It has been announced today that The Simpsons will no longer be shown on Channel 4 after 20 years.
The iconic show, which follows the lives of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie and all the Springfield inhabitants, has been broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 since 2004. However, it was announced on Tuesday (December 17) that from January it will no longer air at its 6:30pm weekday slot.
Instead, The Simpsons will be moving to E4, starting with season 32. Meanwhile, new seasons of the show, which include season 36, will premiere on Disney + before airing on E4. The new seasons will also reportedly be available on Channel 4’s streaming service for a limited time.
The news has stunned some fans of the show, meanwhile others have gone online to pinpoint when the programme started to 'decline'.
A post appeared on Reddit which was titled, 'The Decline of the Simpsons', which featured IMDB viewer ratings since 1989.
It read: "The Simpsons is one of the most iconic TV shows ever created. It first aired in 1989 and continues to do so to this day, spanning over 31 seasons.
"It soon became one of the most comedically successful shows in television history. However, over time, the comedic material and overall appeal of the show began to decline.
"I created a heat chart to show the audience ratings for every episode of every season. I also showed the average rating of each season. The data for this visualisation was scraped together from IMSB using Python."
This saw that the average rating for the early seasons of the show was around 8, however it declined steady – with it currently around the 6 mark.
The post has received more than 31,000 upvotes and thousands of comments as people tried to pinpoint the 'decline' of the show.
One person wrote: "I was born in 1987, The Simpsons were something like a window into the adult world, so much of my humour can be traced back to them for so long, then one day it all kinda stopped for me. Hard to pinpoint where it ended for me. That awful episode of Homer doing everything in the 90's fake clip show where Homer sudden had diabetes really killed the Simpsons for me though."
While another claimed Homer "changed from a likeable oaf to a selfish jerk".
A third chimed in: "There are definitely some subtle changes that I think made the show less great over the years. Earlier episodes have classic sitcom life lessons, morals, and characters choosing the do the right thing for their loved ones. Later episodes still have this, it's just less consistent and pronounced. (I personally think this is because they tried competing with shows like Family Guy). That being said, a huge chunk of what contributes to this is nostalgia. The number of people that say the show stopped being good in season 9 and then haven't watched an episode in 20 years blows my mind."
While a fourth added: "People always pinpoint the Principal and the Pauper as the beginning of the end, but that actually had some decent writing in it (even if the premise was absurd) and it overall felt like a proper Simpsons episode. For me it was the episode where Grampa starts driving again to impress some woman at the nursing home. It was the first episode I felt I'd absolutely wasted my time by watching it."
Despite a lot of criticism, some still thought the show was doing well after all these years. One person said: "The newer seasons might not be as exceptional as the early ones but they still are pretty darn good compared to other stuff on TV. I’ve grown up watching the Springfield lot and love that I can still watch fresh content every year."