time.
A hard reset will invariably mean that a lot of characters will have to die. Abraham Simpson, Mr Burns, Patti and Selma Bouvier, probably Kent Brockman, and a host of others, would have logically become old. What this gives a massive opportunity to do, is to invent whole herds of characters from uncut cloth: children, co-workers, teachers, etc.
A hard reset will risk alienating the audience but that's probably fine. If The Simpsons prime audience in 1992 was the Baby Boomers and Generation X, than I suspect that a lot of them will be like me and will have stopped watching a long time ago. Carving out a new audience is probably a better strategy at this point, if the complaint videos are anything to go by.
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