Top 10 TV Shows that Jumped the Shark

Greetings, reader!

My dad requested this post some time ago, so here goes nothing. For those not aware, the phrase 'Jump the shark' dates back to a notorious episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie quite literally jumps over a shark while water skiing, thus marking a moment of "That's it, I'm done" for quite a few viewers who felt the show had gone downhill. Out of all the TV shows I've loyally watched, these are the ones where the deterioration of quality was felt the most, whether it happened little by little or in a single devastating moment!

Oh, and a spoiler alert is in order, as I will be discussing specific plot points from multiple shows.

Here are my honorable mentions: Gilmore Girls (various shocking out-of-character twists in seasons 6 and 7), Grey's Anatomy (slowly but surely losing its steam and consistency from season 10 onwards), How I Met Your Mother (the overall quality and structure of episodes in season 9), Prison Break (the needlessly long and full-of-unimportant-side-quests season 4).

10. The Walking Dead

I'm putting The Walking Dead on the list because it got pretty damn bad for a while - but only ranking in 10th because unlike most shark-jumping shows, it found redemption.

Season 7 of the post-apocalypse drama based on Robert Kirkman's graphic novels saw a massive deterioration in quality, so much so that despite my investment in the characters, I tuned out after the season 8 premiere, which seemed like a big indication that things would only get worse. However, when season 9 started to air, I started to hear that fans are on board again, that the new showrunner Angela Kang has fixed many of the biggest problems, and that The Walking Dead is good again. Wanting to believe this, I made my agonizing way through season 8, and thankfully, the fans were right - the ninth season was the series back at its best, and it continued on a solid level until the eleventh and final season.

But the series still belongs on this list, as the temporary downfall of quality through seasons 7 and 8 was really quite something. It had a lot to do with the writers dragging the source material out, adapting just one two-part volume of the graphic novel into two 16-episode seasons, meaning that the pace was excruciating. It was cool when season 3 and 4 had a few concept episodes where we only follow one minor character for the whole episode, and it was a bit iffy when seasons 5 and 6 started to have more of them - and it became absolutely ridiculous when season 7 took the format of "the main story only progresses in the season premiere, the midseason finale and the season finale, with every episode in between being a dragged-out side quest for one of the minor characters". We often wouldn't see protagonist Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) for three or four episodes in a row, which really was some bullshit.

9. The Simpsons

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when The Simpsons got bad, but it definitely correlates with the years when the series started to look too good. The very first seasons of the show have the iconic look of cruddy late-80's/early-90's animation, and for approximately seasons 4-15 or so, it has the most classic Simpsons look that we recognize - a bit more polished, but still a bit goofy in a good way.

Around the time the animation started to look too polished, too sharp and too plastic, somewhere closer to the twentieth season, one could also notice that the jokes weren't as funny anymore, the episode premises were getting more lazy, and everything revolved around the same old characters making the same old jokes instead of introducing fresh and new characters and gags. The show went from seasons where half of the episodes are classics and half are decent if not unforgettable, through seasons where half of the episodes are decent if not classics and half are quite bad, all the way to seasons where there are two or three decent episodes worth watching but the vast majority is bad.

8. Designated Survivor

Whoever came up with the premise for this political thriller must've known the inevitable fate of the series from the start: a premise this interesting is worth pitching and the show is worth making, but there is no escaping the tragic truth that it will all be downhill after the pilot. I can just imagine the writers' room, as they pain themselves trying to figure out ways to make their series reach new highs, until they realize that they are doomed and there is no way out: with this particular story, the first chapter is the best and most interesting moment, and from thereon out it will inevitably get worse.

You see, the show's premise revolves around the Designated Survivor, a real thing in American politics (each year when the President delivers the State of the Union speech, where all of congress and the cabinet is gathered, one low-level cabinet secretary stays behind in order to ensure the line of succession in case there's a terrorist attack that kills everyone). And yes, the first episode of this series turns that hypothetical into a story, as the SOTU speech ends in an explosion, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (Kiefer Sutherland) is suddenly thrust into being the most powerful man alive.

It's a damn good pilot, and well, the rest of the first season is worth watching as well. But after The West Wing and House of Cards, the genre of Washington DC political dramas is hard to top, so the further we went from the pilot, the more the plot strayed from the unique and thrilling premise to a regular and generic political drama. By the premiere of season 2, I simply didn't care anymore.

7. Suits

Suits may be a drama series, but it had an arch similar to many sitcoms - for many seasons in a row, it gets better and better, and after reaching a high point, it starts to get worse. Only, instead of the gradual fall to disappointing-but-still-worth-watching that we saw with The Office or How I Met Your Mother, this one crashed and burned.

Starting out as a decent legal drama, Suits grew to be better than it had any right to be, delivering amazing storylines in seasons 4 and 5 especially. Season 6 was still really good, although it showcased the first signs of the series being past its prime, and these signs became more prominent in the inconsistent seventh season. The actual moment of jumping the shark, however, was one that they couldn't really do much about - Meghan Markle had to leave the series after being cast in a British soap opera that jumped the shark a long time ago, and as one half of the show's greatest love story was leaving, it made sense to write out Rachel's husband Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) at the same time.

When you have six major characters, and suddenly lose one third of them, it's tough to stay interesting - especially as Mike was the show's most interesting character, and his fake-lawyer-getting-caught story had now been told. Therefore, as the eighth season started, Suits had gone back to being a regular legal drama, with nothing setting it apart anymore. The charm and soul of the series left with Mike and Rachel.

6. Seinfeld

Of course, this one retroactively double-jumped the shark decades after its release, as multiple unfortunate moments of asshole behavior by Mr. Seinfeld have made me reluctant to re-watch even the earlier seasons - I know, 'separate the art from the artist' et cetera, but that's hard to do when so much of the show's atmosphere comes from the guy and his humor. But that's not why Seinfeld is on today's list, as 'Top 10 TV shows that aren't fun to watch anymore because the people who made them are monsters' would be a whole different topic for some fun day.

Seinfeld is on today's list because the last few seasons just aren't very good. Quite ironically relative to my opinion of the man himself, I always enjoyed the stand-up clips interspersed between scenes, and the series lost a lot of its charm in my opinion when they started to appear less frequently and eventually not at all. In addition to that, the final season in particular just had many, many subpar episodes signaling a drop in creativity from the writers, and just a few worthwhile episodes sprinkled in between the mediocrity.

5. That 70's Show

In many of these cases, the behind-the-scenes reasons for the show getting worse is quite clear, and it is easy to feel for the showrunners despite mercilessly writing about the show jumping the shark. Such is the case when two actors, who play the show's arguably two best characters, decide to leave before what is supposed to be the final season - it's understandable that they didn't opt to cancel the final season and end the series on the season 7 finale that wasn't supposed to be the last one. However, deciding to do the final season without Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) and Eric (Topher Grace) certainly took a heavy toll.

The final season of That 70's Show is just so much less funny (Kutcher's absence), and has a lot less heart (Grace's absence), than previous seasons. I'll cut them some slack for still managing an awesome series finale, largely thanks to both stars returning for that. But the rest of the final season receives a hard 'Skip' from me.

4. 13 Reasons Why

Sure, the whole series and the points it tried to make have sparked some complex and important debate, and after all these years, I'm still not entirely sure of where I stand. For me personally, the first season of 13 Reasons Why was a powerful, therapeutic and even slightly healing viewing experience, so I can definitely see what the showrunners were going for. Having read way too much of the discourse surrounding the series, I believe it did a lot of good for a lot of people who have struggled with similar themes in their lives. That being said, I understand how the same things, no matter how well-intentioned, can be triggering for other viewers, and whether or not it is a Netflix original TV show's place to try and teach big lessons with the risk of awakening someone's trauma is a damn good question.

But, all these complexities aside, I think there's one thing we can all come together to agree on - those follow-up seasons weren't very good.

I watched all four seasons, each with a more begrudging 'I don't see why there needs to be another season, but f**k it, I'm invested in the characters' attitude. Season 2 had its moments, rising to be a decent courtroom drama at its best moments, but it was nowhere near as thematically powerful as the first season, and the infamous assault scene in the season finale was in terrible taste (I get that event being part of the story, but there is no justification for showing it so graphically). Season 3 spiraled further into decay, being barely worth watching for invested fans thanks to some individual episodes and moments that really melt your heart, but wasting way too much time on a goofy murder mystery while dabbling with the idea of a redemption arch for a rapist. All of the show's controversies considered, season 4 actually did a surprisingly okay job of ending the series, but the road to the finale was paved with unforeseen levels of Riverdalean ridicule.

3. The Big Bang Theory

There's no clear and concrete point of shark-jumping on The Big Bang Theory - it just gets gradually worse. The first three seasons are solid (if overrated) sitcom fun, but after that, the series slowly but surely lost its steam.

Many of the best sitcoms start out on a certain level, then find ways to improve, having their prime around season 3-5, and then slowly dwindling - but showrunners Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady never got around to the improvement phase, therefore making viewers like myself realize that the good-but-not-great level of the first seasons is the show's prime, and it's all downhill from there. I don't even remember what season it was when I finally gave up, as it just got to a point where every episode feels like the same episode with the same tired jokes and lazy plotlines.

2. Star Trek: Discovery

This one hurts. The first two season of Star Trek: Discovery were awesome: not the franchise at its best, but also far from the worst Star Trek out there, with the somewhat loose lack of a premise compensated by the interesting cast and the neat connections to other material in the Trek universe. The season 2 finale was the best episode so far, ending with the mind-blowing plot turn that the U.S.S. Discovery crew has been sent 900 years into the future, with no turning back, meaning that the rest of the series will happen in a totally different time period (one that hasn't been explored yet in the Trek universe, truly going where no one has gone before).

And then came the third season, comitting the biggest sin Star Trek can commit: a lack of creativity, and thus a generic feel.

For the year that I waited for the third season, my mind buzzed with tens and tens of possible story directions, as the whole time jump thing is just ripe for exciting plotlines: what does the Federation look like so far into the future, if it even exists anymore? What about the Klingons and the Vulcans and all these established concepts, how have they and their dynamics changed? And what about the characters from other Star Trek who could be utilized so far into the future, like the immortal Changelings or the hologram Doctor from Voyager?

And the f**king sellouts who wrote the show's third season did absolutely nothing. They were given an incredibly cool premise filled to the brim with potential, and they completely squandered it. There are some quite mundane and predictable changes to the universe dealt with in the first few episodes, and other than that, nothing much has changed and it's written just like it would be taking place in the 'regular' timeline, with much of the focus on character drama and already-established concepts that have not changed in any interesting ways. A huge disappointment for fans of the franchise.

1. House of Cards

To be fair, they had an impossible situation. If the case is that the showrunners didn't know about Kevin Spacey's true nature until the news broke between seasons 5 and 6 of House of Cards which lead up to his firing, then my sympathy is on their side, as they had the hard job of suddenly writing out the show's main character and doing the final season without him. If they actually did know and managed to cover it up before the heat of the #metoo movement got to them, as many have speculated, that would mean that they deserve nothing, and ending the series on the single worst season of drama television I have ever seen is a fitting legacy.

But, yeah, as impossible as the real-life situation behind season 6 was, there's no getting around the fact that I did watch the whole thing (having been invested in what was a painfully good series for five seasons, I naturally wanted to see how it all culminates), and it was terrible. And seriously, that series finale - no matter how hard it was to write the series without Spacey's character, surely they could've come up with something better than that?

After a season's worth of things just happening with no interesting themes or surprising plot turns but rather a sense of "we have to wrap this shit up" urgency, the final scene is the two remaining major characters, in the oval office, and one of them kills the other because there's not much else to do and the writers reckoned that something big should happen. You know it's bad when a viewer as emotional as me watches a main character of six seasons get killed, and feels nothing but disdain toward the writers. If you ever want to watch the series in a 'separate the art from the artist' manner, I thoroughly recommend ending with season 5.

Thank you for reading! Tune in next week for a rather ambitious ranking suggested by my friend Teemu - a ranking of all 173 cold opens from The Office.