Yeah, I can't take this dude seriously.. the cutoff to great simpsons is Marge not be proud? because bart as a conscience? what kind of argument is that? Is that his argument ? I just remember reading this years ago and I really couldn't believe this was someone's stance.. I can sort of understand the Principal and the pauper argument, even if I disagree.
It's not just Bart having a conscience, he had one in "Bart Gets an F" and their comparison, "Bart vs. Thanksgiving". It's how heavy-handed it was, seeming more like the sitcoms that
The Simpsons was marketed for attempting not to be. I think another big thing was the grand gesture that fixed everything in the end, which seems like a staple of old sitcoms and
The Simpsons, once again, tried to avoid that ("Secrets of a Successful Marriage", "Lisa the Greek").
Their perspective is they had been watching
The Simpsons while Season 1 was airing after decades of saccharine, cookie-cutter sitcoms, so it was a breath of fresh air. Now, after seven years of doing something different, it falls back on old tropes. I can't really judge them because my experience with The Simpsons was different from theirs. Before
The Simpsons, my entire TV diet was stuff like
Spider-Man and
Digimon and
Power Rangers (talk about saccharine and cookie-cutter). I started watching
The Simpsons after "Marge Be Not Proud" aired, and found
The Simpsons by deliberately looking for something above the kid-vid I was watching exclusively. "Marge Be Not Proud" certainly is a lot more realistic than the show about the web-slinger who fights green guys who fly around and throw pumpkin bombs, and the kids who flew into a digital world and hold devices up to monsters that make them grow 50 times their size and give them machine guns for arms, but that was never its goal, and it's certainly no achievement.
My only real experience with old sitcoms is I watched the occasional
Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy,
Taxi, and
Welcome Back, Kotter on Nick and Nite back in the day, a few
Full House episodes while waiting for
The Simpsons (that I wasn't really paying attention to) and a number of
Leave it to Beaver episodes you can count on one hand on Netflix, plus someone at my work turns on
Bewitched and
I Dream of Jeannie occasionally, but I never get to see them in full. But I don't think I watched enough of them to form an opinion on them, except maybe
Brady Bunch but it's been so long and all I have is a fading memory of it. I don't know enough about these shows to really know how they functioned compared to
The Simpsons or sitcoms today. I'll tell you they're probably more realistic than
Spider-Man, Digimon, and
Power Rangers (well, except obviously
Bewitched and
Jeannie), but that's what I meant by "it's no achievement".
TL;DR - They're judging
The Simpsons for its dissimilarity to the sitcoms that preceded it that they were bombarded with for decades, one of its original marketing points. We're judging it simply for what it is, not really caring what it was similar to, because most of us probably don't hold the same feelings toward those older sitcoms (I know at least one of us LOVES those old sitcoms) or simply weren't familiar with them.