So why the 1996 cut-off date when The Simpsons is still on the air forty decades later? Because things changed around the half-way point of season eight. A lot of the best writers had flown before or around that time: Conan O'Brien, Mike Reiss, Josh Weinstein, Sam Simon, etc. The insane work schedules the writers kept to generate so much A-list material per episode started to go slack, and with it, the rhythm went slack too. The Simpsons' three secret weapons—the quality, volume and rapidity of its hilarious morsels—had been defused. Without that triple-threat, The Simpsons is nothing but an empty shell.
The writers also started misjudging one other important factor in The Simpsons' hilarity: it's sly pop culture references. The references did not dry up, but there started to be too much self-referencing. It seemed that if no more inspired idea floated up during a writing session, just dropping in Disco Stu or having Ralph Wiggum repeat some line he'd said in season three was enough to get the writers out of a jam. That's not funny. It's lazy, and if there's one thing The Simpsons never was during its peak, it's lazy.
I'm saying all this not to bellyache about a show that went sour thirty years ago after giving me thousands of hours of entertainment for free (I can make lazy references too!). I'm saying this to lead into a review of a new anthology of twenty-five-year-old comic strips. The Simpsons Comic Strip Cavalcade gathers 127 color Sunday newspaper comics published between 1999 and 2004. As I'm sure you've already clocked, that timeline falls beyond the TV series' era of greatness. I recognize the names of none of the writers who contributed to the comic strip series. There's also quite a bit of random tomacco-style surrealism. The series is full of self-references, and by their very nature, comic strips have no rhythm at all. In other words, none of what made The Simpsons so great is identifiable in the comic strips. Completist Simpsons collectors might still want to buy it.
