Last week, we here at the Showplace began our countdown of the five best examples of a “shark jumping” ploy created by a television series’ creative brain team.
Look back to last week’s entry to find out more about this oft-used TV term and for the first two entries.
This week, we continue our countdown:
#3: Las Vegas
In 2004 one of the hippest shows on TV capitalized on the Las Vegas craze with a mystery program revolving around the behind-the-scenes views of the fictional Montecito gambling resort.
Anchored by Sonny Corleone-actor James Caan and up-and-coming movie star (and future Fergie husband) Josh Duhamel (Life As We Know It, Transformers movies), the show thrived on Monday nights despite heavy competition from Monday Night Football, Everybody Loves Raymond, Joe Millionaire and other hit shows in that same timeslot. It regularly brought in nearly 12-million viewers each week and was a perennial Top 30 show in the lucrative 18-49 demographic throughout its first two years.
In addition to great acting, innovative technical innovations and suspenseful episodes, it was great at creating some great cliffhanger moments that keep bringing the audience back for more.
Unfortunately, at the end of season two, it went a bit too far.
In addition to leaving its audience hanging regarding one of its key cast members and an unresolved ending to who the new casino owners are and what they might do to the existing employees, the season two finale ends with the casino inexplicably being blown to the ground.
There was no mention during the episode that it was about to happen and it went down without any warning…leaving viewers shocked at what had just happened (and why?) through the entire summer hiatus.
The season three premiere introduced a new owner who announced she wanted to build a brand new, innovative casino–which looked remarkably similar to the old one. Behind the scenes however, its parent network NBC, spent, at that time, a record amount in building a “new” set, one that inflated the program’s overall costs.
The new owner (Lara Flynn Boyle, who came with a hefty price tag after starring in films like Men In Black 2) did not test well with audiences, and she was subsequently killed off after seven episodes. The series’ overuse of teasing cliffhangers at the end of season two started a steady decline in the show’s ratings, which suffered from the season three premiere onward.
Show creator Gary Scott Thompson, failing to learn from previous mistakes, doubled down on his jump the shark technique a year later, proclaiming (according to a March 5th, 2007 article in the “Las Vegas Review Journal”),”I’m gonna make this the biggest cliffhanger anyone’s ever seen. And if you cancel us, you’re gonna have 15 million fans pissed off at you, not me.” (By this time viewership has actually fallen below 10-million fans).
The final season never made it to the end of its contracted 20-episodes. The final episode? An unresolved cliff-hanger.
#2: Felicity
In 2007, the rookie season of Felicity not only garnished some of the world’s greatest awards for a television show, “Time” magazine anointed it, after just 20 episodes, as one of the “Top 100 TV Shows of All-Time.”
Led by creator JJ Abrams and titular star Keri Russell, the show focused on the four college years of a female student, tackling typical issues young people face, with each of the show’s seasons representing a freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years.
On hiatus between seasons one and two (and before the show would be enshrined as a television classic based on its phenomenal year one reviews), legend says that the show’s creators came up with a great idea for the second season premiere: cut Russell’s famous golden hair as an appropriate step for the actress to take–symbolizing a year of growth and development for the on-screen character between her first and second year of college.
Following the season two premiere, the show instantly lost HALF of its audience (from 4.4-milllion to 2.2-million viewers) and, despite the actress quickly adorning a wig to try to cover her trimmed, prized locks, the damage was already done.
While some viewers eventually returned (along with the return of Russell’s naturally longer hair), the show never pulled in the ratings it once had, and never won another major award again for the remaining three seasons it was on the air.
#1: Twin Peaks
The ABC Network, which has quite a history of giving bad instructions to its hit shows (see last week’s list for just one other example), had a surprise hit on its hands with the quirky cult-classic Twin Peaks from 1990-91.
The show, whose RERUNS were topping television’s #1 rated show, Cheers, for two months, was built around the “Who killed Laura Palmer” mystery that was driving the exposition for delving into a world of unique characters and supernatural events.
Despite protest from series creator/director David Lynch that revealing Laura’s killer would effectively “kill the golden goose” by removing the show’s unique suspense factor that drove the series, ABC ordered for the resolution to the show’s main mystery halfway through its second season.
The show became rudderless without its main mystery for not just the fans, but for the actors and show’s creative brain-trust alike. With Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost distancing themselves from the show, series star Kyle McLaughlin and other actors also lost interest in the project.
The show’s ratings fell hard and was canceled at the end of that second season. Its “traditional TV” days were history. The central mystery premise, however, would later see life in a full-length film and a “Return” series on the Showtime Network, 25 years later.
What did you think of our all-time best/worst shark jumping list? There were clearly other examples in TV history in which a show “jumped the shark.” Which ones did you come up with? Email your feedback and responses to us and perhaps we will revisit this list in a future blog entry!
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Astound Broadband or any other agency, organization, employer or company.
