Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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By "hardcore fan", I'm referring to people who make a point of watching every episode when it comes out, buy the merch, know the lore etc. By "casual fan", I'm referring to people who will watch an episode when they're bored at home flicking through channels, but won't go out of their way to watch every episode. The impression I get is that the people who watch newly-released episodes of The Simpsons are mostly in the latter camp. I imagine if you surveyed people "in the last year, have you watched at least one episode of The Simpsons?", the number of people who would answer in the affirmative would be massive compared to the number of people who would answer positively to the question "have you watched every episode of the most recent season of The Simpsons?"
To illustrate, imagine you have a show with a hardcore fanbase of 1 million people, and a casual fanbase of 50 million people. The hardcore fans make a point of watching every single episode within a day or two of release, while the casual fans only watch the show when they're aimlessly flicking through channels, and only one in ten happens to land on it any given week. The show ends up with ratings of 6 million people per week, which comprises the same 1 million hardcore fans every week, plus a rotating roster of 5 million casual fans. The show eventually undergoes so much change and declining quality that it alienates the hardcore fans, but if the population of casual fans who'll tune to watch an episode occasionally is big enough, it can sustain the show even if it no longer really has a hardcore fanbase.
It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.
While it is a great joke and reflects something real going on underneath the surface, I think you are obviously incorrect about this. This is "How did Nixon win when nobody I know voted for him" level analysis, you and I are in a cultural bubble of people among whom a consensus exists that modern Simpsons sucks.
Quick calibration: how many people do you know who LOVE NCIS?
NCIS was THE top rated scripted tv show for six years, and remained in the top 5 or so for over a decade. It has zero long term cultural impact, but there were lots of people who loved it, who watched every episode, who quoted it at each other, who considered it great writing.
The FBI series, which I find unwatchably offensively bad when I run into it if my mother or my grandmother were watching it, draws like 8 million viewers an episode.
I'm not unfamiliar with hardcore fans being unhappy with the product, I'm a Philly sports fan! But TV is not primarily a rarefied niche, an artistic product that caters to the aesthete and the discriminating. It is primarily slop served up lukewarm to the masses, and masses of people like things that you and I might not. De gustibus, I suppose.
To return to Maroon 5, when I was maybe nine years old Train came out with the song Drops of Jupiter, and for whatever reason at nine years old I was OBSESSED with it. I bought the CD and played that song on repeat. Train is an unspeakably lame, mainstream, trend-following, Nissan-advertisement-rock, corporate slop level of band. But at nine, that was my taste. A Pitchfork reader might wonder who the hell likes Train enough to care about their output, and surely no one really likes them. But at nine, I derived immense enjoyment from them.
There exists a whole universe of media consumers who have little impact within the circle of critics and cognoscenti.
I don't dispute the existence of dedicated fans who will go out of their way to watch certain shows every week that I would turn up my nose at. Plenty of my female colleagues make a point of tuning in to Love Island every week, in part because they don't want to be excluded from the "did you see what happened on Love Island last night?" water-cooler conversations the next day. I'm not suggesting that only shows admired by the intelligentsia or by snooty TV critics can attract a fanbase of devoted, hardcore fans. Probably an outright majority of shows with devoted fanbases are ones that TV critics wouldn't be caught dead watching (e.g. just about every soap opera you care to mention: Coronation St, EastEnders and so on).
But I don't think it's controversial to claim that some TV shows can be sustained by attracting a sufficiently large audience of casual fans who won't tune in for every episode, but will collectively watch enough episodes to keep the ratings up. (Probably most game shows fall into this category.) The impression I get is that this is now a category The Simpsons falls into, with the audience of devoted fans who will go out of their way to watch every episode having dwindled over time. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get.
In an attempt to put hard figures on my gut feeling, it's indisputably true that the show's ratings have plummeted over time, from a peak of 30 million early on to something like 2.5 million today. (The decline would be even more striking when controlling for population.) This pattern is certainly consistent with only the most hardcore of the hardcore fans sticking around. Alternatively, it could be the case that the show's audience is primarily made up of casual viewers who'll only tune in when they have nothing better to do or there's nothing else on the tube.
Though less striking given the decline in audience for any primetime tv show. Used to be that primetime shows often hit 20 million viewers an episode, now they hit 5 million if they are lucky. So it's more like maybe a halving of their audience share relative to the secular trend.
2,000,000 is a pretty good audience. If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light. If an artist knew that 2,000,000 people would enjoy their art, they would make it.
This article, basically, but for TV.
There's no reason to expect the showrunners to operate on the timeline of taste, rather than the timeline of money.
Do you think so? I've heard it said that The Simpsons is one of the most expensive shows on TV. This article claims that, by 2011, each episode cost $5 million to make, or $110 million for an entire season. I have a hard time imagining a network greenlighting a show that costs $100 million a season only to get 2 million viewers a week.
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