Asymmetrical Information

And I haven't watched one yet. Having entirely missed one of America's great cultural moments, I feel really old!

Not old - seasoned!

"Back in my day, people had to draw cartoons BY HAND! And Fox had jerks like Al Bundy on, not jerks like Sean Hannity!"

I was shocked to realize recently that the Simpsons will still likely be on television when I am Homer Simpson's age (37).

zoot fenster - it is horrifying that you've never seen the show. Unless you avoid all types of popular television (or television altogether), I can't see how you could have denied yourself.

Howdy Megan--It's been awhile since the NY Salon photo; in fact, I purchased a DSLR since we shot those photos together, mainly for my work at the Tribeca Film Festival. There are several I took of you and downloaded to Wikimedia Commons. Alas, your article was deleted off Wikipedia, so until it is rejuvenated, these photos have no home on the main encyclopedia:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Megan_McArdle

I hope you are well. Sports Review Magazine's blog recently did a bit about my photography for Wikipedia that called me "one of the most famous photographers in NYC" - LOL.

Given that the show has been on continuously and it hasn't quite been long enough for the 20-year-nostalgia to kick in, why are they making this movie now? One last grab for the gold before it goes off the air?

Megan,
No...you're not even close to old. When the new hires (coming out of grad schoool) at your firm were born after you started working there, then you're old.

Regards,
Neil

Matt Groening, in one of the DVD commentaries, mentioned coming to the awkward realization one day that they had people working on the show who were actually younger than Bart (going by his 1981 birth year).

Actually, I kind of like the idea of rubbing up against the Simpson persona. In particular, I liked her in the Dukes of Hazard County movie. They really hit a homer with that one.

David,

Not to slight your main subject, but what was the painting Megan was standing in front of?

I remember when Fox first came on the air in 1987. Ninety-percent of their new shows were pure garbage. The exception turned out to be "Married With Children," which stayed on the air until 1997.

"Tracey Ullman" was okay, and the rough Simpsons sketches were different and had their charm.

"60 Minutes" has been on the air in prime time since the late 1960s.

"Meet the Press" goes back to the late 1940s. I understand it was on prime time for a while.

D-----, if memory serves me correctly, the two shows that Fox originally came out with were Married with Children and the Tracey Ullman show. Other garbage might have followed soon after, but at inception those were the only two shows. Married with lasted almost a decade, I think, Ullman about 1/2 half that, and the Simpsons spin-off almost a couple decades.

All things considered, I'd say Fox started out their career a solid 2 for 2.

FOX went on the air in April 1987. They added new shows as the weeks and months went by. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aarong/from-andrew/fox/fox-1987to1990.html

I actually liked "Duet." "21 Jump Street" was okay.

But "Down Out in Beverly Hills," "Karen's Song" (with Patty Duke), and "Mr. President" (with George C. Scott and Conrad Bain) were horrible.

Given that the show has been on continuously and it hasn't quite been long enough for the 20-year-nostalgia to kick in, why are they making this movie now? One last grab for the gold before it goes off the air?

That was explained years ago, at the close of the 138th Episode Spectacular: "Who knows what kind of wacky adventures they will have until the show finally becomes unprofitable."

Interesting that Fox is going to run this one right into the ground -- no graceful exit a la Seinfeld -- and yet it enjoys cancelling all of the shows that might give it another lasting hit, given enough time to establish the audience (Wonderfalls, Firefly, Drive...even Futurama got axed after four or five seasons).

I don't think they are running The Simpsons into the ground. It still gets good ratings; it's still quite funny. So why stop?

Admittedly, the first couple of years were the funniest, in my opinion. But the quality is still largely there even after all these years.

A little off topic: Megan, you look just *adorable* in those photos. :-)

I know how you feel.

The moment for me was the release of the Transformers movie. I think than when cartoons of your childhood are retro, its hard to avoid the reality that you are getting older.

I don't think they are running The Simpsons into the ground. It still gets good ratings; it's still quite funny. So why stop?

If you only appreciate the show at its shallowest level of lowbrow humor, then sure. But for the first ten seasons or so, the characters and plots generally had some depth to them, even if it was presented in a format of borderline unreality and slapstick. Genuine feelings and relationships seemed to always be at work, and the interpersonal conflicts (particularly within the Simpson family) had an air of genuineness to them and required sincere solutions.

After season ten, and especially in seasons 13-16, it became painfully obvious that the writers were running low on ideas, and therefore either recycling past plots in new wrappers or engaging in wild and abrupt pursuits of fancy, the latter of which frequenltly involved taking characters way out into left field in order to reinvent the drama of conflict at any expense of the character's history or place in the show's critical infrastructure.

So, Lisa becomes a vegetarian, then converts to Buddhism; voice actress Maggie Roswell has a contract dispute with Fox, so Maude Flanders is killed off in a spectacularly crass fashion, and Ned goes through a series of emotional cycles before having an affair for which he uncharacteristically feels no guilt or pain; Homer cycles through 20+ jobs in order to create new show plots; Bart pulls one of his classic pranks but then gets sent to juvie; and on the list goes.

There were always a few good episodes here and there, of course, and seasons seventeen and eighteen have been a notable improvement on the four preceeding. But I would have shed no tears if the whole thing had come to an end after season fifteen or thereabouts. Matt Groening should have been freed up to work exclusively on Futurama, which gave him a whole new universe of characters and ideas to work with. Instead, it always played second fiddle to the increasingly worn out Simpsons, and got its time slot regularly pre-empted, just like every other show that Fox has shot to death before puberty.

That said, I still watch the Simpsons fairly often and hope to get a look at the movie sometime in the coming week, but more out of general interest and loyalty than genuine excitement.

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