Why do so many shows do a "time jump" when fans seldom like it?

Simpsons would be much, much worse if they actually aged the characters. I doubt it would have lasted very long at all. It's something I'm glad they never thought to do.
 
Actually, I wonder if Simpsons might benefit from a time jump. Start a new season and everybody's seven years older, Bart and Lisa are in high school, Maggie's 8 and going to Lisa's old school, but she's very different from Lisa somehow...I don't know. I think it'd be interesting. Are there really so many stories left to tell with the kids at ages 1, 8, and 10?

I gotta say though, the way The Simpsons stays stubbornly frozen in time is REALLY WEIRD sometimes. I remember one episode a couple years ago where they cut to "THREE YEARS LATER" just as a gag, and Maggie is STILL A BABY! IN THE SAME EPISODE!
 
I recall in an interview, I think it was on The Daily Show, Matt Groening explaining why they didn't age the characters, because they figured that "Bart would be tried as an adult."
 
The shows' writers seem to think that there are. Anyways, we did get a couple of episodes depicting Bart and Lisa as teens/young adults. It's nothing that I'd personally need to see on a regular basis.

What you're proposing might be all right for the 1st couple of seasons, but what happens after 10 or 15 seasons, when Bart and Lisa are middle aged and Homer and Marge are now on medicare?

Anyway, animated characters' aging or not aging was never an issue for me personally, as many cartoon characters have remained the same age for decades. Hank Ketcham never aged Dennis the Menace, nor did Charles Schultz ever feel the need to age the Peanuts gang. Why is it so important that The Simpsons age their characters when no other American cartoon (besides Lynn Johnson's For Better or Worse) has done such?
 
Come on Blackstar. You know better than to ask a question like that. :D

The mainstream Simpsons audience doesn't care about issues like this. I've never seen Joe Sixpack complain that the Simpsons sucks because the kids never age. It's a complaint only voiced by die hard animation geeks who believe the best cartoons have tight continuity and characters that age in real time. 99.99% of the things people complain about around here are things the average mainstream fan probably doesn't think twice about. Just like the current complaints about Family Guy. Believe me, the people who actually feel that the show hasn't been good since season 3 are in the minority.
 
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