Shark Bytes

I don't feel the "irrevocable"standard makes it impossible to jump the shark. Many shows have gotten worse and stayed bad right up until they were canceled.

The whole ridiculous 2 vamps having a kid plot ruined the show. And season 4 was terrible, they basically assassinated Cordy's character. Charisma deserved more than that considering her role on both shows since the beginning

"A show can't get more refreshing and interesting after it jumps the shark."

Art can always become interesting and refreshing again, it just sometimes takes efforts at the height of human ability.

If "irrevocable" was some hard standard, nothing could ever jump the shark.

Angel got awful in season four, but then got interesting again. Switching the role of Angel and Spike in 5 was a really interesting twist on the characters, and lead back to good storytelling raising the sort of tough ethical questions Whedon's vampire series are more famous for.

Ok, we can call this "taking a running start towards the shark, then suddenly backing away," if you want to be a lexical tightwad. But I'm gonna stick to "jumping the shark," and you can figure out whatever I really mean.

JTS for me when he became a father. It was all downhill from there.

It obvisouly fell apart when angel investigations moved to Wolfram and Heart.

One thing I never got about this series is if Wolfram and Hart could subdue Angel with those electric tasers, during the trial episode, why didn't they do that every episode?

Also why didn't Angel have gypsies put curses on other vampires? I feel like that comic book guy on the Simpsons, who looks at the earth destroying meteor and says ("I've wasted my life").

The show was at an all-time high when Angel went dark and let Dru and Darla have a massacre in Holland Manner's wine-cellar.

...Unfortunately, the show's highest point led to the show's lowest point. Angel going dark led to Angel sleeping with Darla, which led to Angel becoming a daddy.

After that, things just got worse and worse; and practically all the stories revolving around Connor led to this show jumping the shark big time.

I posted two posts previously about Angel continually jumping the shark. I understand the term. My point was that I think the writers of Angel were intentionally playing with the notion of jumping the shark. I can just imagine a pitch meeting there: "Hmmm, what would be crazier than having Rosanne win the lottery, nuttier than having Mr. Roarke fight Satan?" "I know, I know, let's turn Angel into a puppet..." Sure, jumping the shark is an indication that a show no longer takes itself seriously and that it is doing anything to save itself. But maybe it's also possible for a show to mock the idea of trying to save itself by just saying, f..it, we'll do what we want.

Dude, I think you've misunderstood the term "jump the shark". A show can't get more refreshing and interesting after it jumps the shark. The jump is when the show begins an irrevocable decline.

I'm rewatching Angel right now and rethinking the series. Angel continually jumped the shark. I think, perhaps, that was the mission statement of the show: to jump the shark in every conceivable way possible. What other show reinvented itself in so many ways? Unlike Lost or Alias, Angel flipped the show over so many times to create story instead of incoherent plot. What was so great was that every time Angel jumped the shark, they landed in a more interesting, refreshingly entertaining world. Sure, some of the jumps seem downright silly--Cordelia gives birth to a goddess?--but once the water settled down after every jump, the show sailed smoothly on.

The beginning of season 5 was the biggest jump. mainly because it completely ignored what happened in the previous 4 seasons. Unlike season 4 that was very plot motivated and you couldn't miss an episode, season 5 worked on an episode to episode sort of plot, in which you can pretty much skip the first half of it, and you wouldn't miss a thing. very unfitting to the show (unlike 'buffy' which was just the other way around). Overall, if i had to choose the exact moment it jumped, I'll have to say the last episode of season 4.

Once Cordy was written off and Spike was introduced that just killed this show for me.

1) Cordy was like, an essential part of the show. I mean...it's CORDELIA! She was just amazing in those first seasons of the show, I never really got around the fact that she was just bumped off like that.

2) Spike moving to the show just seemed like a big thing to draw fans to the show. I know it's doubtful that any of the writers actualy had that in mind, but the whole thing just screamed "Hey, come watch Angel 'cause we've revived Spike!"
And to be honest, I lost a lot of love for Spike after S4 of Buffy, so I really didn't want to see him in Angel.

Season 4

OMG... this show suck@d so BAD from the time that angel left. sucked sucked sucked sucked sucked sucked

Christian Kane's S2 departure was a huge blow. He and David Boreanaz had amazing chemistry and the Angel-Lindsey rivalry kept the show going.

Angel and Darla having a kid was the worst thing that could've happened, because it led to the following: Darla getting a conscience and sacrificing herself, Angel prioritizing being a devoted daddy over helping the helpless, Wesley being depicted as the bad guy when he 'kidnapped' Connor even though he did what he thought was right, Angel becoming a self-righteous jackass who would stop at nothing to get his son back, Connor returning a week later suddenly 16 years older with a cocky attitude looking to kill Angel, the Cordy-Connor thing which was just unbearable, and Jasmine. Basically that whole story-arc sparked off all these things which brought the show to its lowest points.

Cordy's character was basically ruined in the fourth season and the show never recovered from this. Both female leads (her and Fred) get unjustified deaths.

To sum up, the second season was the show's strongest point. Angel's dark period made the best episodes (letting Darla and Dru kill the lawyers in the wine cellar then firing his employees when they don't agree with what he did). Bringing back Darla only to have her kill herself to let Connor live was pretty much when the show went downhill.