If Jon Hein from Jump The Shark said the show JTS, it has

I'm cross-posting this to alt.tv.seinfeld since that show comes up in this...

"LLC" wrote in message news:...

I think he said on Olbermann's show that he thought the show jumped the shark when Vito shot Jackie Jr. That was *not* a jump the shark moment! If The Sopranos has J'edTS, it did so with season 4 which was a slow drip, drip, drip of discontinuity and anti- climax.

The whole notion of there being one pivotal moment where a show tips from good to bad is facile and lame. It's the Fredo of mass media concepts. Shows go from good to bad as a trend usually. It's not like someone flips a switch where the creative lights go off all of a sudden.

As a Seinfeld fan I've heard this opinion repeated ad nauseum. It's part of an auteur theory asserting that Larry David was THE genius behind the show and he left after Susan died. I don't buy it.

The trend was more gradual than that. There were episodes pre-Wedding Invitations that were just as silly as anything in season 9 (eg "The Bottle Deposits") and shows post-Wedding Invitations that were among the very funniest (eg "The Little Kicks", the one where Jerry becomes a movie bootlegger and Elaine does her silly dance and George becomes a "bad seed"). There are some people who actually prefer the later, silly episodes.

As someone who never found that show funny I prefer the Norman Rockwell sentimentality of the Potter episodes - though it got a bit predictable when Henry (?) Morgan would start crying by the end of every episode! But MASH is far from being one of my favorite shows so my opinion doesn't really matter.

That's right, we've gotta stay the course!

It's time to retire the "Jump The Shark" idea or, maybe, revitalize it by applying it to different fields of endeavor. For instance, when did the George W Bush presidency jump the shark?

No, he just mentioned that moment so that people would recognize who Vito was. What he said was that Vito, the guy who shot Jackie's son, when we later found out that he was in fact a rather large, gay Yankees fan, that could have been the moment, but if that wasn't, then last night may very well have been it.

That was *not* a jump the

I don't think the whole notion of jumping the shark boils down to one pivotal moment, although it can. In the case of a TV series, you see it coming and then something occurs that just cements that for you and that's the moment that it jumped the shark. I think that's another way of saying that it outlived its hipness. In the case of The Sopranos, we definetely saw it coming. The season was a sleeper for the most part, with a lot of different little things that could amount to something if they ever actually got there, which they didn't. But we kept cutting them slack and waiting for it to crank up. Then last night's Fellini shit just pulled the trip-wire and made a lot of people realize that we've gone too far over the edge to make up for this season. The sad part of it all is that people like me who are hooked on this show will watch it to the bitter end, 2YEARS FROM NOW, just too see it play out. But, then again, people continue using drugs long after they stop enjoying them.

steve horan wrote:

<snip nonsense about jumping the shark>

I greatly prefer the later, silly episodes. Seinfeld always had silliness even its "prime". Ex: The Chinese restaurant guy calling out for "Cartwright" instead of "Costanza" and then having an absurd (but hilarious) dialogue with George about the mistake.

It was a brilliant and gradual progression towards the more ludicrous as the seasons went on - but it was always still just an exaggeration of situations we're all very familiar with, as the show always was. Take "The Susie", where Elaine's co-worker starts calling her "Susie" and it becomes too awkward for Elaine to correct her. The initial situation has happened to most of us I'm sure. A lot of people hate that episode, but I think it's just about the funniest 22 minutes you'll ever find (it's also the one with George's answering machine message). There is nothing illogical about the concept, and it is exaggerated to perfection.

<snip more>

I thought it might have been the best episode of the series.

No, please...let's just never mention that ridiculous fad again. In a couple of years it's going to be more embarassing to American pop culture than Urkel-mania and the Cola Wars.

I disagree completely. Whereas the early episodes were subtle and clever, the later episodes were blunt, tacky and OVER-exaggerated. Granted this is a matter of preference.

And just how many of us can relate to sunbathing with butter or getting so worked up over a damned Twix bar that we set up a candy lineup or push a Frogger machine across a street without any help??

There is exaggeration and then there is just flat out running out of ideas. I think the writers dropped the ball in the last two seasons. Again, probably just a matter of personal preference.

Personally, I can barely stand to watch 90% of seasons 8-9.

Good points. I'd say that all of the situations you mentioned have realistic roots...vending machines malfunctioning, sunbathing with oil, and getting a high score on a video game...but I can understand if you don't like it. From one of the early season classics though: getting lost in a parking garage for hours and hours?

This is true. I guess for me the difference between the early and late comedic situations is the way the characters reacted within the situations.

To use the Parking Garage as an example, the gang here seems to interact so much more realistically than in say, the Butter Shave where Kramer takes the ridiculousness of sunbathing with butter to extremes (by soaking in a hot tub with it.)

And I do realize that the ridiculousness of it is what is supposed to be funny, but IMO that is certainly not the same type of humor that they started out doing.

Boho Mojambo writes:

I can't relate to stealing an old chat show set out of a dumpster, but I think "The Merv Griffin Show" is one of the top 4 or 5 Seinfeld episodes...

I don't need to relate if the scripts are good. Too often in later series, the scripts were too poor ("The Blood" and "The Strongbox" are shockingly weak, for example).

Jon Hein has jumped the shark.