jumping The Shark On Satellite Tv

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All good things must come to an end, as the saying goes, and TV shows are no exception. While the vast majority of long running TV shows eventually find themselves in syndication endlessly on satellite TV, there is often a time during the run of a show when quality begins to decline precipitously. Whether there a change forced among crucial staff members, or the show just begins to lose what made it great, this happens so commonly that it even has a name: jumping the shark.

The term jumping the shark refers to an episode of the 1970s TV show Happy Days, starring actor Henry Winkler as the Fonz. In the premiere episode for the series's fifth season, the Fonz jumps over a shark while riding water skis. What this had to do with the premise of the show remains a mystery to this day. To many people, this episode signifies that the show, which focused on nostalgia for the lifestyle of the 1950s, had by that point completely lost its moorings. The show continued on for seven years after the shark-jumping episode, and many fans agree those last seven seasons are vastly inferior to the first four.

Absurdity is a common feature of shows that jump the shark. This may coincide with sheer fatigue among writers, who find it difficult to keep things fresh while dealing with the same characters in the same situations year after year. Perhaps the great modern example of this is the show Roseanne. While the show made great efforts during the first half of its run to tackle pressing social issues and realistically depict lower-class poverty, and was largely successful, around the time the actress that played Roseanne's daughter Becky was replaced the show began to change considerably. At one point late in the show, Roseanne and her family actually win the lottery, only to reveal to the audience that these late-season events were really just fictional inventions of Roseanne's character. As another example, the Seinfeld episode where Kramer finds the entire set of The Merv Griffin show thrown away is cited as a particularly absurd example of shark-jumping, even though it came very close to the end of the Seinfeld series.

The example of Roseanne brings up another example of a common phenomenon in shows that jump the shark: casting changes. For example, in the U.S. version of the office, Steve Carrell, who is arguably the show's protagonist, has left the show entirely, and yet the rest of the cast perseveres. Even if The Office is still a funny show with Carrell's replacement, one wonders if viewers won't feel just a little dirty watching the show continue to go on without one of its leads. Luckily, satellite TV makes it easy to catch your favorite shows at their peak, and in HD when available to boot.

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jumping The Shark On Satellite Tv

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