Jacksonville.com asks, “Would you miss ‘The Simpsons’?” They have what looks to be a morning show in website form where they put up stochastic items like updates on women who were burlesque dancers in the forties and ask important questions like “Who rocked harder, Foreigner or Journey?” Yesterday, they wrote:

Would you miss ‘The Simpsons’?

Nobody I know talks about “The Simpsons” anymore.

I’ve got it on a TiVo season pass, but I don’t have any urge to watch the night it airs. And I can’t recall episodes the morning after I do make time to watch.

Fox renewed “The Simpsons” for two more seasons, meaning by 2012 there will be 493 original episodes in circulation.

Can you kind of guess where I’m heading? I never thought I’d say this, but I’d be perfectly fine if “The Simpsons” went off the air. Notice I didn’t say I’d be happy, just that I’d be fine with it.

“The Simpsons” no longer has to be on the air, which is awfully close to saying the show is no longer relevant.

Everybody respects the show and its heritage but nothing it does anymore is groundbreaking.

While I’m not one of those people who think “The Simpsons” is a shell of its earlier self, the truth is I can take it or leave it.

Setting aside the fact that the show is renewed through 2011, not 2012 (thank Jebus), and that bizarre final sentence that seems to contradict the rest of the entry, there’s a lot to admire here.  This was not written by a Simpsons jihadi, merely another television fan who’s come to the conclusion that Zombie Simpsons is no different or better than any other random television program.  My hunch is that this attitude is shared by a lot of people who were once avid fans of the show; it just doesn’t show itself very often because simply ignoring Zombie Simpsons is the path of least resistance.  That’s a real shame because a show with as much cultural juice as The Simpsons shouldn’t have to fade away.  Too bad that’s exactly what it’s doing. 

To cite a recent example, when I saw last week that ER was having its series finale I was mildly surprised.  If you’d asked me a month ago if ER was still on the air I might have guessed “Yes” but I certainly wouldn’t have known for certain.  And ER was once so popular that NBC thought it could afford to stop broadcasting the NFL so long as it had those melodramatic doctors.  Obviously Simpsons had a more devoted, albeit smaller, following than ER, but it does make one wonder.  By the time it finally does end, whenever that may be, how pitifully obscure will it have become?