About time!

I meant struggling. It is still a big and succesful show but compared to its past I cant imagine they make anywhere near the same revenues as they did 8-10 years ago, therefore the actors should get severe paycuts or be laid off.

I watched every show from early to mid 90's and from 1996 and forward a couple of shows here and there. Simpsons has never been controversial, not even close. 

But you have a left wing perspective, so you might think that critizising capitalism or the weapon industry is bold.

It stopped being funny about 7 years ago...but it is at a point where because of former glories, it is too iconic to cancel in such a way.

Plus money talks, so The Simpsons speaks volumes.

It doesn't take a year for an actor to make a movie, it never does. Hollywood actors can easily make 3-5 movies a year if they want and still appear in television series and have plenty of free time. Movies can be prepared for several years but actors work only for few months for a movie at most. Actors are not involved during preproduction nor in postproduction. And, actually, preparing for theater show take more time than preparing for a movie from actor (every actor agrees with this). They are only involved while filming and filming only takes 2-3 months for even biggest movies.

For example, Jurassic Park had 25 month preproduction but filming only took 3 months (and a lot filming didn't even have humans). Smaller movies which have no special effects don't take more than 3-4 weeks to film.

futurama is better than the simpsons anyway, they should put more effort into that series.

Its no surprise since this is comming from the same corporation that canceled King of the Hill.

I think the real issue is that their costs to animate have to be pretty high. They use traditional animation techniques that are outsourced to South Korea. SK is not a low-income nation by any stretch of the imagination, and each episode takes months to produce... Versus a show like South Park which takes literally days.

Changing animation techniques would likely have a much larger impact on the bottom line than taking away money from the actors who are the huge driving force behind the show.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=simpsons.htm

It's not dying.... And yes I know ALL about Box Office, I know all the records it broke, how it stands, how impressive that REALLY is, etc. The Simpsons is an absolute beast. The simpsons Movie has made more than Saving Pvt Ryan, Monsters Inc, Toy Story 2, Shrek, Twister, and many, MANY others. it is, at t he time of writing, The Simpsons Movie is one of the 100 most successful movies OF ALL TIME, currently ranked at #80. for comparison's sake, the South Park movie, which was released at the height of that show's prime, made less than 1/6th what The Simpsons did, ranked past 1000 somewhere.

I think the Simpsons did become quite mediocre around 5 or 6 seasons ago but the last 2 or 3 have been almost as good as when the Simpsons was at its peak.