The failing Democratic Party mouthpiece Jacobin has published a hit piece on The Simpsons in what could only be described as a pathetic attempt to stay relevant. Like the rest of its contemporaries in the liberal media, it’s clear that Jacobin has no idea what to talk about now that ol’ Donnie Trump is temporarily out of office, so now they’re just throwing stuff at the wall. Hating Modern Simpsons is praxis now? Sure, why not.
The so-called writer Luke Savage, who co-hosts a podcast all about how much he loves Michael Moore, has a litany of complaints that should be familiar to anyone who’s used the internet for more than five seconds: namely, that something isn’t as good as it was when he was a child:
Beginning in season eight (1996–97) and accelerating in subsequent years, the series would not so gradually shed its best qualities, tampering with the foundations of its own universe, deploying increasingly absurdist plots, and becoming self-referential to the point that characters that had once functioned as broad cultural archetypes were mostly exaggerated self-parodies.
Someone’s been drinking the haterade! He even dusts off the phrase “Zombie Simpsons,” popularized by the long-dormant blog Dead Homer Society. Well, I suppose penning cringey Simpsons screeds is a healthier outlet for his nerdrage than mailing bombs to the cast of Ghostbusters (2016).
Apparently, the supposed decline of The Simpsons is the fault of capitalism (shocker!) and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (???). To his credit, Savage acknowledges the franchise has always been “a moneymaking venture,” but feebly insists there’s a difference between the show’s alleged heyday and now:
In an earlier era of cultural production, it was at least possible for spin-off merchandise and branded ad campaigns to remain ancillary to whatever fictional world they existed to profit from. Today, thanks in large part to suffocating media concentration, any firewall that may have once existed has long since disappeared.
Savage seems particularly upset that massive media conglomerates own too many characters, as exemplified by the childrens movie Space Jam: A New Legacy and the recent Disney+ short The Simpsons in Plusaversary. Uh, hello? You can literally just use your imagination and come up with infinite characters.
He sums up his thesis thusly:
Long before Disney finally gobbled up the show, the rent-seeking monopolies of American capitalism had given us Zombie Simpsons — an undead version of a beloved object once precious, iconoclastic, and funny beyond words. Today, it is increasingly churning out a zombie culture in which the old and familiar are endlessly recycled and reassembled by a shrinking number of mega-corporations, with ever more vacuous and derivative results.
Hey, here’s an idea:
[Jacobin]