You know how everybody argues about exactly when the Simpsons stopped being good? I think I found the exact point where it flipped from still being watchable to dog shit, and it's the start of season 15. I had a hypothesis that lead me to this conclusion, which was that the Simpsons turned to shit at around the time they switched from cell shaded animation to digital, which is fairly accurate, since the show makes the switch to digital mid-season 14, but the last half of season 14 still has good and memorable episodes, even if they're weak. Season 15 however has no memorable or good episodes at all.
Season 15 is also when the show really began to focus on pushing leftist Democrat party politics and telling painfully unfunny jokes in full earnest. For instance, there's episode 21 of season 15, where the Simpsons family are literally put into an American concentration camp because Bart mooned an American flag.
This is also the season with back-to-back unfunny jokes. In the beginning, Bart is given a vaccine that causes him to go deaf, and when the three bullies approach him and Bart doesn't respond to their demands, they lose their nerve and make the statement "He knows that deep down, all bullies are cowards." I pick out this one instance because I recall how the bullies behaved in earlier seasons, and the way I would expect them to be written in that situation is they realize Bart is deaf, decide his new deficiency is cool and make him their group mascot. This cowardly bully joke is then followed by Willy revealing he's also deaf, bragging about reading lips and he misinterprets what someone says and goes on a spaghetti-spilling tirade about his mom working in a filthy Starbucks.
This season is also the beginning of incongruent story hooks and plot points. Bart regains his hearing immediately after the first act concludes, and it had nothing to do with him mooning the American flag or with the episode's plot at large. It unto itself had no point or purpose, didn't play a role into the main story at all, and in earlier seasons would've been the basis for the entire episode, it would've centered on the experience of hearing loss, how much hearing loss sucks, having to live without hearing and when Bart regains his hearing, obtains a new appreciation for it by abusing it with heavy metal played on giant sub woofers pointed at him as he jams on an air guitar as the episode's closing ironic gag. Instead, the episode abandons the plot hook just as soon as its introduced, uses it for unfunny gag material and instead chooses to focus on calling America a Fascist dictatorship that incarcerates political dissenters.
And to think, this is just in 2003 and 2004. I can't imagine how much worse it gets after season 15, and if I did watch seasons 15 through 30+, I would probably just forget everything I saw immediately after.
I think it's also pretty neat how good Simpsons and shitty Simpsons are bifurcated down the middle with near equal number of seasons to compare against. Everyone says the new Simpsons seasons are experiencing a renaissance, so maybe the Simpsons changes its dynamic once every 15 years?
