10 TV Shows Ruined By Their Own Popularity

8. The Simpsons

Is there TV series simultaneously as widely beloved and derided as The Simpsons? At its best it offers some of the smartest and most creative comedy out there, but it can also descend into caricatures and panda rape.

Seasons 2/3 through Seasons 8/9 are regarded as the show's golden age, with a level of consistency that would make rivals like Family Guy rage. But those episodes aired between 1990 and 1998; there's been over a decade and a half since then, yet the show's still chugging along.

What happened?

There's a multitude of reasons - Brad Bird left the show, the voice actors began to cause a stir over pay, Mike Scully took over as producer - but they all play a part in a bigger fact; it's been running too long. By the time the first couple of hundred episodes were done pretty much any novel idea had been done, so things became scrappy.

Even geniuses can't keep going forever and the smart plots began to gave way to gimmicky stories, witty jokes were replaced with gags and complex characters become one-note. There was still plenty of elements of Americana to satirise, but the bite with which had been originally done was lost.