You Don’t Win Friends with Salad
There was a time when being able to quote The Simpsons was a genuine social credential. You’d drop a line in conversation and someone across the room would complete it without thinking—not as a performance, but because those episodes were encoded deep enough that they surfaced involuntarily. "You don’t win friends with salad," and everyone sings it. That era ended sometime in the mid-2000s, and we’ve been pretending otherwise ever since.
The show had a clear turning point, and I’d put it at the 2007 film. It looked and felt like a particularly long mediocre episode—no real highs, no memorable set pieces, a story that didn’t justify the theatrical release except that the brand was big enough to sell tickets on name alone. After that, something broke. The creative restlessness that made the early seasons feel alive—the ability to be slapstick and melancholy and philosophically strange in the same four-minute sequence—calcified into formula. Cult became obligation. Creativity became repetition.
A video essay I watched recently traced this arc season by season, examining how a show that once made the sharpest social satire on American television became something you watch out of habit and then feel faintly depressed about afterward. The analysis isn’t surprising if you’ve been paying attention. But having it laid out systematically—here is exactly when the writers stopped taking risks, here is exactly when the machine took over—makes the whole thing feel more melancholy than infuriating. It wasn’t one decision. It was a thousand small ones, none individually bad enough to stop anything.
The show continues. It’s been renewed into what feels like geological time because it still makes money, and money is the only criterion that matters once the creative impulse is spent. There’s a version of this that’s grimly admirable—The Simpsons as infrastructure, as cultural institution, as something that will outlast everyone who made it great. Mostly it just feels like watching something you love refuse to die.
At least the old episodes aren’t going anywhere. Seasons one through eight, or nine if you’re generous, remain as good as anything television produced in that decade. Homer’s obliviousness still lands. The gut-punches—the Frank Grimes episode, "Do It for Her"—still catch you off guard even when you know they’re coming. Those forty-odd hours of television are untouchable. Nucular. The word is nucular.