Jump the Shark

The television season is being tweaked again and questions are already being put forth as to which shows will no longer be with us, adding to the ranks of unemployed thespians everywhere. Oh, the agony.

The people who should be unemployed are the screenwriters who serve up this drivel and expect the average American to sit and watch it. I thought Congress was trying to outlaw torture. The Yahoo! Home page has a recurring list of “Shows that are on the bubble”, meaning that their viewership is declining. And rightly so, most of the shows they mention on the major four networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox) deserve their status “on the bubble”.

I was born in 1959, at the beginning of the 60’s, ands all we had growing up was the three majors (ABC, CBS and NBC) with a local fourth network that played re-runs that we all loved. I watched Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights because there was only one television in the house (black and white, of course, with tubes in the back) and that’s what my parents wanted to watch. The Soaps were king of the afternoon (except on the fourth channel) and television was pretty mundane, with the most radical thing we saw was James T. Kirk (a white man) kissing Lt. Ohura (a black female) on Star Trek or the comedy of the Smothers Brothers.

Now, with hundreds of channels on cable, you have hundreds, if not thousands of options and there’s still not much to watch on television. Reality television shows have made celebrities out of people whose only claim to fame is their willingness to be humiliated in front of millions of viewers every week. And the list of people who are famous just because they are famous is growing. Fred Allen said back in 1950, “Television is a new medium. It’s called a medium because nothing is well-done.” Anne Landers once said, “Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.” Karl Marx once called religion the “opium of the people”. I remember that there was a cartoon by Berkley Breathed, “Bloom County”, where a computer monitor quoted Karl Marx’s view of religion and implied that this was no longer the case. It wasn’t religion, but mass media (i.e. television) that was the opium of the masses.

The term “jump the shark” comes from a Happy Days episode where Fonzi (Henry Winkler) is waterskiing and jumps over a caged shark in answer to a challenge. Imagine, if can remember that far back, Fonzi wearing swimming trunks, and his signature leather jacket, waterskiing. Then, in all the “coolness” that surrounded this character, having to jump over a caged shark in order to prove his bravery. The term is supposed to mean that the series in question has reached its peak and lost its audience appeal and is about to be cancelled. An interesting fact is that “Happy Days” continued for another seven years before finally being cancelled. But I digress.

I was talking with my brother the other day and he came to the conclusion that Network Television (the main three networks) has not put out anything new or original in decades. In fact, Hollywood is bankrupt as far as new concepts for movies. They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel when they put out “Yogi Bear: the Movie”. It was a cute cartoon in the 60’s. But a live action movie? Not so cute. My sister sais that there are some movies where you pay money to see them and actually lose part of your soul. At least you won’t be getting back the two hours you spent watching that thing back.

Shows that capture our imagination is what people want, like the plot where a “Geek Squad” nerd gets a mini-computer data base of all classified information concerning US national security infused into his brain was brilliant. Or the FBI agent whose brother is a math genius and uses mathematical equations to solve crimes. Or the guy who can tell if you’re lying by the micro expressions we all use and uses this skill to, again, solve crime? The problem is that these story lines, by their very nature, have a limited lifespan. How long before the “geek” becomes a “cool” CIA agent and marries his smokin’ hot female handler/partner? Or how many times can the FBI agent’s brother say, “I can use an algorithm to predict where the criminal is going to strike next” and still be interesting? After only a season or two, the public, as it is wont to do, gets bored with the predictability of the series and moves on to something new.

Most of Network Television programming has “Jumped the Shark” before a new series is even introduced. This is because most of Network Television’s programming is based on some gimmick to keep the viewer interested. “Bonanza” didn’t use a gimmick. It utilized the family dynamics of the Cartwright family and lasted 14 seasons on network television. Neither did “Mash”, a comedy about doctors and nurses in Korea during the conflict, which lasted 11 years and revolved around the ever changing life of a group of Army Medics in a time of war and their attempts to deal with their situation through humor.

Most people like television. It is one place where you can be opened up to whole new worlds while sitting in the comfort of your living room. For its potential, it is relatively inexpensive, and has the ability to change us in positive ways, to enrich society. Instead, we get “Jerry Springer” and “Oprah”, reality television that isn’t real, and more ways to shock and scare ourselves silly until we just sit in front of the television just accepting whatever comes into our homes without question. David Frost once said, “Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home.” Someone else said, “If television is not an idol that we worship, why are all the chairs in the living room facing it?”

To read more by Thomas A. McLoughlin, go to http://insearchofintelligentlife.com or http:docsboyblog.blogspot.com