Television’s most-loved animated family, Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson. Photo: DISNEY

It’s nearly 31 years now since “The Simpsons” made its debut on American television, and just short of three decades it has graced Australian TV screens. That is an incredible feat in itself.

But this is also a show which has not only just endured, but managed to worm its way into so many aspects of modern popular culture. You can’t go more than five minutes on virtually any social media platform without someone using an image from the show as a meme or comment on practically any situation.

For those of us who have literally grown up with the show, it at times has felt like it was part of us. “The Simpsons” is in fact almost six years older than me, and as a result, has managed to define a fair chunk of my life.

I’ve been watching it as long as I can remember, before I can remember, even. Religiously, every night at 6pm, I’d tune in. Whether at home, at my best mates’ house across the road, or wherever I was that had a TV, I’d be there.

It was so embedded in my life that not only did I watch it pretty much seven days a week for the first 13 (give or take) years of my life, but I had a massive stash of whatever Simpsons memorabilia I could get my hands on.

Shopping bags from the supermarket? Check. Soft toys? Check. Keyrings, stickers, posters? Check. Books, specifically “Bart’s Guide to Life” and “Simpsons’ Comics Extravaganza”? Check. “The Simpsons: Hit and Run” as well as “The Simpsons Game” on PS2? Check.

Various Bart Simpson related t-shirts and pyjamas from the boys section at Target because apparently girls can’t like subversive, anti-authority cartoon characters? Also check.

Lisa Simpson did not get enough merchandise 20 years ago. It annoyed me then, it annoys me now and people marketing clothes to girls need to realise that their audience is a lot more diverse in taste than they seem to realise. But I digress.

I didn’t realise just how much of my life I had dedicated to “The Simpsons” until quite recently, however.

It wasn’t until Disney+ launched in Australia and they had a several day (might’ve been a couple weeks) long marathon on Fox8 to essentially say goodbye, as it went to streaming, that I realised how many episodes I had actually seen.

For the record, it’s every episode up until the end of Season 15, and then scattered episodes here and there until Season 19. That surprised me, because I had assumed that all the re-runs at 6pm hadn’t really covered that much ground, and yet I seem to have seen roughly around 400 episodes.

That being the case, it would be nigh on impossible for me to assemble a list of my favourite episodes. Mainly because I tried already before writing this and only managed to get the list down to 182.

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So, instead, I’ve asked people who know me best what episodes they mostly associate with me. My mum instantly went off the top of her head: “Baby Translator, Chanel Dress, Monorail, Lisa’s Saxophone.”

Which translates to: “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?” (S03E24), “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield” (S07E24), “Marge vs. the Monorail” (S04E12) and “Lisa’s Pony” (S03E08).

My friends also got back to me with almost instant answers: “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” (S02E15), “Lisa the Beauty Queen” (S04E04), “Mr. Plow” (S04E09), “I Love Lisa” (S04E15), “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet” (S05E01), “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” (S05E14), “Bart Gets an Elephant” (S05E17), “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” (S05E20) and “Two Dozen and One Greyhounds” (S06E20).

Funnily enough, I’d never pegged myself as anything more than a casual fan. But it is a show which has infiltrated millennial culture to such an extent that most of the time I don’t even realise how often I quote it in real life.

Every time I get frogurt, my mind immediately goes to “The Treehouse of Horror III”, with the terribly-cursed frogurt and potassium benzoate. I tried to make a “Flaming Homer” (no, I will NOT be calling it a Flaming Moe) once and nearly died. It was revolting, but I had to at least try it. And I still haven’t quite mastered “a single plum in perfume floating in a man’s hat” yet.

But what does strike me, though, as I know it has similarly struck many Simpsons fans, is how many of my favourite episodes, and those to which people constantly refer, are from the first 12 seasons. And that’s being generous. It’s mostly seasons 2 through 8.

In hindsight, it’s amazing such a long-running show had such a solid run for that long. Most shows don’t have a run that solid ever.

Season 3 is without a doubt my favourite. Every single episode is good, if not great. Season 4 is a close runner-up.

So when did “The Simpsons” begin to “jump the shark”? I think in Season 8, but to me it didn’t become patently obvious until “The Principal and the Pauper” in Season 9’.

I know some of you knew I was going to say this. And that’s because it’s simply the obvious, most horrendous thing to happen to that point in the show’s history. To completely erase Seymour Skinner’s entire character backstory in one fell swoop for no real gain is among the most bewilderingly stupid things I’ve seen “The Simpsons” do.

And as it was put by Super Eyepatch Wolf in his superb video essay “The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened”: “Like a lot of seasons 8 to 10, the episode itself isn’t particularly bad, and there’s even some great jokes in there. But the problem comes from how it shatters the fictional integrity of one of the show’s most beloved characters.

“The entire episode is based on the premise that the upbringing that made Principal Skinner who he is and is so integral to his character, never actually happened … This episode was telling us that a character who’s been built up carefully for eight years isn’t real and never was. All for the sake of a cheap gag narrative that ultimately goes nowhere and says nothing.”

After this point, “The Simpsons” becomes increasingly self-referential, even referring to “The Principal and the Pauper” in season 11’s “Behind the Laughter”, a parody of VH1’s “Behind the Music”, by presenting a clip from the episode with the appropriately dramatic narrator deriding the show’s increasingly “gimmicky and nonsensical plots”.

But self-referential does not necessarily equate with self-awareness. As can be seen by their increasing reliance on celebrity guest stars being the gag. In the golden age of the show, if you will, celebrity guest stars usually came in and played completely different characters.

And it worked magnificently, such as with Danny DeVito’s Herb Powell or Meryl Streep’s Jessica Lovejoy being essential to the plots of “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” (S02E15), “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?” (S03E24) and “Bart’s Girlfriend” (S06E07).

However, in “new” Simpsons or “Zombie Simpsons”, as in “Lisa Goes Gaga” (S23E22), the celebrity being there is the gag. That’s it, that’s the joke. Oh, did you miss it? So did I.

Apparently, Tony Blair showing up and saying: “Hello. Welcome to the United Kingdom” is a joke now. We know this because Lisa says “Wow, Prime Minister Tony Blair!” to drive the point home, and it’s used as an attempt at a joke about the UK tourism lobby.

Except the episode in question, “The Regina Monologues” (S15E04), aired at the height of opposition to the Iraq War, and is a far cry from the same show which skewered George H.W. Bush in “Two Bad Neighbors” (S07E13).

Even “The Simpsons Movie’ suffers from the same problem. Literally the only jokes I remember are Green Day playing “Nearer My God to Thee”, the massive dome and “Spiderpig”.

The first joke is even less funny than I remember it to be at the time, and I say this as a massive Green Day fan. I’m not even going to touch on “When You Dish Upon a Star” (S10E05) or “Homer vs. Dignity” (S12E05), because if you know, you know.

“The Simpsons” at its height was an explosive comedy satirising and parodying everything it could without reverence and regard.

It was brilliant. It valued its characters, its setting and its audience. It’s some of the most quotable, nuanced, greatest television to which you’ll ever bear witness. I’ll love it forever and treasure the massive impact it’s made on my life. I doubt I’d have the sense of humour I have now if not for early seasons of the show.

I’ll revere those first 10 seasons for the rest of my life. But it’s sad to see what it’s devolved into.

I’ve tried so many times to watch newer episodes, and by newer I really mean Season 19, so not that new. And I just find them impossible to watch. The gags aren’t there, every member of the Simpsons family is a faulty caricature of what they were 20 years ago, the animation is jarring, and it’s ultimately become a parody of itself.

But I will always, always love what its very best gave me.