Remember
the sitcom Roseanne? In case you don’t, Roseanne was a
popular show about a working family in a small town in downstate Illinois,
struggling on the edge of poverty. It starred the popular comedian
Roseanne Barr in the title role, with the already-popular actor John Goodman as
her husband. The show ran for nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997, and
frequently appears on lists of the greatest television shows. After
twenty years, you can still catch marathons of the show running in syndication,
and an eight-episode tenth season is planned for 2018, so fans can catch up
with the lives of these fictional characters. It had a good eight years,
but that ninth season… that’s when the grumbling among the fans began.
Working
hard in middle America: Roseanne and her TV family before the lottery ticket—and well before Roseanne backed the Trump ticket.
In the
first episode of the ninth season, the Connor family, played by Barr and
Goodman and several other talented actors, hit the lottery. This poor
family, struggling to get by, suddenly found itself with millions of dollars
and no need to work anymore. Barr said that it didn’t really matter,
since money or no, Roseanne was always about class. The Connors
were always working class, she felt, and a sudden windfall couldn’t change
that. Indeed, the characters’ personalities didn’t change that much, even
if their financial straits did. That was part of the vision of the show:
your class, your social standing, your connections in the world, they aren’t
connected to money. Money might make your own life easier, and it can
change the way you behave, but it won’t change your fundamental nature.
You can agree with that assessment or not, but that’s what Barr was going
for in her show.
While
ratings didn’t suffer during the ninth season of Roseanne, some longtime
fans started to grouse, saying that Roseanne had “jumped the shark”.
It’s a strange expression, especially since the show was set in a place
that’s about a thousand miles from anywhere a shark might be sighted. No
sharks appeared in any episode of Roseanne, much less were any jumped
over.
Roseanne was not the
first show ever to be accused of “jumping the shark”. It’s nowhere near a
new phenomenon in television or in writing itself, though the term is just over
thirty years old. It refers to the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, where
literal shark-jumping figured into one of the episodes. Happy Days
focused on the lives of teenagers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1950s.
(Since the show ran for eleven seasons, its final episodes must have been
in the 1960s, but apart from early episodes where the Eisenhower/Stevenson
presidential races got some mention, this was never really made clear.)
Probably
the show’s most popular character was Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli, played by
Henry Winkler, and provided the origin of the term “jumping the shark”.
He was what was known in the 50s as a greaser, so called because
they used an oily hair product that was popular at the time, giving their hair
a slick, “greasy” look. Perhaps evoking James Dean or Marlon Brando in
“The Wild Ones”, Fonzie’s costume was comprised of blue jeans, a leather
jacket, and boots. He rode a motorcycle (without a helmet, of course).
A ratings bonanza happened early in the show’s run, where Fonzie
announced he would jump fourteen parked cars on his motorcycle. The
episode was a huge ratings draw, ending with Fonzie in a mid-air freeze-frame,
leaving the audience to wonder if he’d make it safely to the other ramp.
The cliffhanger had fans buzzing until the following week’s episode.
I remember the kids in my first grade class talking about it incessantly,
and speculation flew about whether or not Fonzie would make it, or even if the
character would wind up dying in a crash.
If you’ll
pardon the spoiler, Fonzie did crash, but did not die. He was in pretty
bad shape, landing in a hospital for a while, where he vowed to abandon the
tough-guy lifestyle and clean up his act. Fonzie never stopped appearing
tough, but he did cut the rebel act, and found a nice, steady job teaching shop
at the local high school.
The writers
and producers of Happy Days never forgot what the motorcycle stunt did
for their ratings. Fonzie never gave up his trademark motorcycle, but
since he gave up his reckless lifestyle, they couldn’t very well have him jump
something else, could they? Well, they did. In the September 20,
1977 episode of Happy Days (set in nineteen fifty-something), Fonzie and
the Happy Days cast take a trip to Hollywood where Fonzie discovers
waterskiing. This was a natural course, since in real life, Henry Winkler
was a good waterskier himself. Repeating the car-jumping formula, the
writers decided it was a good idea to have Fonzie, on waterskis, jump over a
shark. Beside the ramp Fonzie would jump on his waterskis was an
underwater cage holding a shark, and he jumped it, with the end of the episode
showing him in a mid-air freeze-frame, leaving the audience to wonder if he’d
make it safely to the other side.
Another spoiler: Fonzie did make it, and was not bitten by that shark.
Happy Days was bitten by some criticism, though. Some fans
were annoyed that the show was retreading a previous success, suggesting it was
something new. Critics didn’t care for it, since it didn’t make sense
that Fonzie, whose character was moving from a reckless youth to a responsible
adult, suddenly did something that was apparently really reckless again.
Today, the gimmick is remembered as stupid and contrived by many one-time
fans of the show, but the fact is that the episode got great ratings when it
aired, as the episode’s writer is still quick to point out.
Fonzie
getting ready to jump the cars (left) and to jump the shark (right).
In the
1980s, when radio personality John Hein was still in college, he and his
roommate were discussing their favorite TV shows and when those shows started
their declines. After talking about the fifth-season shark-jumping
episode of Happy Days, Hein credits his roommate with having coined the
term “jump the shark” to refer to any show that abandoned its earlier,
successful formula for a flashy gimmick, a new character, or some new direction
that left what followed diminished. As Hein went on his career in sketch
comedy and radio, he also started a website in the 1990s called
jumptheshark.com, which kept track of the point where TV shows went from right
to wrong, getting worse while airing far too long.
Other shows
have since been saddled with the always-negative tag “jumped the shark”.
When Cousin Oliver joined the Brady Bunch cast, many fans felt the
show had jumped the shark. (At the time, the expression was years away
from coinage). When Charlie Sheen had his famous public meltdown and left
Two and a Half Men, he was replaced by Ashton Kutcher, keeping the
two-and-a-half part mentioned in the show’s title intact, this was jumping the
shark. When Fox Mulder left The X Files and his partner Dana
Scully sallied forth without him, this was jumping the shark. When Bruce
Willis’ and Cybil Shepherd’s characters finally got together on Moonlighting,
negating the unaddressed romantic tension that was at the center of the show’s
personality, this was jumping the shark. The term is sometimes used to
express that a show just isn’t as good as it used to be, but this isn’t quite
it. Shark jumping is about a fundamental change in the formula of the
show, and not mere decline. There’s often a matter of loyal fans just not
liking change, and just as likely some resentment toward studios who are
reluctant to give up on a lucrative franchise. Film franchises have also
been disparaged as jumping the shark, like with the fourth Indiana Jones
movie in 2008, or the third Halloween movie in 1982.
The
expression has moved beyond television, too. Radio opinionator Rush
Limbaugh accused Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) of “jumping the shark”
when she ranted against vaccines in 2011. (Limbaugh had previously been a
great admirer of Bachmann). The city manager of Black Rock City, Nevada,
observed that the Burning Man Festival had “jumped the shark” when, alongside
the masses camping in the middle of the desert, the festival started to feature
VIP areas for those who were willing to pay for them—something the city manager
found to be very much contrary to the original spirit of the festival. In
2017, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Scottish humorist
darkly declared that “democracy had jumped the shark”. This was not a
compliment.
Ironically,
after the episode when Happy Days literally jumped the shark, the show
did not enter a period of decline. Happy Days’ final episode aired
in 1984, after eleven seasons, with ratings still as strong as ever. The
show’s creators decided to end it only because they actually were afraid of staying
too long, and feared that if they did, decline and tedium would be inevitable.
Happy Days also spawned two highly successful spinoffs—Laverne
& Shirley and Mork & Mindy. It later spawned the less
successful Joanie Loves Chachi and the Saturday morning cartoon show The
Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. There were enough characters in the
show’s cast to create even more spinoffs, but there were never more than those
four. Some feel that with those last two spinoffs, they’d already jumped
the shark.
Watch
television history: Fonzie jumps the shark:
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