"jumping the shark": a bum rap?

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:38 PM -0700 9/8/10, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote:
>In today's LA Times, Fred Fox Jr., one of the writers responsible for
>the Happy Days 1977 "jumping the shark" episode, argues that it didn't
>actually initiate the definitive decline of the show and hence that
>the phrase unfairly used to refer to the moment in which a successful
>enterprise starts to go downhill:
>
>"Was the 'Hollywood 3' episode of "Happy Days" deserving of its fate?
>No, it wasn't. All successful shows eventually start to decline, but
>this was not 'Happy Days'' time. Consider: It was the 91st episode and
>the fifth season. If this was really the beginning of a downward
>spiral, why did the show stay on the air for six more seasons and
>shoot an additional 164 episodes? Why did we rank among the Top 25 in
>five of those six seasons?"
>
>Maybe, but to my mind the phrase implies an aesthetic peripety rather
>than a
>commercial downturn -- the claim that "Chomskian linguistics jumped the
>shark with the appearance of Lectures on Government and Binding" isn't
>falsified by pointing out that it was picked up for a number of
>seasons after that.

...not to mention its survival in syndication, with surprising
strength in the ratings.

LH

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