"jumping the shark": a bum rap?

[Shapiro, Fred]

Fox's argument that Happy Days's continuation for six more seasons means the "jumping the shark" moment was not the beginning of a downward spiral is ridiculous.  The Simpsons, for example, is widely considered to have lost its edge and high quality a lot more than six seasons ago, but keeps rolling on nonetheless.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Geoffrey Nunberg [nunberg at ISCHOOL.BERKELEY.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2010 11:38 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "jumping the shark": a bum rap?

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. And the associations of the phrase must have had a
lot to with
its success -- not just the image of Fonzie on water skis, but the
implications of making Happy Days the paradigm of an aesthetic project.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-jump-the-shark-20100903,0,6800871.story

Geoff Nunberg

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