The Simpsons is rightly considered a high watermark in television history, but the show’s decline in quality and viewing figures over the past 25 years has arguably detracted from the legacy of its earlier successes. Most critics and fans alike consider the show to have peaked during its first 10 seasons, with seasons 2 to 8 of The Simpsons generally considered to be the show’s golden age. Funnily enough, an episode from the show’s 11th season actually seems to concur with this view, while predicting the show’s inexorable decline over the past two decades.

The finale of the show’s 11th season, “Behind the Laughter”, would have been a The Simpsons that its best episodes were already behind it. Yet the show has, in some ways, continued to limp downhill into precisely the state that the episode predicted.

The Simpsons Episode “Behind The Laughter” Is About The Decline Of The Show

“Behind The Laughter” Satirizes The Downhill Trajectory Of The Show

Season 11’s “Behind the Laughter” is arguably the greatest example of The Simpsons laughing at itself. The episode is a self-effacing send-up of the show’s own history in the form of a pop-culture mockumentary, lampooning everything from Bart Simpson’s worst crimes to the flogging of Simpsons merchandise on the mass market.

The concept of “Behind the Laughter” was itself a landmark moment of TV, as the episode aired a full year before the seminal mockumentary The Office first appeared in the UK. But the most significant aspect of the episode was its direct ission that The Simpsons was declining, under the guise of meta exposé.

Throughout its 22 minutes, the lines between comic fiction and tragic reality are constantly blurred, as “Behind the Laughter” touches on factors in The Simpsons’ decline that really came to , either before or after the episode first aired. Pre-existing rifts and walkouts in the production and writing team are represented by a fallout between Simpsons family . Meanwhile, jokes about the show’s lavish spending and unrealistic demands by cast ring especially funny, given that The Simpsons understandably features some of TV’s highest-paid actors in its voice cast.

Ironically, after spending almost its entire runtime skewering what The Simpsons was becoming, “Behind the Laughter” concludes with a Hollywood-style happy ending, as celebrity shock-documentaries tend to. “The future looks brighter than ever for this Northern Kentucky family,” the episode’s narrator Jim Forbes, of Behind the Music fame, tells us. In reality, this optimistic take foreshadows the show’s stubborn determination to soldier on despite dramatic falls in standards and ratings, by spinning a positive out of its record-breaking run for a TV sitcom.

“Behind The Laughter” Highlights The Show’s Main Problems Since Its Golden Age Ended

Plot Gimmicks And Guest Spots Are The Hallmarks Of Latter-Day Simpsons Episodes

Apparently, Simpsons writers were acutely aware of their show’s failings since the end of its golden age, since “Behind the Laughter” features some of the most astutely perceptive commentary ever written about the decline of The Simpsons. "Episodes increasingly resorted to gimmicky premises and nonsensical plots," it explains. It specifically highlights an actual plotline as an example of this problem, from season 9’s controversial Simpsons episode “The Principal and the Pauper”. This episode is often viewed as the watershed moment that began the show’s descent into a caricature of its former greatness.

“Behind the Laughter” is again on point when it tells us, “Trendy guest stars were shamelessly trotted out to grab ratings.” This symptom of the show’s decline has only become more prominent in the years since the episode aired, to the extent that it’s arguably one of the defining features of The Simpsons today.

An especially bad example of this phenomenon is rightly highly in “Behind the Laughter”, as we see a clip of Gary Coleman’s bizarre cameo in the Simpsons episode “Grift of the Magi”. Coleman is crowbarred nonsensically into the episode’s plot for no other reason than to say his catchphrase, an approach that’s formed the blueprint of celebrity appearances in The Simpsons ever since. The contrast with guest stars like Dustin Hoffman and Beverly D'Angelo playing cleverly written characters in golden-age episodes couldn’t be starker.

A Graphic In The Episode Predicted The Simpsons’ Ratings Collapse

The Trajectory Of This Graph Is Astonishingly Close To Reality

The starkest reflection of The Simpsons’ decline in “Behind the Laughter” is more straightforward than shrewd critical observations. It’s a graphic that depicts the show’s ratings falling off a cliff, to the sound of “angry yawns” from the audience. Unfortunately, since the episode aired this collapse in ratings is exactly what’s come to , as a 2021 graph based on Nielsen data demonstrates (via Sherwood).

In fact, season 11 marked the first genuinely catastrophic drop in US TV ratings in Simpsons history, from around 14 million viewers the previous season to a low of 8.8 million. Even though “Behind the Laughter” was the final episode of season 11, it’s unlikely the writers were aware of the extent of this ratings decline when they were working on it. Still, they correctly predicted what was coming.

After a brief recovery in ratings up to season 14, The Simpsons has been losing viewers at roughly the same rate for the past 22 years. It’s still seen as one of the flagship shows on Fox, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. For some, Homer Simpson’s final line in “Behind the Laughter” should have been his last words in the show’s monumental run. “This'll be the last season,” he tells a fictional member of the show’s production team. This prediction was perhaps the episode’s most telling of all, yet it’s the only one it got wrong.

Sources: Sherwood