5 ms·

After 800 episodes, 'The Simpsons' creators look back and ahead

48 points by 1659447091 8mo ago

foxfired 8mo ago
800 is a huge achievement. But I have to admit, around 2011 I had completely given up on the Simpsons. Story and content aside, they did something with the audio. The quality of the voice is so clear that it sounds un-natural. You can see the same effect on many shows around that time. The voice is disconnected from the background music and sfx. Anyway, they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.
- WalterBright 8mo ago
  > they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature. Computers. I, too, liked the rawness of the earlier hand-drawn ones.
- Sateeshm 8mo ago
  The cell layers constraint led to better art. The detail in the background was minimal and the artists world compensate for it by interesting framing and lighting. Go back and watch one fish two fish or the black widower episodes from early seasons - just incredible animation. You can see the number of lines drawn go up like crazy around season 10 or so, making it feel less realistic. Coincidentally, the writing also started to get worse around this time.
nomilk 8mo ago
I wonder if it's plausible that AI could generate an entire (good) Simpsons episode in the future.
- MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
  It’s absolutely possible. Intelligent enough AI could do anything. Make you an entire film where Mark Wahlberg plays every character at once. Make you a music album. Write you a novel.
- Tade0 8mo ago
  ChatGPT can already expand on any premise, no matter how ridiculous[0]. [0] "Tell me a bedtime story about a light cobblestone and a heavy cobblestone". It was already late and I was out of ideas for improvised tales.
MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
The simpsons is absolute slop now and has been for decades at this point.
- iwontberude 8mo ago
  The Treehouse of Horror episodes are still great imho
some-guy 8mo ago
I haven't read much into it, but The Simpsons to me became terrible around the same time Family Guy came out. I don't know if trying to be like Family Guy made the show worse, or if the type of humor The Simpsons championed for so long became unfashionable. A lot of people say Family Guy copied the Simpsons, but in reality I actually found that the Simpsons tried to copy Family Guy's style of humor and did a very terrible job at it.
- MPSimmons 8mo ago
  There's probably a term of art for it, but that Family Guy style cut to some previous reference hadn't really been done before, certainly not to the extent that Seth McFarlane did it. Simpsons copied it, but it never felt good when they did. If you watch The Simpsons DVD commentary on the very first season DVDs, they talk about how Matt Groening's team would draw the key frames and then they would ship them to an asian animation studio to provide the animation frames. The very first time they did this, they got an animation style that was all over the place - not just the quality of drawing, but the actual animation style was jello-y and way more wobbly than they wanted. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk The main reason that they sent it back was that the style and physics represented in the cartoon wasn't the one they were going for, and it changed how the show felt. I feel like the rapid cut references they adopted from Family Guy did a very similar thing. It changed the flow of the show, which, maybe (?) is actually more of a sign of the times and attention span than animated show style, but still, I wasn't a fan and I didn't feel like The Simpsons did it naturally or that it fit, and it takes me out of the narrative every time they do it.
- dfxm12 8mo ago
  There seems to have been a big turnover of writers in 98-99. As in very few people who were there in the beginning were left by that point. You're not considering that the original charm of the show was lost with the original creative force. Family guy debuted in 1999. It's hard to say Simpsons tried to copy family guy's style. Family Guy is really known for its cutaways (usually to some non sequitur) & somewhat crude humor. A lot of the jokes at this time hinged on Stewie not being understood by anyone but Brian, Brian himself being a dog. There were also a lot of references to musical theater. The Simpsons was different from this.
Biganon 8mo ago
Kill it already. It's been terrible for 15 years now.
- jedberg 8mo ago
  Their ratings would tell another story. Still one of the top rated shows.
  - Biganon 8mo ago
    Ok let me rephrase: it's been terrible for 15 years in comparison to what it used to be. Also thank you for reddit.
    - jedberg 8mo ago
      I can agree with that. Which then begs the question, is the rest of TV so bad that it's still top rated, or is it momentum, or are we just looking back with rose colored glasses? :) And you're welcome!
- rwmj 8mo ago
  The technical term seems to be "Zombie Simpsons".
- wk_end 8mo ago
  15 years is more than generous. It's been terrible for nearly 30 - the drop-off around season nine or ten was precipitious and it's only gotten worse since then.
taurath 8mo ago
To me the Simpsons and a lot of older shows have been a bellweather for how things used to be and how they’ve changed. As a late millennial who was once Lisa’s age but now more like Marge and Homer, I often think about how much of a given it was that they own a house on a single income. Homer has a stable job, they don’t have a lot of stuff but they have some basic securities that I’ve been trying to work towards my whole life, and still haven’t gotten there - maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s, though we have many new distractions and things to engage with to make up for it.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  Agreed. The funny thing about this is that, when I mentioned it to wife's family, they did not think it was particularly representative and was dismissed as faux Americana. I still think about it, because as I re-watched older episodes recently, I can't help, but think that they did not want to acknowledge it being true, while it was just that.
- bamboozled 8mo ago
  It's sounding like the plan is to make all of this even harder to obtain as well. It's a shame we just cannot be nicer to each other, even if just for a decade.
- nabbed 8mo ago
  >they own a house on a single income. You want aspirational, look to Family Guy. Somehow Peter Griffin can afford a helicopter, a jet pack, and whatever expenses are required to obtain the foot of the statue of liberty. >maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s I think even in 1989, when the show debuted, two income families were starting to be (or already had been) pretty typical. I think the Simpsons might have been poking fun at the 1960s and 1970s family sitcoms where the dad went to work and the wife stayed home. Edit: But you're right that in the 80s and 90s you would have a decent chance of buying a house (on those two incomes).
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  > how much of a given it was that they own a house on a single income. Homer has a stable job It isn't - especially if you watch the original first season of the Simpsons [0] (Homer's Odyssey - the 3rd episode of the Simpsons written right as the 1990 recession was kicking off) as well as that Frank Grimes episode back in 1997 [1]. The older Simpsons episodes weren't that common on syndication from what I can remember growing up - at most you might see an episode from 1994 in the early 2000s, so I wouldn't be surprised if these episodes may have been forgotten. Simpsons in it's original iteration during it's golden age (1989-1999) was essentially lampooning the 1960s American dream (which itself was legally unattainable for a large portion of Americans in the 1960s - there's a reason why we had a Civil Rights Movement as well as normalized anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Greek, anti-Spanish/Portuguese, and anti-Jewish sentiment until these communities assimilated into being "white" in the 1980s and even heritage Americans in vast swathes of America lacked indoor plumbing, medical care, education beyond the 5th grade, etc) being punctuated by the harsh realities of America at the time [4] (eg. $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling) from 1993). What I've noticed from the comments on HN (as well as the viciousness of the community when I point this out) is most HNers grew up in middle and upper-middle class households in the 1980s-90s that in most cases weren't representative of the lives the median American would have lived then, and a lot of the rose tinted glasses appear to betray that upbringing. For example, from 1989 to 1994, household incomes in the US dropped at the same rate as they did during the Great Recession and the COVID Pandemic [2] and didn't recover until 1997, but because most HN users today weren't the head of a household during that period they view the 1990s as a golden age. It's the same with 1980s nostalgia with everyone ignoring the 1980s recession which is lampooned in Mr Mom [3] - strip the 80s humor and it's basically a story about a single earner household where the primary breadwinner is made structurally unemployed right when the Rust Belt was starting to rust due to Japanese and German automotive exports becoming more competitive than American exports. [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1W8O-CKNw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1W8O-CKNw [1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNj2nlFttCM&t=71s&pp=2AFHkAIB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNj2nlFttCM&t=71s&pp=2AFHkAIB [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [3] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xth2v727PiQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xth2v727PiQ [4] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iTuHQxIC7rY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iTuHQxIC7rY
jedberg 8mo ago
"Do these characters have the emotional memory of the 800 things that have happened to them? ... I don’t really know the answer to that.” They do have a history, because in the Grimes episode he talks about things Homer did in other episodes, and the characters themselves sometimes make reference to things in the past. But it must be a fun writing challenge to take characters that don't age but somehow seem to rack up a lifetime of experience.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  Along with the favorite montage of tons of stuff happening and Homer remarking: 'what a week'.
- aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
  "I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda." https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jHQM9cCK4Qw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jHQM9cCK4Qw
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
fasbiner 8mo ago
Part of the secret to the Simpsons' longevity is that is is something the majority of people on earth can catch a few seconds of in the background and still be able to follow by sheer recognition alone. This was always the majority of television, but the majority of television shows are cancelled and forgotten long before now. It is now simply an extremely cost-efficient form of content relative to the value of the ad slots and licensing of the IP. People working on it now are technicians delivering a product to spec that is basically a perfect use case for generative AI. "Hey claude, write me an episode of the simpsons where Homer starts investing in NFTs while Lisa and Bart goes to a comedically sinister horseback riding summer camp with a guest star that has a movie coming out this summer." Or even: "Write a skill that creates standard length 22 minute new simpsons episodes scripts and scene video prompts by combining a trending news topic with two or more simpsons characters. IMPORTANT: make it wacky!"
- onetokeoverthe 8mo ago
  [dead]
Khaine 8mo ago
Its sad that one of the funniest and subversive shows on television has become a rotten husk of itself. Zombie Simpsons has been on longer than the golden and silver age of the Simpsons. They really need to let it go.
- Khaine 8mo ago
  This is a decade old, and its still on point https://www.r-bloggers.com/2016/09/the-simpsons-by-the-data/ https://www.r-bloggers.com/2016/09/the-simpsons-by-the-data/
havaloc 8mo ago
I have a lot of respect for the actors at the Simpsons, but listen to some clips of their voices now versus when they were in their prime. They can't go on forever. https://youtu.be/0H2KAtsSI3A?si=n_JI9FpmI2xy92IY&t=518 https://youtu.be/0H2KAtsSI3A?si=n_JI9FpmI2xy92IY&t=518
adamiscool8 8mo ago
Hopefully they embrace AI. 800 episodes is such a rich corpus and there could be such bright-line guardrails in a "Springfield style guide". If AI can replicate the 90's Golden Era through voice cloning + an intentional hand-drawn cel animation quality aesthetic, I would unironically love to create my own AI-generated episodes from a random premise.
- carabiner 8mo ago
  Dan Castellaneta's voice has aged so much that he just sounds like Grandpa Simpson.
triage8004 8mo ago
The Simpsons is advanced ai fortune telling simulation /s but their predictions are really out there and on the money a lot of the time...
mberlove 8mo ago
1. As a sporadic viewer of the newer Simpsons, the quality appears to vary. How can any show remain consistently humorous through nearly 40 years of content? And across how many writers, over time? That being said, it's fair to expect quality. I wonder where the funding and viewership is coming from presently (if those remain related). 2. This is not strictly related to the article content, but I hope I'm not the only one disturbed by the low quality of writing coming from even AP. I don't try to look for nits to pick but this article is a good example. E.g. "triumph tinged with perfectionism." -- This is poor wording. I think I understand the meaning -- that perfectionism, which has downsides, has removed something from what is otherwise triumphant. But it is not written clearly. Another: "Nancy Cartwright arrived at her 1987 audition expecting to read for Lisa Simpson. She had other ideas." -- This reads like a line AI wrote. There are other examples scattered throughout the content. I guess it's not really important, and I guess there's no reason for me to be picking on this article. But this is a top-of-the-line publication (in theory) and a relatively high-visibility article. I know writers are under pressure to produce content. But there are plenty of writers who perform well under pressure, and editors exist for a reason -- what does it imply that AP, among others, is disinterested in the quality of their own articles?
yndoendo 8mo ago
I recommend watching _The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened_ [0]. It goes though how the comedy went from sharp an witty to laugh track quality. Personally, the only show that was also focused on sharp and witty was _Futurama_. That show was able to retain it better through out the years. Every series finally episode was a masterpiece. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk

48 points by 1659447091 8mo ago

800 is a huge achievement. But I have to admit, around 2011 I had completely given up on the Simpsons. Story and content aside, they did something with the audio. The quality of the voice is so clear that it sounds un-natural. You can see the same effect on many shows around that time. The voice is disconnected from the background music and sfx. Anyway, they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.

WalterBright 8mo ago
> they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature. Computers. I, too, liked the rawness of the earlier hand-drawn ones.
Sateeshm 8mo ago
The cell layers constraint led to better art. The detail in the background was minimal and the artists world compensate for it by interesting framing and lighting. Go back and watch one fish two fish or the black widower episodes from early seasons - just incredible animation. You can see the number of lines drawn go up like crazy around season 10 or so, making it feel less realistic. Coincidentally, the writing also started to get worse around this time.

nomilk 8mo ago

I wonder if it's plausible that AI could generate an entire (good) Simpsons episode in the future.

MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
It’s absolutely possible. Intelligent enough AI could do anything. Make you an entire film where Mark Wahlberg plays every character at once. Make you a music album. Write you a novel.
Tade0 8mo ago
ChatGPT can already expand on any premise, no matter how ridiculous[0]. [0] "Tell me a bedtime story about a light cobblestone and a heavy cobblestone". It was already late and I was out of ideas for improvised tales.

MagicMoonlight 8mo ago

The simpsons is absolute slop now and has been for decades at this point.

iwontberude 8mo ago
The Treehouse of Horror episodes are still great imho

some-guy 8mo ago

I haven't read much into it, but The Simpsons to me became terrible around the same time Family Guy came out. I don't know if trying to be like Family Guy made the show worse, or if the type of humor The Simpsons championed for so long became unfashionable. A lot of people say Family Guy copied the Simpsons, but in reality I actually found that the Simpsons tried to copy Family Guy's style of humor and did a very terrible job at it.

MPSimmons 8mo ago
There's probably a term of art for it, but that Family Guy style cut to some previous reference hadn't really been done before, certainly not to the extent that Seth McFarlane did it. Simpsons copied it, but it never felt good when they did. If you watch The Simpsons DVD commentary on the very first season DVDs, they talk about how Matt Groening's team would draw the key frames and then they would ship them to an asian animation studio to provide the animation frames. The very first time they did this, they got an animation style that was all over the place - not just the quality of drawing, but the actual animation style was jello-y and way more wobbly than they wanted. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk The main reason that they sent it back was that the style and physics represented in the cartoon wasn't the one they were going for, and it changed how the show felt. I feel like the rapid cut references they adopted from Family Guy did a very similar thing. It changed the flow of the show, which, maybe (?) is actually more of a sign of the times and attention span than animated show style, but still, I wasn't a fan and I didn't feel like The Simpsons did it naturally or that it fit, and it takes me out of the narrative every time they do it.
dfxm12 8mo ago
There seems to have been a big turnover of writers in 98-99. As in very few people who were there in the beginning were left by that point. You're not considering that the original charm of the show was lost with the original creative force. Family guy debuted in 1999. It's hard to say Simpsons tried to copy family guy's style. Family Guy is really known for its cutaways (usually to some non sequitur) & somewhat crude humor. A lot of the jokes at this time hinged on Stewie not being understood by anyone but Brian, Brian himself being a dog. There were also a lot of references to musical theater. The Simpsons was different from this.

Biganon 8mo ago

Kill it already. It's been terrible for 15 years now.

jedberg 8mo ago
Their ratings would tell another story. Still one of the top rated shows.
- Biganon 8mo ago
  Ok let me rephrase: it's been terrible for 15 years in comparison to what it used to be. Also thank you for reddit.
  - jedberg 8mo ago
    I can agree with that. Which then begs the question, is the rest of TV so bad that it's still top rated, or is it momentum, or are we just looking back with rose colored glasses? :) And you're welcome!
rwmj 8mo ago
The technical term seems to be "Zombie Simpsons".
wk_end 8mo ago
15 years is more than generous. It's been terrible for nearly 30 - the drop-off around season nine or ten was precipitious and it's only gotten worse since then.

taurath 8mo ago

To me the Simpsons and a lot of older shows have been a bellweather for how things used to be and how they’ve changed. As a late millennial who was once Lisa’s age but now more like Marge and Homer, I often think about how much of a given it was that they own a house on a single income. Homer has a stable job, they don’t have a lot of stuff but they have some basic securities that I’ve been trying to work towards my whole life, and still haven’t gotten there - maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s, though we have many new distractions and things to engage with to make up for it.

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
Agreed. The funny thing about this is that, when I mentioned it to wife's family, they did not think it was particularly representative and was dismissed as faux Americana. I still think about it, because as I re-watched older episodes recently, I can't help, but think that they did not want to acknowledge it being true, while it was just that.
bamboozled 8mo ago
It's sounding like the plan is to make all of this even harder to obtain as well. It's a shame we just cannot be nicer to each other, even if just for a decade.
nabbed 8mo ago
>they own a house on a single income. You want aspirational, look to Family Guy. Somehow Peter Griffin can afford a helicopter, a jet pack, and whatever expenses are required to obtain the foot of the statue of liberty. >maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s I think even in 1989, when the show debuted, two income families were starting to be (or already had been) pretty typical. I think the Simpsons might have been poking fun at the 1960s and 1970s family sitcoms where the dad went to work and the wife stayed home. Edit: But you're right that in the 80s and 90s you would have a decent chance of buying a house (on those two incomes).
alephnerd 8mo ago
> how much of a given it was that they own a house on a single income. Homer has a stable job It isn't - especially if you watch the original first season of the Simpsons [0] (Homer's Odyssey - the 3rd episode of the Simpsons written right as the 1990 recession was kicking off) as well as that Frank Grimes episode back in 1997 [1]. The older Simpsons episodes weren't that common on syndication from what I can remember growing up - at most you might see an episode from 1994 in the early 2000s, so I wouldn't be surprised if these episodes may have been forgotten. Simpsons in it's original iteration during it's golden age (1989-1999) was essentially lampooning the 1960s American dream (which itself was legally unattainable for a large portion of Americans in the 1960s - there's a reason why we had a Civil Rights Movement as well as normalized anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Greek, anti-Spanish/Portuguese, and anti-Jewish sentiment until these communities assimilated into being "white" in the 1980s and even heritage Americans in vast swathes of America lacked indoor plumbing, medical care, education beyond the 5th grade, etc) being punctuated by the harsh realities of America at the time [4] (eg. $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling) from 1993). What I've noticed from the comments on HN (as well as the viciousness of the community when I point this out) is most HNers grew up in middle and upper-middle class households in the 1980s-90s that in most cases weren't representative of the lives the median American would have lived then, and a lot of the rose tinted glasses appear to betray that upbringing. For example, from 1989 to 1994, household incomes in the US dropped at the same rate as they did during the Great Recession and the COVID Pandemic [2] and didn't recover until 1997, but because most HN users today weren't the head of a household during that period they view the 1990s as a golden age. It's the same with 1980s nostalgia with everyone ignoring the 1980s recession which is lampooned in Mr Mom [3] - strip the 80s humor and it's basically a story about a single earner household where the primary breadwinner is made structurally unemployed right when the Rust Belt was starting to rust due to Japanese and German automotive exports becoming more competitive than American exports. [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1W8O-CKNw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1W8O-CKNw [1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNj2nlFttCM&t=71s&pp=2AFHkAIB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNj2nlFttCM&t=71s&pp=2AFHkAIB [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [3] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xth2v727PiQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xth2v727PiQ [4] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iTuHQxIC7rY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iTuHQxIC7rY

jedberg 8mo ago

"Do these characters have the emotional memory of the 800 things that have happened to them? ... I don’t really know the answer to that.” They do have a history, because in the Grimes episode he talks about things Homer did in other episodes, and the characters themselves sometimes make reference to things in the past. But it must be a fun writing challenge to take characters that don't age but somehow seem to rack up a lifetime of experience.

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
Along with the favorite montage of tons of stuff happening and Homer remarking: 'what a week'.
aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
"I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda." https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jHQM9cCK4Qw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jHQM9cCK4Qw
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

fasbiner 8mo ago

Part of the secret to the Simpsons' longevity is that is is something the majority of people on earth can catch a few seconds of in the background and still be able to follow by sheer recognition alone. This was always the majority of television, but the majority of television shows are cancelled and forgotten long before now. It is now simply an extremely cost-efficient form of content relative to the value of the ad slots and licensing of the IP. People working on it now are technicians delivering a product to spec that is basically a perfect use case for generative AI. "Hey claude, write me an episode of the simpsons where Homer starts investing in NFTs while Lisa and Bart goes to a comedically sinister horseback riding summer camp with a guest star that has a movie coming out this summer." Or even: "Write a skill that creates standard length 22 minute new simpsons episodes scripts and scene video prompts by combining a trending news topic with two or more simpsons characters. IMPORTANT: make it wacky!"

onetokeoverthe 8mo ago
[dead]

Khaine 8mo ago

Its sad that one of the funniest and subversive shows on television has become a rotten husk of itself. Zombie Simpsons has been on longer than the golden and silver age of the Simpsons. They really need to let it go.

Khaine 8mo ago
This is a decade old, and its still on point https://www.r-bloggers.com/2016/09/the-simpsons-by-the-data/ https://www.r-bloggers.com/2016/09/the-simpsons-by-the-data/

havaloc 8mo ago

I have a lot of respect for the actors at the Simpsons, but listen to some clips of their voices now versus when they were in their prime. They can't go on forever. https://youtu.be/0H2KAtsSI3A?si=n_JI9FpmI2xy92IY&t=518 https://youtu.be/0H2KAtsSI3A?si=n_JI9FpmI2xy92IY&t=518

adamiscool8 8mo ago

Hopefully they embrace AI. 800 episodes is such a rich corpus and there could be such bright-line guardrails in a "Springfield style guide". If AI can replicate the 90's Golden Era through voice cloning + an intentional hand-drawn cel animation quality aesthetic, I would unironically love to create my own AI-generated episodes from a random premise.

carabiner 8mo ago
Dan Castellaneta's voice has aged so much that he just sounds like Grandpa Simpson.

triage8004 8mo ago

The Simpsons is advanced ai fortune telling simulation /s but their predictions are really out there and on the money a lot of the time...

mberlove 8mo ago

1. As a sporadic viewer of the newer Simpsons, the quality appears to vary. How can any show remain consistently humorous through nearly 40 years of content? And across how many writers, over time? That being said, it's fair to expect quality. I wonder where the funding and viewership is coming from presently (if those remain related). 2. This is not strictly related to the article content, but I hope I'm not the only one disturbed by the low quality of writing coming from even AP. I don't try to look for nits to pick but this article is a good example. E.g. "triumph tinged with perfectionism." -- This is poor wording. I think I understand the meaning -- that perfectionism, which has downsides, has removed something from what is otherwise triumphant. But it is not written clearly. Another: "Nancy Cartwright arrived at her 1987 audition expecting to read for Lisa Simpson. She had other ideas." -- This reads like a line AI wrote. There are other examples scattered throughout the content. I guess it's not really important, and I guess there's no reason for me to be picking on this article. But this is a top-of-the-line publication (in theory) and a relatively high-visibility article. I know writers are under pressure to produce content. But there are plenty of writers who perform well under pressure, and editors exist for a reason -- what does it imply that AP, among others, is disinterested in the quality of their own articles?

yndoendo 8mo ago

I recommend watching _The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened_ [0]. It goes though how the comedy went from sharp an witty to laugh track quality. Personally, the only show that was also focused on sharp and witty was _Futurama_. That show was able to retain it better through out the years. Every series finally episode was a masterpiece. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk