But why are these Internet reviewers so much tougher on the show than the professional critics? Well, what critics usually praise about "The Simpsons" is its irreverence toward everything crass and crazy in American culture, its harsh satire. The die-hard fans tend to be more interested in the characters as people than as vehicles for social criticism. While they enjoy the satire, above all they see "The Simpsons" as a character comedy, at its best when most compassionate toward the flawed-but-lovable Simpson family. Many of these fans cite the early "Lisa's Substitute" -- the Dustin Hoffman episode, and the most serious and poignant "Simpsons" episode of all -- as a favorite.

It's this element of compassion that fans find lacking in the recent flood of "wacky" episodes; to quote Lombard, in the last few seasons "the satire tends to forsake character realism. Stories these days don't tend to deal with the ... feelings of the characters." Emotionally affecting episodes have been rare of late, as "The Simpsons" has placed more emphasis on cartoony action.

Almost every episode now seems to end with some sort of violent action climax. Already this season, Homer survived an assassination attempt by a horde of evil restaurant owners, the kids torched a pile of evil robot toys and the whole family was attacked by rampaging farm animals. Some fans point to these outlandish plots as evidence that creator Matt Groening's original rule for the show -- that "The Simpsons" would never do anything a real, non-cartoon family wouldn't do -- has been violated.

To the TV critics, what matters most is that the show is still taking on the big cultural targets; the fans are quicker to object when a joke, however nervy, gets in the way of the characterization -- or worse, when characterization is violated for the sake of an easy joke. In the ninth-season episode "Bart Star," Lisa showed up at football tryouts, expecting to stir up controversy and fight discrimination against women in sports. When she discovered that the team already had three female members, she lost interest and left; she didn't care about football, just about taking up a new cause. It was a nice bit of self-parody, but many fans saw it as a betrayal of the character, an indication that the writers had misread Lisa's personality, turning her from a sweet girl with a social conscience into a self-righteous, preachy troublemaker.

You could say that this kind of attitude is presumptuous for supposing that fans know more about the characters than the writers do. Certainly some of the writers have seen it that way; in one of the episode capsules, a longtime fan recalls getting a private e-mail from a "Simpsons" writer saying "that he cares more about Lisa than any 'abject admirer of Lisa Simpson.'"

The fans could counter by pointing out that just because someone writes for a show doesn't mean he's necessarily in a position to understand what the show was originally like. In that notorious interview, Maxtone-Graham admitted that he had hardly ever watched "The Simpsons" before he was hired. The current executive producer, Mike Scully, didn't join the show until the fifth season, when, in the opinion of some fans, its humor had already started to shift toward simple cartooniness, and Homer had started to dominate the show.

Which brings us to one of the most often-used phrases on alt.tv.simpsons, "Jerkass Homer." This refers to a new characterization of Homer that has supposedly become prevalent in recent seasons, a Homer who is not simply dumb but disgusting and semi-sociopathic. This is the Homer who, in the season opener, showed Mel Gibson his wife's wedding ring and said, "It's a symbol of our marriage, signifying that I own her." Fan Dale G. Abersold wrote, "This new Homer displays only three characteristics: lust, greed, and stupidity. Yes, [the] old Homer was lustful, he was greedy, he was dumb ... but he was so much more. Can you imagine the current Homer thrust into the classic episodes of the first two seasons?"

Well, maybe you can, at that; despite the implication that Homer has become more boorish over the years, it's hard to imagine a bigger jerkass than the Homer of the show's first couple of seasons, the Homer who told Bart, "Always make fun of those different from you." The difference, perhaps, is that the early Homer usually had to apologize for his behavior, learning how to be a better husband and father. (Even if he usually forgot these lessons by the time the next episode started.) As Homer began to replace Bart as the show's great cultural icon, the writers seemed to become more indulgent toward his antics; follies he would once have learned a lesson from are now seen as kind of cute, by the writers and by the wider public that made Homer a TV hero of the '90s.

You could argue, then, that the characters haven't changed so much as the attitudes that inform the way the characters are written -- that "The Simpsons" is different because the producers and the public expect different things of it. Or you could argue that nothing has changed at all, as Scully did in a recent interview: "You can sit down and watch an episode we did 10 years ago or one we did last year and the characters are still the same."

But whatever you think, and whatever "The Simpsons" might become in the next couple of seasons, the alt.tv.simpsons regulars will keep writing, disappointed with what the show has become -- still devoted to what it used to be.

Recent Stories