Jumping the Shark
When I was a kid, we used to go to the Saturday matinee shows at the local movie theater on a regular basis. Unlike what you see in theaters today, there was more than just ads, previews and the feature. There were cartoons, news features, sometimes two features and the serial.
The serial was a longer movie broken into a number of short episodes, each episode to be shown one week. At the end of each episode, usually, the hero or his friends would be in grave danger -- or would seem to perish. The beginning of the next episode would explain how the hero escaped his fate or how what we thought we had seen wasn't what really happened. Sometimes it was pretty lame. Sometimes it was very lame, to the point that none of the kids in the audience could accept the explanation given. This was usually signalled by Boos and other shouts of derision (Saturday matinees were avoided by adults because of the noise factor).
Later, television took over, the Saturday matinee vanished, and this process of inventing a lame explanation for a critical event in a series was given a name: "Jumping the Shark".
I never saw the episode where the water skier supposedly jumped over a shark. I wasn't a watcher of that particular sitcom, whatever it was. But lame explanations tend not to be singular events -- instead, they herald a general decline of creativity by the series writers to a new low above which they will never more ascend.
I've seen the process happen several times. For example, I used to be a fan of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer", the story of a Preppie princess who discovers that she is the chosen one destined to save the world from destruction by a wave of bloodthirsty vampires or die trying. The idea made a decent movie. Then, thanks to really good casting and some decent writing, it became an outstanding series for several seasons. But it's hard to maintain good writing and creative acting for a long period, particular over between season breaks with their equivalent of the Saturday matinee cliffhanger episodes, and they jumped the shark when they killed Buffy off at the end of one season and then started the next season by bringing her back to life. I watched the new season for several months before I realized that the show was dead. They had turned it into a zombie.
The new Harry Potter book just came out, two years late and after the release of two Harry Potter movies. Pretty soon we'll see if Harry has survived the long interval of inactivity or if he, too, has jumped the shark.
Comments (4)
I agree that this happens. I have never watched Buffy, although I have heard that it was a very good show and I have thought of watching it. I have seen this happen to other shows, though. It seems the writers just exhaust all the really good ideas and then for some reason decide to keep writing anyway. What I really hate is when they start to rework old plot lines that have been used on other shows. They are usually so thinly disguised that they fool no one.
They happened to be discussing this very thing on NPR last night in connection to the Potter books. "Jumping the Shark" refers to the episode of Happy Days where Fonzie, still wearing his leather jacket, dons a pair of skis as part of a show while on a visit to Florida and jumps over a shark.
Yeah, that was part of the explanation I heard about the saying, the rest being how it was picked up and used to refer to a particular episode that signalled the decline of a previously decent show. I was unaware that NPR or anybody else had made the same connection I did with Harry Potter. It just shows how hard it is to come up with anything really new without the same idea striking somebody else.
That was an interesting comment you left on my site. I have always wanted to sail the Panama Canal. I had a couple of opportunities but didn't take them up, I'm sorry now. Friends tell me its a pain in the butt though, lots of hanging around and paperwork. It must be easier doing it with a canoe or kayak though. (At least you won't need lines and extra crew to handle them, I suppose you just go up and down with the water levels in the locks).
How did he get on this. Where do you live. Tell me lots more, please