Jumping the shark

"Jump the shark" redirects here. For the episode of The X-Files, see Jump the Shark (The X-Files). For the Supernatural episode, see Jump the Shark (Supernatural).

Fonzie on water skis, in a scene from the Happy Days episode "Hollywood, Part Three of Three," after literally jumping over a shark

Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. It is synonymous with the phrase, "the beginning of the end." It also means and/or is often signified by a particular scene/episode/aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of "gimmick" in a desperate attempt to keep viewers' interest.

The phrase derived from an early fan forum website (jumptheshark.com) where users debated a given television show's jump the shark moment. On June 20 2006, website founder Jon Hein sold his company Jump The Shark, Inc., to Gemstar (owners of TV Guide). In early 2009, Gemstar scrapped the original fan forum site and converted jumptheshark.com into a redirect for TV Guide's celebrity gossip site.

In its initial usage, it referred to the point in a television program's history when the program had outlived its freshness and viewers had begun to feel that the show's writers were out of new ideas, often after great effort was made to revive interest in the show by the writers, producers, or network.

The usage of "jump the shark" has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment in its evolution when a brand, design, or creative effort moves beyond the essential qualities that initially defined its success, beyond relevance or recovery.

History

The phrase jump the shark comes from a scene in the fifth season premiere episode of the American TV series Happy Days titled "Hollywood: Part 3," written by Fred Fox, Jr., and aired on September 20, 1977. In the episode, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler), wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, jumps over a confined shark, answering a challenge to demonstrate his bravery. For a show that in its early seasons depicted universally relatable experiences against a backdrop of 1950s nostalgia, this marked an audacious, cartoonish turn towards attention-seeking gimmickry and continued the faddish lionization of an increasingly superhuman Fonzie. The series continued for nearly five years after that, with a number of changes in cast and situations. However, it is commonly believed that the show, out of ideas and even trapped in its own success (largely due to the disproportionate popularity of the "Fonzie" character and the show's (executives') intense desire to continue "milking" that), began a downhill slide, becoming a caricature of itself often filled with little more than its popular catch phrases and character mannerisms.

In a 2010 Los Angeles Times article, former Happy Days writer Fred Fox Jr., who wrote the episode that later spawned the phrase, said, "Was the [shark jump] 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." Fox also points to not only the success of the episode itself ("a huge hit" with over 30 million viewers), but also to the continued popularity of the series.

Broader usage

As an example of the idiomatic usage of the phrase "jump the shark" in a broader context, Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive journalist Dan Neil used the expression to describe the Mini Countryman, a much larger and less nimble evolution of the previously small and aptly named cars marketed by Mini. The Countryman, in Neil's opinion, absurdly forsakes the ethos, the essential quality, the inner logic that made the brand successful in the first place: excellent handling in a nimble size. In a March 2011 review titled "What Part of 'Mini' Did You Not Grasp, BMW?", Neil wrote "with the Countryman, tiny sharks have been jumped."

In September 2011, after Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann repeated an anecdote shared with her that the HPV vaccine causes "mental retardation", conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh said "Michele Bachmann, she might have blown it today. Well, not blown it – she might have jumped the shark today."

The idiom has been used to describe a wide range of situations, ranging from the state of advertising in the digital video recorder era, views on rural education policy, the anomalous pursuit of a company acquisition and Facebook's efforts to "modernize its home page ... with empty bells and whistles — take, timeline and subscribers, for example" before an anticipated 2012 IPO.

A print-specific version of the phrase is "Marrying Irving", coined by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten.