Series that Jump the Shark

[Diana]

If you have never heard of "jumping the shark" - that is when a series goes TOO FAR. The show does something really stupid, be it a gimmick, or plot twist, or one really bad episode that forever changed and RUINS the series.

Usually after that moment, the series ends up cancelled not too long after. It is sad and it sucks. A lot of really awesome series have been ruined by seriously awful writing decisions. D:

Tell us about some of your favorite series that jumped the shark and then sucked!

 

[Pastor ćhoi]

 

[KeatonWorshipper]

SpongeBob SquarePants.

 

[Jorick]

My favorite example is probably Roseanne, although I was never a huge fan of it so I didn't hate the shark jumping as much as most people apparently did. It was a more or less decent sitcom about a working-class family, up until they began the ninth and last season by having the family win the lottery. That turned it into a mess of goofy nonsense that abandoned the whole tone of the first 8 seasons and included nonsense like Roseanne keeping a dangerously premature baby alive through the power of love, Roseanne's sister getting together with a literal prince, and Roseanne saving Hilary Clinton (played by an actor, not the real deal) from women-hating terrorists on a train.

The reason this one is my favorite example is because it ends up having a totally logical reason: the entire ninth season was made up bullshit. In the finale it was revealed that the entire show was really Roseanne writing a book about her life wherein she changed a lot of things she didn't like. Her husband actually died at the end of the eighth season and the family never won the lottery, so apparently instead of writing about those painful memories she kept him alive and went full ham to drastically change their fictional life.

There are also a couple shows I actually did like a lot until they pulled a Fonz. One was That 70's Show having two of the main characters (including the main character) leave the show and get poorly replaced with new characters, which of course killed it and ended up with the 8th season being the final one instead of ending it in the 7th season with the main character leaving as they probably should have done. Dexter went a sort similar with with its 4th season finale killing off the best antagonist they'd ever had and also Dexter's wife, and so the later seasons included multiple really awkwardly done romance plots (including one where Dexter's adoptive sister apparently falls in love with him, because incestuous overtones make for good ratings I guess?) and increasingly formulaic nonsense, and was eventually finished off by an 8th season that sank like the fucking Titanic and delivered one of the least satisfying series finales I have ever witnessed. Homeland jumped the shark in its second season when near the end of it they had terrorists hack into the Vice President's pacemaker to kill him. Yeah, it was exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.

The fact that I had so many examples off the top of my head makes me kind of sad.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Shows where jumping the shark killed it?

Walking Dead I guess?
Though I still watch it as a guilty pleasure and it's still going.
It's only 'killed' in the sense that none of the later seasons hold up to season 1.

-Heroes-

I personally dropped it at Season 5 (I think, it was whenever the Carnival people popped up).
Though I'm curious what the dropping point was for you, because Heroes fans seemed to have dropped it as a ton of different spots.

 

[Brovo]

Remember when this show was all about explaining how the criminal justice system worked and felt the audience was intelligent enough to deal with the nature of justice being blind and most cases having elements of uncertainty?

Yeah. Well. They felt that was too productive, so lets portray gamers as rapists and murders. That is totally reflective of reality, right?

 

[Dervish]

My favorite example is probably Roseanne, although I was never a huge fan of it so I didn't hate the shark jumping as much as most people apparently did. It was a more or less decent sitcom about a working-class family, up until they began the ninth and last season by having the family win the lottery. That turned it into a mess of goofy nonsense that abandoned the whole tone of the first 8 seasons and included nonsense like Roseanne keeping a dangerously premature baby alive through the power of love, Roseanne's sister getting together with a literal prince, and Roseanne saving Hilary Clinton (played by an actor, not the real deal) from women-hating terrorists on a train.

The reason this one is my favorite example is because it ends up having a totally logical reason: the entire ninth season was made up bullshit. In the finale it was revealed that the entire show was really Roseanne writing a book about her life wherein she changed a lot of things she didn't like. Her husband actually died at the end of the eighth season and the family never won the lottery, so apparently instead of writing about those painful memories she kept him alive and went full ham to drastically change their fictional life.

There are also a couple shows I actually did like a lot until they pulled a Fonz. One was That 70's Show having two of the main characters (including the main character) leave the show and get poorly replaced with new characters, which of course killed it and ended up with the 8th season being the final one instead of ending it in the 7th season with the main character leaving as they probably should have done. Dexter went a sort similar with with its 4th season finale killing off the best antagonist they'd ever had and also Dexter's wife, and so the later seasons included multiple really awkwardly done romance plots (including one where Dexter's adoptive sister apparently falls in love with him, because incestuous overtones make for good ratings I guess?) and increasingly formulaic nonsense, and was eventually finished off by an 8th season that sank like the fucking Titanic and delivered one of the least satisfying series finales I have ever witnessed. Homeland jumped the shark in its second season when near the end of it they had terrorists hack into the Vice President's pacemaker to kill him. Yeah, it was exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.

The fact that I had so many examples off the top of my head makes me kind of sad.

Apparently hacking into a pacemaker is terrifyingly possible.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/singula...ck-a-pacemaker-and-other-medical-devices-too/

 

[Jorick]

Apparently hacking into a pacemaker is terrifyingly possible.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/singula...ck-a-pacemaker-and-other-medical-devices-too/

Hah, well then, they did a horrible job of presenting it. Everything about it made it seem like total shenanigans in both reality and the plot of the show. I guess that changes it from an unrealistic nonsense shark jumping to a suddenly awful writing shark jumping. The stuff that came after that bit was still generally far lower quality than what came before, so it still works as an example. :P

 

[Dervish]

Hah, well then, they did a horrible job of presenting it. Everything about it made it seem like total shenanigans in both reality and the plot of the show. I guess that changes it from an unrealistic nonsense shark jumping to a suddenly awful writing shark jumping. The stuff that came after that bit was still generally far lower quality than what came before, so it still works as an example. :P

I never saw the show before, but if TV loves doing anything, it's taking something someone on the team heard about and then running so hard in a goofy ass direction that by the time they air the episode, what's left is less believable than Invader Zim.

 

[Razilin]

magical girl lyrical nanoha

but then it jumped away from the shark with sound dramas

 

[Asuras]

Aldnoah Zero started out as what I'd like to believe was a witty and interesting show. While the main character Inaho was utterly boring as a character personality initially, he was at least bearable. He was depicted as being quite intelligent, though his demeanor was about as a colorful as a moon rock.
What was great about it was that it seemed to be all about the struggle to defeat overwhelming odds with wits rather than sheer force. There was no, "I must save my friends, time to power up to my next level hrrroooooaaaahhh!" It was just simply thinking about the science behind whatever enemy mecha they faced was using, and turning it against it.

With time it became little more than as huge jumping board to pass off Inaho as being an unstoppable badass. He starts to defeat enemies single-handedly, with less and less interesting methods to boot. Eventually he just becomes a one man army, to the point where he literally uses everyone else's mecha directly at the same time to defeat a large force.

It's become boring now. There's no intelligence to it. No sense of danger. No sense of wonder. They went too far with trying to make one character "cool", but inevitably just made him a gary stu instead.

 

[Pastor ćhoi]

Shows where jumping the shark killed it?

Walking Dead I guess?
Though I still watch it as a guilty pleasure and it's still going.
It's only 'killed' in the sense that none of the later seasons hold up to season 1.

I personally dropped it at Season 5 (think, it was whenever the Carnival people popped up).
Though I'm curious what the dropping point was for you, because Heroes fans seemed to have dropped it as a ton of different spots.

Never dropped it. Hatewatched it to the bitter, bitter end. But there's definitely more than one "oh no, this is the turning point' moment. The shark doesn't just jump; the shark learns parkour, the shark masters the art of the BMX dirt bike just to swerve up into the air. The shark skydives from the heavens, lands safely against your window and presses both its middle FINgers up against it. The shark has trained its entire life to win gold at the olympic high jump of fuck you.

My personal moment was the, uh, Angela's decision to use mind control to turn Sylar's comatose body into Nathan. Out of a mountain of monumentally dumb decisions, this one takes the cake for me. Angela's smart. Well, smart for this series anyway, but when you're up against the sheer -SHEER- number of mental impairments that plague Hiro, Peter, Mohinder and Claire, is there really much of a contest? She knows the stakes. She's went up against mind control (Hell, her black boyfriend and husband are both powerful telepaths) and she knows how shaky, how unreliable the whole thing is in the long term. But she's a grieving mother, yes? She's not thinking right? Fine. But some of the most pragmatic, most competent, most paranoid (coughHRGcough) characters out there basically let her bully them into this stupid, stupid decision.

Sylar comes back within, what, 4 episodes? He renews his killing spree, Nathan gets to die again, and Zachary Quinto gets to bask around on this trainwreck for a bit more before the Star Trek Movie.

 

[chainedfiction]

@Pastor ćhoi Thanks for the spoilers .___.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Never dropped it. Hatewatched it to the bitter, bitter end. But there's definitely more than one "oh no, this is the turning point' moment. The shark doesn't just jump; the shark learns parkour, the shark masters the art of the BMX dirt bike just to swerve up into the air. The shark skydives from the heavens, lands safely against your window and presses both its middle FINgers up against it. The shark has trained its entire life to win gold at the olympic high jump of fuck you.

My personal moment was the, uh, Angela's decision to use mind control to turn Sylar's comatose body into Nathan. Out of a mountain of monumentally dumb decisions, this one takes the cake for me. Angela's smart. Well, smart for this series anyway, but when you're up against the sheer -SHEER- number of mental impairments that plague Hiro, Peter, Mohinder and Claire, is there really much of a contest? She knows the stakes. She's went up against mind control (Hell, her black boyfriend and husband are both powerful telepaths) and she knows how shaky, how unreliable the whole thing is in the long term. But she's a grieving mother, yes? She's not thinking right? Fine. But some of the most pragmatic, most competent, most paranoid (coughHRGcough) characters out there basically let her bully them into this stupid, stupid decision.

Sylar comes back within, what, 4 episodes? He renews his killing spree, Nathan gets to die again, and Zachary Quinto gets to bask around on this trainwreck for a bit more before the Star Trek Movie.

Oh yea I remember that moment...
Why the hell did they allow Sylar to live by doing that stupid crap? >.<

Also, relevant:

 

[Ser K+]

Lost.

 

[Pachamac]

Bleach was never exacty amazing, but the manga was pretty fair and entertaining up until the end of the Soul Society arc. Then it all went to shit.

 

[ᴛᴏᴄᴋᴀ]

Sons of Anarchy! Ugh! The whole entire show was ruined for me in the sixth season. Previously in the other seasons there was a break in the violence to show the brotherhood inside the club and how they all looked after each other, but the sixth season was nothing but endless backstabbing and violence with literally no pause. The series was dark to begin with, but from beginning to end they took it to a much darker place than it should have gone, and let in very little light.

That stupid Honey Boo Boo show too....I mean, they made light of a morbidly obese woman and her daughter who is also unhealthy. And for what? To get ratings? To make people laugh at a lifestyle that should not be publicized? There was no reason at all that should have been turned into a show other than to glamorize rednecks....

 

[Jerelin]

I have to agree with Jorick and say Dexter. Seasons 1 and 4 are my favorite. 2 was memorable because of Lila. What happened in 3? Doesn't matter because Seasons 1 and 4 make up for it. After 4, though? Terrible. Killing the best antagonist and then ____ made it terrible. Sucked so badly that I pretty much forced myself to get through it because I wanted to know what happened. I enjoyed the final season a tiny bit, but that finale was a disaster.

 

[Hellis]

hmmmm


HMMMMMM

Super Natural past season 5.

 

[Koschei]

/unpopular opinion

Doctor Who after all that Pandorica bullshit (aka reboot season 5). It's mostly on Moffat's part, though. Sure, he can write some really good stuff, but you can't just grab shit and slap it onto Doctor Who and expect it to work out. It doesn't. The "impossible girl" thing that's been going on for the past 4 seasons also help make the show less interesting. All the female characters are copies or just really, REALLY flat, or the kind of woman Moffat would like to stick his dick in. They can't exist as characters unless the Doctor is around or directly involved. The constant continuity glitches and the massive plot holes also play a part in why the show got worse. *coughcoughAsylumoftheDalekscough*

And the Amy/Rory relationship (so fucking unhealthy I can't watch it) also made me drop the show. I watch it now and then, but not with the same enthusiasm as the Davies era. He made the show and adventure, Moffat killed it. /end Moffat bashing

And Supernatural, of course. I stopped watching after that leviathan!Castiel arc. It just got boring after that.

Arrow got kind of boring after the first season, too. Not sure why, actually.