Approximately one million years ago, before the internet, there was a show about an even more ancient time (the 50’s), called Happy Days. And on that show, a popular character known as The Fonz (played by Henry Winkler) once jumped over a shark on water-skis, dooming the rest of the show’s run to a slide into irrelevance and future generations to painfully naval-gazing debates over whether the term “jumping the shark” had itself jumped over one or more proverbial sharks.

I’m not here to defend the term, per se, although I find it relatively innocuous compared to almost every other word or phrase coined by the citizens of the internet. Rather, I think the concept itself – embracing the ephemerality of all things and having a show (or band or whatever) peak in a self-aware way while it’s still cool – is unfairly maligned. While some things end when they reach their natural conclusion- older movies, modern prestige television, most anything that could reasonably described as drama without some kind of modifying prefix – other formats – particularly television comedy or anything geeks like – can drag on until the audience and advertisers give out.

Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the beast. Futurama was rebooted multiple times with (mostly) diminishing returns. Indiana Jones survived a nuclear blast and costarring with Shia Lebouf. Pam and Jim got together and even married and then Steve Carrel left and somehow The Office just kept happening. Tupac Shakur got turned into a fucking hologram after being dead for a decade and I’m horrified for him and I don’t even listen to his music. And we all gripe about how the things that used to be cool suck now. But what if there was a way for show creators to say to those of us who are ever so hip that “This is it. The apex. We have reached the summit, and while the network won’t stop milking this cash-cow and we’ll just be doing fan-service from here on out, this is your chance to pretend this is the last episode and have only fond memories.”?

Enter the shark

You see, with the shark, there’s an opportunity for what could be thought of as a kind of mid-series finale. Consider The Simpsons episode “Behind the Laughter” or Always Sunny‘s “The Nightman Cometh”. Sure, “Laughter” was season 11 and purists would disdain even mentioning anything after season 8, and “Nightman” was only the 4th season finale of Sunny, when the show was still fairly fresh. But they both came around the time when room to grow  was running out on their respective shows. Don’t get me wrong, I still watch new seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when they arrive, and will occasionally watch the more well reviewed new Simpsons episodes when I’m bored, but it’s not the same. There’s no need to watch them anymore. I’m not trying to be stuck-up; frankly, for this kind of transition to happen in the first place requires that the show at one point be great. Everything in life waxes and wanes, and if it’s a little bittersweet to know you are seeing the high-water mark for something you love, that’s normal.

I’m ruminating on this in part because I watched “Nightman” last night, and in part because this is something I’ve learned to accept and even use to my advantage in the past year. A recent anime/manga I got into for a little while, Nisekoi, seemed like a fairly fresh twist on the classic rom-com formula of “they bicker and can’t get along at all so you know they of course eventually realize they’re in love”, which I have a soft spot for because sometimes that’s my life. The art style is great, there’s a central love triangle that actually makes some sense (unlike the bizarre “all these girls love this one idiot” theme that’s become painfully common), and the gimmick – that the two leads are from rival yakuza families and are forced to pretend to be involved to prevent an all-out gang war- actually kind of works as a justification for them not figuring it out and just getting together by the end of the first few episodes.

But sure enough, lurking just along the fringes of the story, you can see some of the worst trends in anime starting to come out of the woodwork. So when the cast put on a play together and the female lead realized mid-production that yes, she actually really likes the male lead, I knew that the series would either have to wrap up shortly or descend into crap. I found out the American translations were a year behind plot-wise (itself a bad sign), checked out some fan-translations, and discovered that yes, it definitely turns into pure shit in incredibly short order. But that’s ok. Everyone has to earn a paycheck, and I feel like the series creator gave me fair warning so that I could exit on a high note. And who knows, maybe I’ll check back in for the finale when they finally get there?