User blog comment:Gran2/Introduction/@comment-2057792-20100821092742/@comment-307330-20100904140243

I'd say 1-9 are the golden age, 10-12 are the Scully age, 13-16 are the "silver age" and 17+ are what author Chris Turner refers to as "the long plateau", an era of very uneven episodes that still have their moments. 21 might just have been the worst season since the Scully age, because many of the episodes had a tonne of filler, and a lot of the characters have been reduced to one-joke characters, who say their typical line, then leave. For example, Flanders is now just a right-wing Christian. Burns is now just old.