Jumping the Shark

 One of the eternal debates in pop culture is over the ideal length of a TV series—and here it must be said that Britain and the US have adopted manifestly opposite philosophies on this subject. The perennial complaint of American viewers of every popular UK series is how little of it gets made. "Why?" we cry, "Why are there only three episodes of Sherlock per season??" Or: "Why is the UK version of The Office so much shorter than the American one?" But to this, the British viewers can always fire back: "at least our shows know how to end when they ought to. They don't drag on for years, long after they have run out of fresh ideas or interesting storylines." In other words, the UK shows have managed to avoid that distinctly American TV phenomenon: the problem of "jumping the shark."

I penned a critique recently of the decline and fall of the US version of The Office, for instance, and I notice that I failed to dwell at sufficient length on what is probably the one single, greatest flaw in the series: its inordinate length. The first season of the show set up a compelling central drama: will the two charming and lovable romantic leads manage to overcome their inhibitions and current emotional entanglements enough to arrive at the dénouement we all feel to be necessary and inevitable: in brief, will Jim and Pam finally get together? But this central plot was resolved after three seasons. Nevertheless, the increasingly rudderless show drifted on for years more, losing viewers and descending into increasingly broad comedy and improbable storylines in order to clutch at some fleeting relevance. 

In other words, the American Office was a classic and almost criminal case of jumping the shark. Nor is it the only beloved show to meet this fate. By the time Ross was being mocked to his face daily by his so-called "friends" for just having had his fifth divorce or whatever, was anybody still enjoying themselves? And how is it that The Simpsons has managed to chug along for almost a quarter-century more after its core audience stopped paying any attention to its new episodes and wrote the show off as a wash-up after the notorious affair of Principal Armin Tamzarian? But we must notice that all these examples are derived from American TV. The British Office, by contrast, for all its lamented brevity, at least could never have been said to have this problem: nor could most other UK shows. (Is there anyone in the world who thought that three Sherlocks per year were too many?)

And I have to say, at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, that I think the British have the stronger argument here. It is surely far better in the world of drama to leave the audience wanting more rather than less. And they also have on their side no less an authority than Aristotle. In his classic treatise on Poetics—itself a marvel of brevity and compression worthy of a UK TV producer, running at only about fifty pages in English translation—we find the fourth century BC philosopher already warning against the perils of "jumping the shark." 

Aristotle is at pains throughout his treatise to explain that plots need to unfold through a series of causal relations, not merely a string of events. Every plot, he writes, should start with an uncaused situation, move through a set of consequences of that situation, and end with the final consequence in this causal chain. A plot, that is to say, should not be just "one damn thing after another"; it should not pile on events merely to prolong the story, if these events have no necessary relation to one another in the form of causality. After all, as Aristotle puts it: "there is a great difference between happening next and happening as a result." (Margaret Hubbard translation throughout.) 

This admonition also sheds some light, by the way, on the critique I was trying to make of certain recent movies (see here and here) in which characters have sudden realizations—"recognitions," in Aristotle's terminology—that don't seem to result necessarily from the plot. Aristotle says this is the lowest form of recognition. Ideally, such moments of revelation, "discovery," or realization should spring as a direct consequence—he writes—of a key development in the plot (the turn or twist in the plot that the philosopher called "peripeteia"). But in all too many recent movies, I argued, the screenwriters do the opposite. They rush toward their desired conclusion by having their central characters simply monologue to the camera about the personal realizations they have just had, without these personal discoveries being related in any necessary way to the events on screen. (This is the fault of "manufactur[ing]" recognitions, in Aristotle's terms, where the playwright makes characters "say what [he] wants them to say, not what the plot demands.")

More to the point here, however, we have to say that Aristotle's words on this subject also explain why the American shows are so prone to "jumping the shark," and the British ones are not. In part, it is a sociological phenomenon. The British shows are largely produced by state-owned media, which can say no to the public's demand for endless entertainment for the sake of the show's artistic unity. The US series, by contrast, are funded through capitalist enterprise. They are thus forced to be crowd-pleasers—they need to cater to the demand for instant gratification that will keep the viewers coming back for more, even if those same viewers realize too late that this very willingness to feed their bottomless appetite for entertainment has ended up destroying the very things about the show that they liked in the first place. 

Aristotle predicts that it is precisely such a temptation to pander for external plaudits from the viewers that is likely to cause dramas to jump the shark—or, as he would put it, to pile on extraneous further events just to prolong the story, even if these events no longer retain any necessary causal relation to the storyline that went before it. Of course, the philosopher writes, some bad poets just prolong their plot lines needlessly because they are incompetent. But when good poets commit this sin, even when they know better, he argues, we can be sure it is because they are trying to please "the judges" (which in ancient times would have been the literal judges of dramatic competitions, but which in our time are the metaphorical judges of a capitalist entertainment industry, i.e., the average American TV viewers sitting at home and generating Nielsen ratings):

"Of defective plots or actions," Aristotle writes, "the worst are the episodic, those, I mean, in which the succession of the episodes is neither probable nor necessary." What better description of "jumping the shark" could there be? Has anyone before or since more accurately and succinctly diagnosed the condition of The Office, after Pam and Jim had already gotten together and closed the loop on the show's first and only real storyline? At any rate, Aristotle continues: "bad poets make these [defective plots] on their own, good ones because of the judges [that is, in modern times, you and me]; for in aiming at success in the competition and stretching the plot more than it can bear[,] they often have to distort the natural order."

Aye, there's the rub. That is what our American shows keep getting wrong. The natural order for The Office would have been to end at the finale of season three; the natural demise of The Simpsons should have come with the end of season eight at the latest. Yet here we are, and the Office lingered on for years, and The Simpsons has produced twenty-six seasons more than its allotted dramatic lifespan, in terms of the number of actual ideas it had to convey. And it must be said that Aristotle had correctly assessed the reason for this error: the screenwriters are writing for the judges—that is, all of us watching from home—instead of obeying their own artistic conscience, or the laws of storytelling that dictate an end to the plot at the point at which it has run out of consequents—a law that authors violate at their peril.