Jumping the shark

Origin Future radio personality Jon Hein and his University of Michigan roommate Sean Connolly coined the phrase in 1985 in response to season 5, episode 3, "Hollywood: Part 3" of the ABC-TV sitcom Happy Days, which was originally broadcast on September 20, 1977. In the episode, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler) answers a challenge to his bravery by wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, and jumping over a confined shark. The stunt was created as a way to showcase Winkler's real-life waterskiing skills. Hein sold his company, Jump The Shark, Inc., for "over $1 million" in 2006. Responses Ron Howard In 2006, during his contribution to The Interviews: An Oral History of Television, Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham) talked about the Happy Days episode that inspired the phrase: "I remember Donny Most and I sitting there, looking at the script. Donny was really upset. He said, 'Oh man look at what our show has kind of devolved into. It's not even very funny, and you know Fonz is jumping over a shark'... and I kept saying 'Hey Donny we're a hit show, relax. You know it's hard to have great episodes one after another. Fonzie jumping over a shark, it's gonna be funny and great...' I remember thinking that creatively this was not our greatest episode, but I thought it was a pretty good stunt, and I understood why they wanted to do it. And what I remember the most is, it was fun actually driving the speedboat which I did a bit of, noticing that Henry was really a pretty good water skier... But the thing that has to be remembered about the jumping the shark idea, is that the show went on to be such a massive success for years after that. So, it's kind of a fun expression, and I get a kick out of the fact that they identified that episode (because granted maybe it was pushing things a little too far), but I think a lot of good work was still done after that show, and audiences seemed to really respond to it." Fred Fox Jr. In a 2010 Los Angeles Times article, former Happy Days writer Fred Fox Jr., who wrote the episode that later spawned the phrase, said "Was the [shark jump] episode of Happy Days deserving of its fate? No, it wasn't. All successful shows eventually start to decline, but this was not Happy Days time." Fox also points not only to the success of that episode ("a huge hit" with over 30 million viewers), but also to the continued popularity of the series. In addition, Winkler told TheWrap in 2018 that he is "not embarrassed" by the phrase. He stated that "newspapers would mention jumping the shark... and they would show a picture of me in my leather jacket and swim shorts water-skiing. And at that time I had great legs. So I thought, 'I don't care.' And we were No. 1 for the next four or five years." As Winkler's character Barry Zuckerkorn, in the sitcom Arrested Development, hopped over a shark in the episode "Motherboy XXX", Winkler also noted that there "was a book, there was a board game and it is an expression that is still used today... [and] I'm very proud that I am the only actor, maybe in the world, that has jumped the shark twice—once on Happy Days, and once on Arrested Development." == Broader usage ==

Within television, the term is used often by fans to denote a specific episode of a series that changed the focus or tone of the series for the worse. It is almost inevitable that any show with several seasons to its credit will have fans passionately debating about specific episodes that led to the series "jumping the shark." The idiom has been more widely used to describe a wide variety of situations, such as the state of advertising in the digital video recorder era, views on rural education policy, and the anomalous pursuit of a company acquisition. Examples In September 2011, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann repeated an anecdote claiming that the HPV vaccine causes "intellectual disability"; this prompted political commentator Rush Limbaugh to say on his radio show, "Michele Bachmann, she might have blown it today. Well, not blown it—she might have jumped the shark today." In January 2018, political commentator Keith Olbermann criticized the inclusion of esports players on the sports journalism website ''The Players' Tribune'', saying that they "have jumped the shark by publishing pieces by snotty random kids playing children's games" in response to an article by Doublelift, a League of Legends player. In May 2021, CNBC news anchor Carl Quintanilla proposed that Elon Musk had jumped the shark with his advocacy of cryptocurrencies instead of focusing on Tesla, Inc., as it began to lose market share and its stock price began to plunge. Tesla closed at $196.58 on the day Quintanilla made the comment. == Related idioms ==

Nuking the fridge In 2008, Time identified a term modeled after "jump the shark": "nuke the fridge". Specifically applicable to film, the magazine defined the term: "to exhaust a Hollywood franchise with disappointing sequels." The phrase derives from a scene in the fourth Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which Indiana Jones survives an atomic bomb detonation by fitting himself into a lead-lined refrigerator to shield himself from the explosion. The blast completely annihilates its surroundings, but sends the refrigerator flying a sufficient distance away, allowing Jones to escape unharmed. The scene was criticized as being scientifically implausible. Within two days of the film's premiere, the phrase "nuke the fridge" had gone viral, describing film scenes that similarly stretched credulity. Director Steven Spielberg later said the scene was "my silly idea" and was glad to have been part of the pop-culture phrase, while the film's executive producer George Lucas took similar credit believing that Jones would have had an even chance of surviving the explosion. Flanderization == References ==