Fox just renewed The Simpsons for a 23rd season, guaranteeing the show will hit the absolutely insane 500 episodes milestone. Great?
This isn’t too surprising, seeing as the show still pulls in a lot of viewers and anchors Fox’s animation block on Sunday nights, but good lord. I feel like sort of a jerk talking shit about the show, as the first 10 seasons are essentially responsible for me liking comedy, but clearly the show that’s airing now is a completely different show than the one from the 90s. Watching new episodes makes me feel kind of sad, even if there are some good jokes sprinkled throughout. It’s not awful, really; there are certainly many worse comedies on TV. It just feels like a bastardization of something near and dear to my heart, like they’re defiling the corpse of my favorite show. Can’t they write their pop culture references somewhere else?
But despite my unnecessarily morbid thoughts on the matter, there will be new Simpsons episodes through at least the spring of 2012. And really, well beyond that, I’m sure. They’re so close to Gunsmoke’s record of 635 episodes, they might as well keep it going through then. And then there’s the 30 year milestone, which they can then try to hit. And hell, at that point, why not go for 50 years? I’m sure there will still be new and surprising situations for the family to get into in 2030, right? Or at least new celebrity guest appearances for them to interact with.