Six hundred episodes is probably enough. I concede this. If The Simpsons, whose 600th episode aired in the US this week, were to come to an end now, one could say it was time. Past time, even – that's a lot of episodes and no TV show could be unhappy with a run that long.
So call for an end to The Simpsons if you must: but don't you dare tell me the show's no good anymore.
It's the fashionable thing to do nowadays, disparage The Simpsons as "tired" or "in decline" or "a bunch of crap". But as is the case pretty much 100 per cent of the time, fashionable people are wrong.
The Simpsons is still great. The Simpsons is still funny. The Simpsons is still better than a hundred of the shows you are happily staring at like the gaping zombies you are.
Is The Simpsons as good as it once was? Well, no, but what show could be?
From 1992 to 1999 it was so good you could pray to it to cure scrofula. No show will ever be that good again unless they reboot The A-Team starring Bryan Cranston as Hannibal and Nicki Minaj as BA.
The Simpsons combined domestic sitcom with satire, genre parody, farce, slapstick and pretty much every kind of comedy you can think of, at an exquisitely unprecedented level.
It's only natural it couldn't sustain that quality forever. But give the latter-day Simpsons a chance: it's better than you think. Besides, what are you going to watch instead? Real Housewives? Mrs Brown's Boys? The freaking Wrong Girl?
Such televisual diseases infect our screens every day, but you're going to whine about the still extremely good cartoon that changed all our lives – and western civilisation – for the better?
Show some damn respect.
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