Robert Hamer
On Bluesky (aka the “woke” X.com) yesterday, writer Nev Fountain posed a question that went relatively viral:
This generated a number of interesting answers:
What Mr. Fountain is asking about is a more extreme version of what used to be called “Jumping the Shark,” named after an infamous episode of the once-beloved sitcom Happy Days that aired in September 1977 when the Fonz accepts a challenge to jump over a tiger shark on water skis:
For decades, that scene was the go-to reference to describe the moment when good TV shows go bad. It was usually a single moment, either introducing a new gimmick or a plot turn that betrayed the core of the show. Or, in the case of Happy Days, an episode that was so embarrassing that it turned off fans from continuing to tune in regularly.
An example I prefer to cite from my own living memory was the unfortunate downturn in the quality of Mad Men. The first two seasons were, no kidding, among the most revelatory achievements of television drama, explaining with painfully honest clarity how the advertising executives in the early years of the postwar era methodically went about replacing the tradition and religion and community that gave previous generations their sense of meaning with the products and services they were selling via the then-recent invention of mass broadcast media. Within its first twenty-six episodes, Mad Men masterfully portrayed how those Madison Avenue advertisers crafted the still-ongoing mythology that, in order to achieve a fulfilling life, you need to buy a certain car, own a certain house, and wear certain clothes to attract a certain kind of spouse and project a certain kind of social status. All while the show pulls back the curtain to reveal how these men who shaped these assumptions utterly failed, across the board, to achieve any kind of gratification in their own lives. Then the third season introduced a slew of contrived plot points and new characters that transformed it into a shallow soap opera.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the decline in quality invalidates the ingeniousness of those first two seasons. You could just stop watching after the finale of the second season and still get a perfectly satisfying narrative. For a show to become so bad that it retroactively ruins the good early parts is a different question. In my personal experience, the #1 show I can think of fitting this description is one I have briefly mentioned my antipathy towards in past articles: South Park. I am an elder Millennial, so it kinda goes without saying that a huge part of my adolescent sense of humor and cultural frames of reference were defined by this show. The movie is still one of the best animated musicals of the 1990s (and an example of good political satire, Mr. Iñárritu) in my eyes.
But sometime around the mid-aughts, it transformed from an iconoclastic animated firebrand into the pop culture leader in disaffected, smarmy, insincere cynicism that became the default ideology for an entire generation. For a hit comedy show in the 1990s to come out unambiguously in favor of gay acceptance was genuinely bold. For that same show, only a few years later, to indulge in the laziest strawmanning and stereotyping was heartbreaking. Their ultimate ire, however, was always reserved for anyone committing the sin of caring about anything too much. If you were an advocate for changing the status quo in a way that personally annoyed them, that was when the knives came out. That was who they saved their deepest contempt for. When I realized how often Trey Parker and Matt Stone increasingly tilted toward a tacit endorsement of whichever Equally Bad Side of a political debate rocked the boat the least, it made me view the entire series with newfound suspicion. Nowadays, they are desperately trying to hop on the hashtag resistance bandwagon far too late for it to carry any cultural cachet, which is just pathetic and further taints my memories of those early seasons.
What about you, readers? Which television or streaming series started off great, and then declined so dramatically in quality that it ruined the earlier good seasons in your eyes? Should we replace the term “Jumping the Shark” with a more contemporary reference? If so, what?
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