Hollywood has a term that it uses when a TV show has essentially run out of ideas and it’s time to start thinking about pulling the plug; it’s called “jumping the shark”. It has it’s origin in the “Happy Days” episode where Fonzie, donning his trademark leather jacket, goes water skiing and jumps over a man-eating shark. I’m not sure what the plot line was, but suffice to say that it was not exactly in line with the entertaining writing of previous shows, and demonstrated that the show had little left to offer.
It’s not just TV shows that can “jump the shark”, movie franchises can continue on beyond the point where they should end (though I am certainly looking forward to the next Rocky installment where Rocky breaks out of hospice to teach some young boxer a lesson… oh, and then there’s the interminable Terminator… and Mad Max is back, yay…). Ad campaigns can certainly lose their freshness (someone seriously needs to kill that gecko!); and with the introduction of the hot dog stuffed crust pizza, I think one could say that Pizza Hut may have jumped the fast food shark.
One of the longest running political shows in the country could be called “The Progressives”. It’s been around for more than a century, and while there’s no accounting for taste, or in this case, bad taste; like Jerry Springer, “The Progressives” seems to be able to find a perennial audience. One wonders though, if the movement has run out of even its bad ideas, and moved on to crazy town. Are we looking at the “jump the shark” moment for the progressive movement where the show finally gets cancelled, or like a bad drug addiction, are we doomed to continue on a path to our ultimate destruction? The circus around the person formerly called Bruce Jenner shows how far we have come in denying reality by placing political agendas above common sense. We’ve so far moved the window on sex-education for our children that a school in Minneapolis felt comfortable to organize a field trip for students as young as eleven to “The Smitten Kitten”, a sex shop that bills itself as “a progressive sex toy store for everyone”, without bothering to even ask for parental consent. Possibly even more demonstrative of how low we have sunk as a society is this video of a woman jumping off her motorized shopping cart at Walmart to engage in a brawl with another woman, who in turn encouraged her young son to participate in the fracas.
IMHO: Social media and the 24 hour cable news channels have helped us to see that these are not aberrations, but pretty much everyday examples of where our progressive society has led us. It is said that sometimes you have to hit bottom to realize you need help… let us hope this is indeed the bottom. Unfortunately, some seem perfectly content to dwell at the bottom. It may be that the nauseating examples of what we’ve come to will lead the country to look toward brighter horizons; but “Happy Days” would have been dark days indeed if Fonzie had not been able to “jump the shark”. Let’s hope that we are in fact jumping the shark of progressive culture, and not being eaten by it.
From the author: It’s been a busy Spring, and looks to be a busy Summer, and as such the frequency and content of blog entries may be a little lighter than usual. My apologies, but I hope to return to weekly entries as we move into the Fall.
