The Simpsons, specifically post 9th season

      I've been watching The Simpsons since the Christmas Special airing.  I was part of the original craze.  While I never bought a t-shirt, my enthusiasm for the show only grew over the run of the show, at least up through sometime around the 7th season.

      I still watch The Simpsons.  I have every released season, and usually put an episode on before falling asleep.

      The show hit a stride of perfection around the 4th season, and this stride continued, with some minor variation, through the 6th season.  Starting with the 7th, we had some weaker episodes.  Many of them are still considered classics, but episodes like Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming and Marge Be Not Proud are good, but don't stand up to repeat viewings as strongly.  There are still a few solid classics in there - Team Homer is still fantastic, and I've had a real affinity for Homer the Smithers.
     The 8th season continued this trend.  Some of the episodes have bits that people remember and really love, especially ones like You Only Move Twice, or A Milhouse Divided.  I've never had great feelings about Burns, Baby Burns, and I find Mountain of Madness to be kind of dull most of the time.
     This season also hit with Homer's Enemy.  This episode severely split fans, and not in the way that some of the others did.  Some really viewed it as being in bad taste.  I remember I didn't like it at all at first, and now I've come to respect it.
     Season 9 is where things tipped a little more toward the 'weak' side of the spectrum.  The Principal and the Pauper really bothered some more people.  I never cared much about it.  But I found episodes like The Cartridge Family and Bart Star to be unusually poor.  Their clip show episode, All Singing, All Dancing was one of the worst I had seen to that point.  There were still some good jokes, but there was also much more filler and weak material.

     It's this point that soured a lot of casual fans.  There are a lot of people who just can't get past how fantastic the show was during the 4th season.

     This show has gone through many, many writers, many show runners, and most importantly, many, many episodes.  They aren't all going to be as spectacular as the best of them.
      Also, the show has changed, and it no longer has the same type of satirical edge that it had.  It's a bit more obvious.

      I've accepted this.  I still find the point, starting in the 9th season, and declining around the 12th or 13th season, to be hard to watch, mostly because the jokes haven't aged as well.  But after that, the show rebounded in quality.  It's still more silly than it was, but it's considerably better.

      What bothers me is that so many people seem to take pride in how little they've watched the show since their youth.  Or how much they assume that a decline in quality is permanent.