Herald Journal Blog

My co-worker asked us if we could think of a bad TV show that he could use as an example in a column he was writing. We all tried to think of one, but the really bad TV shows don’t get watched or almost always are immediately forgotten. I did think of a recent TV show that was quickly taken off the air, “Laughlin.” It was supposed to be a spin-off of the show, “Vegas.” We went to the real Laughlin, Nev. this summer, and the TV show is nothing like it. It was much easier to think of TV shows that started out good, but turned bad. “ER” is like that. It was excellent the first few years, but became tedious. I don’t watch it at all, now. TV shows that have declining ratings, sometimes try a gimmick to get viewers reinterested. It is called “jumping the shark.” When viewers were losing interest in “Happy Days” the writers had the Fonzi character waterskiing and jumping over a shark. It didn’t work, but the term “jumping the shark” stayed.