It debuted the same year as Cops, 1989.
Not sure I’d call all the Trek shows one thing. TNG and DS9 were quite good. Voyager, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, aside from “Lost In Space,” and I pretty much quit watching it by the second season.
And Enterprise… well, by definition, a prequel dives into the lore of a preexisting milieu, and explores and defines what came before. The whole Temporal Cold War, the Xindi attack on Earth, and all that… well, it didn’t do anything for me. I liked the cast, but once again, the suits were calling the shots, and they didn’t wise up until the last season. Enterprise barely felt like Trek at all.
Voyager improved. Enterprise, for the most part, did not. So I’m not sure either of these shows applies to shark jumping.
I agree “Lost” lost me, but I did hang on to the end, and if you believe you guessed correctly as to who got off the island alive, I assure you that you guessed wrong.
The Chris Carter Effect: If the fans decide that the writing team is never going to resolve its plots, they will stop following the show.
I don’t care how good you are, you can only keep so many plates spinning for so long, and Lost was a show where by the end, they were fighting like hell to avoid catching or dropping the plates.
Dick York’s double-takes were often pricelessly hilarious. All Dick Sergeant could do was stand there and do the slow burn.
Oh, yeah, I remember all that. I also was in elementary school thinking “This is shit.” Yep, a big shark jump took place.
I also remember The Waltons starting to suck big time in about 1976-77. I think that it turned into a clone of Happy Days, only with Virginians who had Connecticut accents. Whenever Richard Thomas left was about 2 years too late.
ALL one-episode twins are evil. No exceptions.
Wasn’t Cartman’s twin a really nice guy who everyone liked?
Gunsmoke, like many other shows of the era, was effectively gutted by the growing “no violence in TV” movement. There was an early Simpsons episode that satirized this beautifully.
I never thought of that, but I think you may be right; the show’s demise slotted right in the time frame where they were starting to get tough about “The Family Hour.”
And I never understood the appeal of Lassie. I watched a few episodes when I was a kid, and remember thinking, “This is worse than Leave It To Beaver, except for the dog.” A show like this would not have lasted long in a world with more than three or four channels.
This was the reason why The Wild, Wild West, one of my favorite series, was cancelled despite continuing good ratings.
The cancellation of “Wild, Wild West” had more to do with violence on TV in general rather than the network’s later implementation of a “family hour” in prime time. It was also the reason why the networks 86’d a slew of popular Saturday morning superhero cartoons that same year.
The “family hour” did not really become a factor until the mid 70s when, in addition to violence, the sexual content of prime time programming increased.
Nope… Saturday Night Live has been on since 1975… FORTY YEARS. :eek:
That would explain why Beldar and Prymaat look a little elderly nowadays in the insurance commercials.
I do remember, though, the sudden yanking of popular TV shows due to their violent content. Seems to me that led directly to the sexualization of prime time television; if you can’t have Jim West get in a fistfight, well, what DO you offer the teeming masses?
Well, as it turns out, Suzanne Somers in a tight top jumping up and down seemed to work…
Which brings me to a perennial favorite of not me, The Dukes Of Hazzard. I wasn’t crazy about the show, but Daisy usually managed to hold my attention. Does anyone think THIS one ever jumped the shark? Nearly every episode I can think of seemed to have pretty much the same plot, and they all seemed to operate pretty much the same way… and … well… they were all more or less ALIKE. The only change in format was that one season they got the two lookalike actors because the two leads wanted a bite of the merchandising. And for some reason, THAT was the only time I can ever remember hearing anyone gripe about it.
And then the next season, the two leads came back, and … well… everything went back to normal. Did anyone pay enough attention to this show to know if it actually jumped the shark, or the actors got bored, or what?
I was referring to the anti-violence campaign in general, rather than the “family hour” in particular.
IIRC, didn’t they use what was obviously a remote control model for the car stunts towards the end to save money? That’s pretty shark jumpy.
Yep, they went from killing tons of stunt cars to using fake plastic cars that looked about as real as the little raft on a stick at the beginning of Land of the Lost. :smack:
Replacing, then rehiring, the two lead actors from the show is pretty shark-jumpy, but IIRC the show only lasted another season and a half after Bo and Luke’s return.
Whoops, sorry, you just pointed out the ONE exception. If the regular character is evil, the one-episode twin will be good. On the Nick teen show iCarly, the one-episode twin Melanie Puckett is as sweet-tempered as you could wish for, in contrast to her sister Sam, the regular character.
It should have ended when they stopped the Apocalypse. That would have been a perfect ending point.