The Joys of Jumping the Shark

Presumably everyone knows what “jumping the shark” means at this point. It’s a term used to describe television shows or movies- and sometimes people and even political movements- that once were good and have gone sour. “Jumping the Shark” is the exact moment in the life of a show to which one can point and say, with some authority, “This is where it fell apart.” I think the term dates back to an episode of the show “Happy Days” in which “the Fonz” literally had to jump over a shark in the ocean while riding on a jet-ski.
The idea of the Fonz doing this patently drips with flop sweat and reeks of someone (presumably the writing staff) running completely out of ideas.
I love “The Simpsons” and have several seasons on DVD, although all mine come from Germany and are titled “Die Simpsons,” with Norbert Gastell voicing Homer. I have my MA in German Studies and though I lack real-world chances to use the German language most of the time, I still like to practice my German. And it’s better to practice with something I actually enjoy, which I think helps one to absorb and retain the language.
Gastell says “Nein!” instead of “D’oh!” in the show. Don’t ask me why.
The commentary on the DVDs is still in English even though the show’s in German. During commentary on one season, someone in the recording booth (maybe Matt Groening himself?) said that a lot of fans pinpointed the moment “The Simpsons” jumped the shark as the ending of "Cape Feare.”
For those who don’t remember or aren’t fans, “Cape Feare” is the episode in which Sideshow Bob (known as “Tingeltangel Bob” in German) gets out of prison and attempts to murder Bart. The episode ends with the family returning from a stay in the Witness Protection Program to their house on Evergreen Terrace, where everything presumably will go back to normal, resetting at least until next week’s adventure.
Only when Homer pulls the car up to the house, Grandpa Simpson is standing there, having apparently been forgotten, a victim of unwitting elder neglect. Abe also now sports large breasts, supple red lips, and a long wavy mane of woman’s hair. “Look what happened to me without my pills!”
That moment was certainly ludicrous, but it wasn’t break-the-fourth-wall/scrap-a-character’s-entire-backstory-for-a-laugh ludicrous (see “The Principle and the Pauper” and the Simpsons universe-specific term “to pull a Tamzarian”).
Most fans would argue that the show had several more great years after “Cape Feare” before there was a precipitous drop in quality, or little details like story started to suffer as a kind of winking/cutaway humor edged into the production. I think the “South Park” writing staff derisively calls this sort of thing a “Manatee Joke” for reasons that are obvious to anyone who’s seen the episode in which Trey Parker and Matt Stone use their cardboard cutout foulmouthed children to slam “Family Guy”.
Putting aside the churlish fans from the BBS/early AOL days who were premature in their declaration of the death of “The Simpsons”, the day did in fact eventually come when the rest of us had to admit that the quality dipped and then precipitously nosedived into a graceless faceplant, at least for a while.
It was still better than almost anything else on television at the time and was far from being outright bad, though.
The consensus among the less-curmudgeonly, less Comic Book Guy-esque fans is that the show’s Golden Age is maybe between the fifth and eighth seasons, when Homer’s voice shed all traces of Walter Matthau and Bart was no longer spouting out sayings that appeared on t-shirts a week later. Family dynamics got explored in more detail, and secondary characters got rounded out and proved they had real life in them (especially Moe the Bartender and Apu the convenience store clerk).
After that period, some stories felt recycled and slack (though there were still some gems in there) and things really started to go downhill.
By the 21st or 22nd season, it felt like the writers of the show had grown up on the Simpsons, which made it impossible to treat the family as an organic thing. “The Simpsons” was more like a mass pop culture meme, running mostly on nostalgia and the desire of fans to believe it could ever again be as good as it once was. If The Simpsons were a band, this would have been their Vegas years, a time (much like in SNL) when the irreverence of the past shows was gone and was replaced with a much broader crudity.
The Unpersoning of Apu a few years later to appease the Gods of Multiculturalism was a Stalinist bit of overkill that alienated even stalwarts like me, who were happy to keep buying episodes on Amazon well after the show should have been pulled from life support. Up until Apu got axed I enjoyed “The Simpsons” the way a sports fan who lives in a town with a long-losing franchise enjoys rooting for his accursed nine batsmen to break the spell, knowing they probably won’t. It was almost a question of loyalty at that point.
But to return to the Post-Shark / Pre-Unpersoning-of-Apu years, and for the sake of argument, this blog, and a bit of devil’s advocacy: who the hell cares?
Nothing is consistently great forever, and good is sometimes good enough, provided that slightly inferior product is still undergirded by the main structure that made things work well in the better days. And we can still allow ourselves to be buoyed by the warm thermals of nostalgia, and with some effort by both the creators and the audience, we can again occasionally cross the threshold back into something that at least feels like the Golden Age.
Most TV shows aren’t even good from their inception. As far as I’m concerned “Happy Days” jumped the shark the day it debuted. It’s one of those series like “Hogan’s Heroes” that I can barely tolerate even if it’s on some sort of common area TV mounted on a wall in a barbershop or a rest home, and even then it’s only playing because the audience is at best captive and more likely than not semi-comatose.
Even though the Golden Age can never be permanently reentered and lightning can never be rebottled, one can still do good work after they’ve jumped the shark. There are some good and arguably even great “Simpsons” episodes from the post-peak years. The one in which Kirk Van Houten and Homer Simpson coach little league lacrosse and end up having a confrontation in a strip club is as good as the better episodes from the tenth to fifteenth seasons, and I think this episode is from something like the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth season.
And what, pray tell, is good after twenty-five years? “Wine” is the only ready answer that springs to mind at the moment. And maybe marriages, in rare cases.
The Simpsons’ “Halloween of Horror” episode was another classic late entry that stands with the best of the Golden Age shows. It eschewed the usual three-tale format familiar from “Treehouse of Horror” and instead presented a single thirty-minute piece. The show mainly dealt with Lisa and her father running away from psychotic seasonal workers recently fired from a costume and party supplies store.
In a parallel plot (not quite a subplot) Bart and Marge leave the comforts of “Everscream Terrors” to go trick-or-treating in a richer neighborhood filled with McMansions platted in leafy cul-de-sacs, where kids in bouncy palaces make a man dressed as E.T. say swearwords on command.
It’s a great episode, touching and funny in the correct proportions, with a little bit of a moral lesson without being too didactic or heavy-handed. It’s sweet in a way that more recent cartoons like “South Park”, or even worse “Family Guy”, rarely were (though some “South Park” episodes had their moments and when the show wasn’t trying to deal with the churnings of the weekly news cycle or the tabloid circuit, it could be very sweet and effective in its storytelling).
Another great late entry in Simpsons World is “Block Like Me” (whose title is a take on the famous book “Black Like Me”, by John Howard Griffin, the sociologist who shot himself up with a serum to change the color of his pigment so he might experience what it was like to be a black man in segregation-era America).
The episode deals with an inversion of reality with so many twists it feels channeled by Philip Dick from his ”Man in the High Castle” period (it’s unfair to talk about Dick jumping the shark, since psychosis rather than a lack of ideas unhorsed the great SF writer in the end; if anything, part of what killed his writing was that it was so overstuffed with ideas that it resulted in a sort of logjam that didn’t allow for any coherent writing to emerge).
In “Block like Me”, the Simpson Family live in a world where everything is constructed of Lego bricks, from the family members themselves to Maggie’s pacifier, down to the the local Presbylutheran church (I think the stained glass windows may be decals).
It’s in the church where Homer stops the services to bear witness to his ecstatic vision of an alternate world. The world he speaks of is one where where nothing is made out of blocks, and everything is drawn, squiggly, and meaty as his fingers appear fluttering before his eyes in wavy disconcerting cartoonish lines. As he testifies, Homer’s conviction about this other world (the cartoon we all know and love) makes him appear like a fat, middle-aged, beer-soaked Hildegard Von Bingen.
The episode is great, and ranks with the better of the experimental entries in the series, like the one that spoofs those “Behind the Music” specials, where it’s revealed that the Simpson Family is both a real-life family but also playing one for the people viewing them at home. It’s fourth-wall breakage to the umth-degree and it benefits from scorching the proscenium arch to rubbly cinders. And since it can be viewed as non-canonical no one gets hurt and the balance is restored in the end.
My personal favorite “bad” episode is “Hit the Alligator and Run.”
It’s the episode in which Homer has a nervous breakdown and decides to go to Florida for rest and relaxation. Only inspired by beer and booze, the pater familias upends the family station wagon and hits the beach instead, where he proceeds to get hammered with partying teens at a Kid Rock concert (some website voted Kid Rock’s appearance as the #1 worst celebrity guest feature in the show’s history).
Later, when Spring Break is winding down, Homer forces the family to go on a ride through the Everglades in an airboat.
While gunning the boat, Homer goads Lisa to take part in a Jefferson Starship singalong (“What kind of music/built this city?”), but accidentally runs over and possibly kills Captain Jack, a resident alligator who’s a beloved mascot for locals in town.
The previously laidback sheriff sees what Homer hath wrought with Cap’n Jack, and rather than being cool about it he reveals that he’s a hard-ass cracker in the off-season, when the beer companies aren’t paying him to feign mellowness for the sake of the spring breakers.
The family ends up on a chain gang, breaks free, gets blindsided by a passenger train that improbably pushes their car along the track for many miles, so long in fact that Homer has time to hit the dining cart while sparks are literally flying from the car as it’s shoved down the train tracks.
The train finally dislodges the family car (which has taken quite a pounding up to this point) and the Simpsons end up working in a backwater diner where a Kiss-My-Grits waitress with a two-pack-a-day croaky voice says “I like that” to whatever anyone says to her.
There are many moments that feel lazy and like an insult to the viewer’s intelligence, but it doesn’t quite feel like contempt (to me at least), so much as a series of concessions by a hamstrung team of writers who have screwed themselves and managed to find humor in the process rather than scraping the project altogether and running a rerun (or whatever they do when they create something unsalvageable and have nothing to air, or those times when maybe there’s a writers’ strike).
The episode has that feel of a roomful of writers who know they’ve backed themselves into a corner with their story, who know they’ve injected too many non sequiturs and twists, and yet who can’t help themselves from doing it again and again, compounding the problem. The show’s self-conscious badness is part of what causes it to be funny.
If, as Stephen King once said, good writing is a form of courtship, a sort of seduction between a reluctant buyer (the reader or viewer) and the salesman (the artist), “Alligator” is a hard sell offer from a desperate Amway peddler willing to stain your rug or your jacket without asking you, in the hopes that you’ll ask for a demonstration of his cleaning product rather than just punching him in the face. The show’s funny for the same reason the character Gill Gunderson on “The Simpsons” (inspired by Jack Lemon in “Death of a Salesman”) is funny.
You can tell the writers were having fun, and while a fun work environment on a set (or in a writer’s brainstorm room) doesn’t always translate into fun or something funny for the audience (see: Adam Sandler movies), sometimes it does. And it works (at least for me).
It’s almost as if the writers knew that the best years of the Simpsons were past, and that trying to recapture that era or attempting force that kind of magic to come back just wasn’t happening.
Maybe I’m imagining all of the above, but that’s the sense I get, that the staff was liberated by being conscious that the shark could not be un-jumped, and writing with this in mind took off a lot of the pressure and freed them up.
This kind of acknowledgment can sometimes feel liberating, this loss of pressure to perform or maintain a standard. Very few professional boxers, for instance (boxing is another of my obsessions) would admit it, but many feel relieved after their first loss, unburdened and able to concentrate more on improving their skillset and shoring up their weak points, rather than fruitlessly obsessing on the pressure of maintaining their flawless ledgers.
And yes, you can extrapolate this “joy of jumping the shark” to things other than boxing or “The Simpsons”, and it was probably my intention to do so when I started writing this piece, before I began meandering.
Take any artform.
There are writers and musicians and painters who know there are fans of their work who prefer their earlier style, or would prefer them to continue mining a certain vein, and who consider this artist’s best days to be behind them.
There’s frankly nothing wrong with a reunion tour that gives band members the chance to reconcile their differences over doobies backstage while also providing the fans out front the music that reminds them of their youth (not to mention knocking out a massive back-tax nut in the bargain).
But for those who want to concentrate on continuing to create, who don’t want to be chasing their own shadow or some benchmark set for them by someone else, make sure to pay attention to the way that being written off can in some sense liberate one. At least consider the idea.
Whatever you do (write, sing, paint) you probably did it for quite a while before anyone started paying attention, much less paying money for your work. And if the people should turn their back on you, stop paying attention, and stop paying literally (hopefully you get some residuals when they use your songs in toothpaste commercials), the best thing to do is to keep working.
The tree that falls in the forest to hear its own sound is the tree worth being. Or, to paraphrase Knut Hamsun, “I write to hear the water drip.”