As you can see in the latest installment of our Issues with Heroes, I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel on Heroes yet. I have my reservations, but I can't say that we've reached the shark jump quite yet.
And actually, I begin to grow a bit weary of the whole "jump the shark" phenomenon. Sure, the concept is true. It's more or less inevitable that any TV series that goes on long enough is going to suffer some level of repetitiveness or arguable decline. However, the real question to ask is how often the "shark jump" on the part of a popular show is due to a decline in writing and plotting and how often it's just our weariness with overfamiliar characters or a sign that the concept behind the show has gone as far as it can.
Take The Simpsons. Please. (Har har.) For the longest time (and well before the change to a sponsored and completely unnavigable site), The Simpsons was listed on Jump the Shark website as a "never jumped." I can't pinpoint exactly when the show started to decline, but anyone who thinks that it's even a fraction of what it once was is in sad, sad denial. Part of the problem with the jumping metaphor is that it presupposes a single defining moment of realization as opposed to the long, dubious slide that The Simpsons experienced. But the problem with The Simpsons isn't purely overexposure--sure there was a time when we were royally sick of the Bartman shirts, but the show was still good for several seasons after that point. With The Simpsons, it's clear that the writing slowly deteriorated. It became lazy, and fake outrageous instead of witty and provocative. Contrast it with South Park, which also went through a period of overexposure, but (despite its inherent uneveness) is very much what it always was--people who liked it still like it, and people who hated it still hate it, and it continues on, just as outrageous as it has always been. It's probably no coincidence that the creators of South Park are still involved with its production, whereas Lord knows what generation of writers The Simpsons is currently in.
But if The Simpsons suffers from writing decline, then what about the story/character exhaustion? I'll admit that this is somewhat more rare, but you can see strains of it in any show that is dependent on a gimmick to drive the plot. Take Lost, for example. Unless they ended it after 3-4 seasons, it was always destined to jump the shark from sheer story and character exhaustion. Eventually, we were going to get tired of these people being stuck on this island--no matter how many flashbacks or new mysteries got thrown at us. (And sure enough, the additional bluffs and storylines only exacerbated the frustration.) It is just impossible to maintain these stories and characters indefinitely without creating shark-infested waters. That's why I admire David Chase (and Dave Chapelle too for that matter) for making the decision to stop his series before it stumbled into repetition or contrived situations. No one wants to see a great show end, but seeing it slowly fade into absurdity is just as bad.
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