The news that The Simpsons has been renewed for seasons 35 and 36 is surprisingly good since season 34 has been the riskiest, most interesting outing that the show has released in a long time. Since the end of the show's generally accepted Golden Age, The Simpsons has been generally regarded as surviving in a state of persistent decline. However, although many later seasons have tarnished the series' legacy, season 34 arguably began to reverse the trend.
Over two decades after “Gump Roast” declared "You'll Never Stop The Simpsons", the long-running cartoon continues to live up to this promise. The Simpsons season 34, episode 13 airs in February 2023, and Fox renewed the series for another two seasons in January of the same year. By the end of season 36, The Simpsons will have been on the air almost three times as long as it was when season 13's “Gump Roast” joked about the show’s potential eventual cancelation. Yet, despite how tired any series could reasonably be after 35 years, The Simpsons started taking some major creative risks in season 34 and could improve its critical standing still further with two more seasons.
The Simpsons Season 34 Has Improved The Show’s Reception
Season 34 episodes like “Not IT" and “Lisa the Boy Scout” have garnered acclaim from critics who wrote off The Simpsons years ago as the series proves that its premise is not entirely out of creative juice. ittedly, the best episodes of The Simpsons season 34 break its rules constantly since even the most liberal of television conventions hem in the show’s creative potential after over 750 episodes. As a result, The Simpsons season 34 has seen the show air its first screenlife episode, its first full-episode Treehouse of Horror parody, and its first anthology episode over a dozen segments.
This isn’t enough to reverse the critical decline of The Simpsons entirely. However, almost nothing could be. At the height of its success, The Simpsons was a pop culture juggernaut and a critical darling, a rare combination achieved by few shows. The show was also surprisingly inventive and experimental during the Golden Age of The Simpsons, breaking conventional television writing rules to mess with the sitcom format. To quote critic Matt Zoller Seitz, The Simpsons at its best was ”ambitious, intimate, classical, experimental, hip, corny, and altogether free in its conviction,” a lofty description that few later seasons (and few other shows in the medium’s history) have been able to replicate. And yet, with its boundary-pushing approach, season 34 went some way towards recapturing the magic.
Why The Critical Decline of The Simpsons Happened
The Golden Age of The Simpsons ended because the show waned in relevance and popularity right around the time that its writers' room was reshuffled. Much of the creative talent responsible for the show’s best episodes moved on to new projects while The Simpsons itself became an institution instead of a boundary-pushing renegade. No longer the subversive series of its earlier seasons, The Simpsons was soon outdone by a slew of edgier, less family-friendly competitors that had been inspired by its success. The show rarely reached the height of the best episodes of The Simpsons after season 12 thanks to its growing irrelevance, its new writing staff, and its many similar competitors.
How Seasons 35 and 36 Can Continue To Improve The Simpsons
However, The Simpsons season 34 has proven that the series still has potential despite its decline, and the show’s two-season renewal proves that this hot streak can continue. If the show continues to experiment in seasons 34, 35, and 36 instead of growing complacent, The Simpsons could become a more energetic and impactful series than it has been in recent years. While The Simpsons is unlikely to ever regain the critical success it enjoyed in the show's Golden Age during the ‘90s, this doesn’t mean that the series can’t continue to break the rules of television writing and innovate.
The best episodes of The Simpsons season 34 break major TV rules because the show is one of few television institutions that can afford to try out weird, ambitious experiments without risking cancelation. With seasons 35 and 36 now guaranteed to happen, The Simpsons can now continue to lean further into the weird, playful side that the show has relied on in season 34 so far. As a result, The Simpsons season 34 (and seasons 35 and 36) can prove that there is life after the Golden Age for the hit sitcom.