It's not controversial to say that The Simpsons is nowhere near as good as it used to be. There are a variety of reasons for this: shorter run time, changes in popular types of humor (call it The Family Guy effect), different writers, no more hand-drawn animation (watch something from season 3 and from season 20 and tell me that the crisp image and sharp lines don't hurt the experience. Animation should be fluid), and of course, running out of ideas. Even with all of this, I still watch the show regularly and frequently find it enjoyable though rarely great. Even in the doldrums of the show, the Treehouse of Horror episodes were always highlights. Except for this year.
Like the show the ToH episodes have also been falling in quality. I'd even go so far as to say that they haven't been the same since they moved on from the humorous headstones or at least having any sort of opening credits. The writers also stopped creating any sort of connective tissue like everyone telling scary stories trying to one-up each other, or eating too much candy and having nightmares, or even Bart telling the stories of the paintings. Maybe it's just me, but I like when these stories feel at least a little bit related to the real Simpsons universe as opposed to being an excuse to do movie parodies.
And that's really the biggest problem. When The Simpsons writers used to do ToH episodes, they'd stick with horror or Sci-Fi stories, but now they basically riff on anything they want (which is what The Simpsons used to do very elegantly with their normal episodes). So this year there is a bizarre mashup of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Spider-man and Avatar (there's also a Dexter parody, which kind of works, but it's not that dark and way to rushed). Avatar may be sci-fi, but there's certainly nothing scary about it and the Diving Bell parody shoehorns Halloween into the segment by having Homer putting up Halloween decorations, but it's an afterthought.
There are still so many horror stories to pay homage to. I don't know why they are avoiding them. Christ, as far as I remember, they haven't even done a Halloween parody yet! They've barely scratched the surface of Stephen King and Hitchcock (who, let's be honest, gets enough attention during the rest of the season). There's tons of Poe and Twilight Zone episodes to cull from. It makes me sad that they're wasting their time on Diving Bell and Avatar.
There's also a dip in quality from season 13 to season 14, which happens to coincide with every segment of the ToH episodes being written by different people to having the whole episode being credited to one. Having multiple voices makes it easier to forgive a lacking segment if the others are good. On the commentaries on The Simpsons DVDs, they always talk about how hard the ToH episodes are to make, so I don't know why they are giving it to one person. Especially this year, where not only did writer Carolyn Omine not come up with anything good, but she didn't even know how to end the segments. I almost thought that it was going to be one story instead of the triptych that it normally and we'd rejoin the action coming back from commercial.
The Treehouse of Horror episodes should be fun, scary, and more than a little gory times. At the risk of sounding like an old man talking about how things were better in my day, the writers need to go back to the start and take a good hard look at what makes those episodes so good. But don't take my word for it:
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