JTS, RIP

The other day I clicked on Jumptheshark.com, looking for a comment I'd seen there many years ago. The site hadn't been much good for years, and was going downhill even before it was sold to TV Guide, but now it's gone. TV Guide has eliminated the site, and all the thousands of comments. They still have the basic descriptions for the main types of JTS moments, but when you click on one, you get only the description followed by TV Guide posts that contain those specific keywords. It's a shame to lose the comments and arguments; there were even some comments from people on the actual shows. The Jump the Shark site was the only place where you could find a note from Randall Carver confirming that he was in fact alive and well.

Yes, the site was not well managed, never had a good system for organizing or navigating comments, and was a victim of its own success: once the term "Jump the Shark" entered the language, becoming a phrase we use without thinking (there's no point in saying that the phrase itself has jumped the shark; once a term becomes that common, there's really no going back), it didn't need one specific website for arguments about what makes a particular show JTS. Every discussion forum had JTS arguments of its own.

Still, it was fun to go there and see the voting patterns and comments; sometimes they could be surprising. The moment that got the most votes for Happy Days was not the actual shark jump, nor Ted McGinley, nor any of the other JTS moments, but the switch to a live studio audience.