Jumping the Shark
Posted by Nick S. on February 25, 2008
Jumping (get it?) off from Sam’s post on Robert Allen’s work, I had a few thoughts that I figured were just off-topic enough to merit a new post. It’s interesting to consider the problem posed by alienating your core audience. All shows do it, albeit in different ways. We’ve all complained about our favorite program ‘going to the dogs’, but with five times the output of regular prime-time series, soaps have considerably more opportunities to do so (at least with Happy Days you could only complain about the quality once per week…).
jumptheshark.com – a popular website for people who posit exactly when a show has gone from bad to worse – contains a list of categories that signify disaster for a TV programme. These include:
- Same Character, Different Actor
- ‘A very special…’ episode
- New Kid in Town
- Singing
- …The Movie
- Live!
- I Do (wedding)
- Exit…Stage Left (actor leaving over contract)
You can probably see what’s coming. Soaps pretty much fulfill every defining character required to have ‘jumped the shark’ (I’m drawing on my own knowledge here – direct-to-video ‘specials’ of British soaps used to be quite popular, usually with more thrills and explosions than usual, and The Bill did a ‘special live episode’ a few years ago).
But the very same website shows that the majority of posters believe As The World Turns is ‘never jumped’, and is as good as its ever been (although Guiding Light apparently jumped when ‘Reva was cloned’, a story that I instantly want to know more about).
I’d argue that the difference between a prime-time show carrying out these…’gimmicks’ (a nasty word, but I’m not sure what else to use)… and soaps is that prime-time shows do them for ratings, but clearly the same is true of soaps. You could then also argue that prime-time shows revolve consistently around one set of identifiable characters, and losing those characters can lose the show, but I don’t believe that’s true either. There are several successful shows that demonstrate it is possible for your entire set of characters to be replaced without a large detrimental effect (Spooks, or MI:5 if you’re watching it in the US, is one example, Law & Order a more familiar one). I suppose you could also say that the lack of narrative pay-off in a soap gives it some distinction from prime-time-shark-jumping – but one could just as easily point out that plenty of prime-time shows offer little to no immediate narrative ‘incentive’ at the end of the season. The ‘cliffhanger’ device is well established, and shows like Lost have no real ‘pay-offs’ from season to season (you can probably tell I’m very interested in soaps and their relationship to prime-time, particularly coming from a country where soaps only really air during prime-time). Anyway, here’s to hoping As The World Turns continues to consistently jump the shark for a long time to come.
WKU POP 201 
laura47 said
I think these events are not considered shark-jumping events on soaps because the expectations are different from prime-time. When the audience expects or even desires ‘gimmicks’, they need to be a whole lot more egregious to actually turn people off the show. I hold different shows to different standards myself. I will accept people going back from the dead much more easily on my SF shows than my serious dramas, for instance. I need to have appropriate expectations to enjoy shows, and I don’t really mind. It does make one show less enjoyable in my mind just because I have different standards for what is cheesy.
samford said
Reading some of the individual comments about “jumping the shark” is illuminating. What I’ve noticed. People have a different expectation with these shows. I’d say that soaps, pro wrestling, comic books, and other long-form pieces like this have probably jumped back and forth over the shark many times over. The phrase “Jump the Shark” seems to be code for “the beginning of the end,” a drop-off of quality in which as how will not recover. On the other hand, soaps are set up with the idea that they will be permanent from the beginning, so that viewers watch these bad moments in the show while waiting for them to improve, rather than thinking of it as “the beginning of the end.”
Further, there’s that piece of the puzzle from Allen’s book that Nick refers to here and which I wrote about a few posts back. If a viewer has invested a substantial amount of time into watching a show, that creates quite a bit of tolerance when the show isn’t to their liking. That means these shows, with longtime viewers, have developed quite a deep cache that helps seem them through “bad times.” But, eventually, that goodwill can be spent, which is when soaps are most in trouble–when they lose some of their most dedicated fan base.
Potassium said
I watched GH during eighties and then drifted away. I returned in 2006 to find among other things, a new metric system that involves “sweeps.” It’s possible they had sweeps in the eighties but I wasn’t aware of it. In my soap, these sweeps periods are inducing “Jump the Shark” events.