Bob's Burgers should call it quits

Paste Magazine

"It’s always sad, as a fan of a long-running TV series, to recognize that one of your favorite shows is lurching into obsolescence," says Jim Vorel. "Such things rarely happen overnight, or as a dramatic plunge—the decline of a classic drama or sitcom usually begins gradually, and longtime fans of a series are typically willing to give some leeway to episodes (or entire seasons) that aren’t quite on par with a show’s former heights. Sadly, what so often happens is that the decline eventually catches up with you all at once: A fan watches a new episode, wonders 'what the hell happened to this series?' and is then forced to concede that asking such a question has actually been a long time in coming. And I’m genuinely sorry to report that this is where I am these days with Bob’s Burgers. I love Bob’s Burgers, and I consider it to be one of the only essential network animated sitcoms of the last two decades. Short of the golden era of The Simpsons, I’ve perhaps spent more hours watching reruns of Bob’s Burgers than any other animated show. It’s a franchise I associate fondly and emotionally with my wife, who introduced me to the series years ago when we began dating. For as long as we’ve been an item, Bob’s Burgers has been our go-to comfort programming—the persistent background soundtrack of the last six years or so of my life. I hope we’ll be watching those reruns together until we’re old and grey. But I can’t imagine that a decade from now, we’ll be watching reruns of the current Bob’s Burgers, as it exists right now. Fans like myself need to face the reality that the show has become a shell of its former self, and for the sake of its legacy, it’s likely time to pull the plug. Not that this will be happening anytime soon. Bob’s Burgers, like both The Simpsons and Family Guy before it, has fallen into the undead pantheon of FOX animated series that seem to possess limitless rubber stamps for new seasons."