In regards to The Simpsons getting canceled, as many suggest should happen, I came into this thread prepared to quote Neil Young - “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
I didn’t know that backstory on Groening before reading your post. It’s a very interesting parallel with Kurt Cobain, who of course used that Neil Young line in his suicide note.
But Neil Young didn’t actually mean it that way (IMO). He saw several friends die of overdoses (and wrote several other songs directly addressing that), and I see the song with that line as a satire/spoof of the “live fast, die young” idea.
Which ties this back to The Simpsons. Many shows are canceled too soon, and then you wonder - what might have become of them if given a few more seasons? (along the same lines as, “what might have become of James Dean and Kurt Cobain?”)
With The Simpsons, there’s no wonder. We know what happened. Many people still like it - for different reasons than people originally liked it, perhaps - and many don’t. I don’t know anyone who watches it, but even in its “prime” I never watched it regularly (though everyone else at the time seemed to), so I’m not a good judge of who its audience is.
