Jump The Shark - a term to describe a moment when somethin that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity.What part of pop culture Jumped The Shark for you? Any idea what I'm talking about? Find out what Jump The Shark means here on
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So tell me in comments where you thought something jumped a shark - film, television, music, art, whatever. I'll start with television.
AHEM: Growing Pains jumped the shark when Mike Seaver decided to become a teacher and stop being a hot, teenage fuck-up.
Achem: Joey
It just seems, in all but a few exceptional cases, it tends to go downhill.
Police academny II and there after
any "retro" tv show that seems to have forgotten why it was cancelled in the first place and comes out as a current movie in theaters...
specific example of a tv one tho
Laverne and Shirley...a personal favorite.....when they moved to California...da hell?!
This song was "underground" making it big. Punk was never the same. The "freaks" became the new "jocks." The jocks became "frekish", yet only a surface level understanding of what the whole "underground" scene was about came along with it. Skateboarding, BMX, snowboarding, etc. all became hip and "exterme." Hence, so did everything else. All that stuff used to be a legitmate counter-culture. Now, it is just another facit of pop-culture.
Sure, there were occasional good Trek episodes and movies after that point... but the rapid decline had begun, cumulating with Star Trek: Nemesis and Enterprise.
I remember one episode when Kim was 'infected' by alien DNA (so the species could reproduce) and of course by the end he was put back to normal. I thought to myself, why? An ongoing alien metamophosis into gods-know-what could give the insepid character a little depth.
And Enterprise was just sooo bad in so many ways.
I mean the episodes were banal for most of season of one but by the time "Precious Cargo", the ice princess episode, came along, well, it was the worst writing I've in sci-fi bar none, not even the short lived Adrian Paul what-was-they-smoking fiasco, the Tracker.
But the writers of Enterpise managed to top it yet again with the series finale... ARRGGG!
The White House jumped the shark when they let a former Coke addict in.
Moonlighting was good until David+Maddie jumped into the sack - after that, the show changed from "light-hearted mysteries with witty repartee" into "how can we decide whether to admit that this really happened or not". Cheers suffered a similar demise.
In the new Spider Robinson/Robert A. Heinlein book Variable Star, that wonky new drive that enables a ship from Earth to catch up to another one is where the shark was jumped.
It's been downhill from there.
I worked on both Clinton/Gore campaigns, and it was something that left me feeling very accomplished.
And Hill Street Blues jumped the shark with "Watt A Way To Go." Unfortunately, the cop-show genre went with it. While NYPD Blue was good, it never got into the down-and-dirty mayhem shown in HSB. A little here and there for shock value, but that was about it. Now we have freaking reality shows like Cops, aka "All White Trash, All The Fucking Time." Beautiful. :P
--Kris
Also: Scooby Doo and Scrappy too. I HATED Scrappy and his bullshit "puppy power."
And do I have to mention? Joanie loves Chachi.
After it, most of the more progressive GLBT movements for broader social justice fell by the waysaid to mere "normality" and "equality." We need to aim higher than just getting our share of the (rotten) pie.