Markies wrote:I grew tired of the constant parade of celebrity guest stars. Like, for a while, every single episode had a guest star and it just became exhausting. It felt like they were writing episodes around whoever they could get that week. One episode in particular was when Simon Cowell was judging babies for a pre-school. To me, it felt like they had no more good stories about their original characters and were relying on their guest stars. I thought that was kind of sad considering they had almost a 100 or so characters in their town...
The episode that springs to my mind when I think of a significant turning point in quality on The Simpsons is the Season 12 episode with N'Sync. I thought the episode itself was kind of funny and clever, but the cameo was really awful, and then, during the credits, they showed video of N'Sync recording their lines.
There are still gems in later seasons, though I'm pretty sure I haven't watched anything from the last twelve years or so. I used to point to Season 17, Episode 19 (Girls Just Want to have Sums) as a really good later-season episode. But now that episode is halfway through the run of the show.