When did Trek "jump the shark?"

[Warped9]

For those young'uns who may not be familiar with this expression it refers to an episode of the '70s series Happy Days when The Fonz attempted to jump a tank of sharks with his motorcycle. It has come to mean when a series (or franchise) has peaked and starts to slide downhill.

And so when do you think the Trek franchise "jumped the shark?"

For me, even with all my criticisms, I think it was Season 5 of TNG. Although I had criticisms before I think this is where the slide started as TNG started getting mired in its own formulas and cliches. It wasn't a dramatic and sudden drop, but in fits-and-starts it started to falter. And looking back I don't think the franchise ever recovered, at least not in the way I liked (in my opinion, as if that needs to be qualified).

I'm sure the Niners will loudly disagree, and that's their right, but then there was little about DS9 that I felt was like the Star Trek I recognize. Again, in my opinion.

If the Trek franchise had come to a stop after TNG Season 5 I think there'd be a lot more fond memories and the franchise and fandom as a whole would have more respect.

I'm not talking about popularity or box office takes. I'm talking about personal opinion. I've stated mine.

Now who else thinks the Trek franchise "jumped the shark" and when?



Note: I'm just waiting for someone to say after "The Cage."

 

[6079SmithW]

I think it slowly started to begin with 2 shows existing at once (DS9 and TNG). Then it was DS9 and Voyager. I think Star Trek truly jumped the shark when we had DS9, Voyager and the TNG movies all going on at once. So, basically, over-saturation. It might be blasphemous, but I think there can be such a thing as too much Trek.

 

[Joeman]

According to my scoring season 5 of TNG is the best TNG season, and in the top 5 of all Trek seasons @ 8.25/10, so I definitely cannot agree with you there. So be it.

I guess my answer would have to be "never". Even though I rejected DS9 and everything that followed at the time they came out, looking back at it I was wrong. I love Trek from TOS all the way through Enterprise and ST09 (although I guess I could say that it jumped at TATV. But really, it's just another bad ep to me, and not the actual "jump").

As far as I'm concerned, Trek is still good to go. I'm just waiting...

 

[Warped9]

^^ I will add that often I've disliked things that were otherwise popular. ST09 being a recent example. And so popularity doesn't sway me.

 

[Amaris]

VOY onward.

 

[Garm Bel Iblis]

I've got I've got I've got I've got I've got faith of the heart

 

[Lethe]

I've got I've got I've got I've got I've got faith of the heart

Garm, you need to post that over on the "embarrassing moments" thread!

 

[Volvic]

When Voyager started. On paper it should have easily been the best show of the franchise but instead it was, imo the second weakest. In short too many character and storyline concepts were recycled constantly. Character growth or just general characterisation in some cases was nonexistent. Most importantly, though, TPB played it far too safe.

Voyager was a show that demanded a great deal of character conflict from the get go and we didn't get that. The crew also should have had a much tougher time of it than they did.

I think the most frustrating part of Voyager for me was sometimes there would be some superb ideas shown and they would never run with it. There was always a big reset button at the end or it was never alluded to again. More's the pity.

 

[RandyS]

After the Cage.

Hey Warped, don't look at me like that.

You asked for it.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Star Trek XI, there I said it.

 

[Delta1]

Is jumping the shark really a peak? I always thought it was an inflection point from which a slow downward trend becomes unrecoverable. Most shark-jumps I've read about have occurred well after a series's peak.

We've had two or more streams of Trek running concurrently for decades now. I think it would be hard, even unfair, to say the entire franchise jumped the shark if at least one of those streams was merrily chugging along. Canonical Trek may have jumped several times, but I think it slipstreamed over 75,000 sharks and their temporally-displaced quantum duplicates during Voyager. I'd put Voyager's shark-jump in Caretaker or Parallax, after which the ship turned around and had a few more goes over the years.

I can't comment on licensed Trek jumping the shark. Perhaps the games jumped when they gave up the adventure format for mods of more popular games, and canceled the Interplay/DC Fontana collaboration "Secret of Vulcan Fury." Somewhere there is a hard drive or CD-ROM with an original story, original artwork, and vocal performances by the original cast--some of whom, needless to say, are no longer with us. But all this was shelved and we ended up with FPSes and generic resource-mining/universe-conquering games. Not all of them were bad, but they feel somehow less than what could have been.

 

[M-Red]

This has actually happened with Trek several times -- it failed in its present form and then had to be resurrected with a different vision.


TMP really stand out to me. Here was a film that was financially semi-successful, but was also a critical disaster with the general public. Following this one, a new direction was plotted for the franchise under Bennett and Meyer. The Great Bird was "promoted" and a new vision adopted...the result was TWOK, which was a huge success with the general public.

There would be no more clown-car pajama uniforms or "Slow Motion Picture" TOS films. The refitted movie franchise produced five more films and resulted in the creation of TNG.


There are several other rebirth moments in the history of the Trek franchise.


All in all, Trek has proven to be amazingly resilient after failing.

 

[RegFan]

Trek never jumped the shark, as ENT is my second favorite series.

 

[Spork111]

I'm going to say it never really jumped the shark. "Jumping the shark" implies a moment where the flaws of a show crystallize and anything afterward is seen through the spectre of that one moment. Trek has had its embarrassing moments to be sure, but never that. I would characterize the period from the end of TNG to the end of ENT a steady downward spiral (at least in terms of popularity/success - I rather liked most of ENT), with a resuscitation with STXI. Trek seems to go through phases, and right now we're in a "movie only" phase that I think will last for several years at least. It's kind of like the time when the first four films came out, before TNG.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Not sure it ever truely jumped shark. It became repeatative as a early as TOS and overstayed its welcome towards the end of TNG, but it chugged along through DS9, VOY and ENT doing what was expected, telling those all too familar "Star Trek" stories. Perhaps the problem was doing that. It didn't shake things up enough to kick the cobwebs. But it never jumped the shark.

 

[scotpens]

For those young'uns who may not be familiar with this expression it refers to an episode of the '70s series Happy Days when The Fonz attempted to jump a tank of sharks with his motorcycle. It has come to mean when a series (or franchise) has peaked and starts to slide downhill.

He wasn't on his motorcycle; he was on waterskis. And it was actually a pretty dull scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDthMGtZKa4

 

[SpyOne]

For those young'uns who may not be familiar with this expression it refers to an episode of the '70s series Happy Days when The Fonz attempted to jump a tank of sharks with his motorcycle. It has come to mean when a series (or franchise) has peaked and starts to slide downhill.

Not just started downhill. There once was a website called jumptheshark.com (that now redirects to TVguide.com) that defined it, as I recall, as the moment when a show has become SO bad that it has descended into self-parody.
Wikipedia puts it this way: "Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. The phrase was originally used to denote the point in a television program's history where the plot spins off into absurd story lines or unlikely characterizations. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose viewership has begun to decline, usually through the employment of different actors, writers or producers."

In order to have "jumped the shark", a show must have become very very bad indeed. Most shows never get there.

Of all the Trek shows, I think only TOS got that bad, and then only during the third season. The third season had some gems, but it had all the leading contenders for "Worst Episode Ever". You can argue that it should be Turnabout Intruder and not Spock's Brain, but we all pretty much agree it is in there somewhere. The good ones were good, but god were the bad ones awful.
I should note that I only saw a handful of episodes of Enterprise, so it is possible it jumped the shark: I wouldn't know.

But TNG, DS9, and Voyager, ... none of them ever resembled a Saturday Night Live skit making fun of themselves.

 

[Warped9]

This has actually happened with Trek several times -- it failed in its present form and then had to be resurrected with a different vision.


TMP really stand out to me. Here was a film that was financially semi-successful, but was also a critical disaster with the general public. Following this one, a new direction was plotted for the franchise under Bennett and Meyer. The Great Bird was "promoted" and a new vision adopted...the result was TWOK, which was a huge success with the general public.

There would be no more clown-car pajama uniforms or "Slow Motion Picture" TOS films. The refitted movie franchise produced five more films and resulted in the creation of TNG.


There are several other rebirth moments in the history of the Trek franchise.


All in all, Trek has proven to be amazingly resilient after failing.

TMP was more than semi successful financially. And I challenge that it was a critical failure with the public since it did respectably well financially. In fact few subsequent Trek films beat TMP in box office.

And if you exclude the money Paramount blew on the Phase II TV project that they saddled TMP with then it looks even better. Generally speaking film projects and television projects are two wholly separate things.

 

[M-Red]

This has actually happened with Trek several times -- it failed in its present form and then had to be resurrected with a different vision.


TMP really stand out to me. Here was a film that was financially semi-successful, but was also a critical disaster with the general public. Following this one, a new direction was plotted for the franchise under Bennett and Meyer. The Great Bird was "promoted" and a new vision adopted...the result was TWOK, which was a huge success with the general public.

There would be no more clown-car pajama uniforms or "Slow Motion Picture" TOS films. The refitted movie franchise produced five more films and resulted in the creation of TNG.


There are several other rebirth moments in the history of the Trek franchise.


All in all, Trek has proven to be amazingly resilient after failing.

TMP was more than semi successful financially. And I challenge that it was a critical failure with the public since it did respectably well financially. In fact few subsequent Trek films beat TMP in box office.

And if you exclude the money Paramount blew on the Phase II TV project that they saddled TMP with then it looks even better. Generally speaking film projects and television projects are two wholly separate things.

TMP sold a lot of tickets. But TMP should have done well....it had all the advantages a movie could want. It was Trek's very first big-screen adventure....and coming off a decade-long absence, the hype and attention for the return of Trek was a pretty big deal.


However, it cost a small fortune to make. The profit margin isn't as large as it would seem by looking at the film's intake. And, outside of the Trek community, no one was raving about TMP. The reviews were generally bad.


Obviously, there's a reason why TPTB went in a completely differerent direction for the next one. They knew they couldn't release another movie in which the audience was expected to sit around and watch a movie of characters sitting around watching a viewscreen.


TWOK basically doesn't acknowledge TMP's existence, and neither do any of the other films -- in style, visual design, tone, pacing, characterizations, wardrobes, etc. TWOK offers a pretty different take than GR's re-imagined view and it became widely celebrated. Moreover, it was also produced for a significantly smaller amount, and everything that followed flowed back into the events of TWOK, not TMP.


In that sense, you could say that TWOK prevented TMP from being a "jump the shark" moment....but only because it and the rest of the ensuing franchise basically just ignored it.

 

[Admiral Shran]

I'd argue that TMP was a huge commerical success for Trek. When adjusted for inflation, only Star Trek XI has done better.

That being said, it was also a "jump the shark moment" that was saved by TWOK.