Jumping the shark

The phrase was coined in 1985 by radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom Happy Days, in which the character of Fonzie (Henry Winkler) jumps over a live shark while on water-skis.

Future radio personality Jon Hein and his University of Michigan roommate Sean Connolly coined the phrase in 1985 in response to season 5, episode 3, "Hollywood: Part 3" of the ABC-TV sitcom Happy Days, which was originally broadcast on September 20, 1977.

[1] In the episode, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler) answers a challenge to his bravery by wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, and jumping over a confined shark.

[2][3] In 1997, Hein created a website, JumpTheShark.com, to publish a list of approximately 200 television shows, and his arguments as to the moments each "jumped the shark".

[5] In 2006, during his contribution to The Interviews: An Oral History of Television, Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham) talked about the Happy Days episode that inspired the phrase: "I remember Donny Most and I sitting there, looking at the script.

Fonzie jumping over a shark, it's gonna be funny and great ...' I remember thinking that creatively this was not our greatest episode, but I thought it was a pretty good stunt, and I understood why they wanted to do it.

And what I remember the most is, it was fun actually driving the speedboat which I did a bit of, noticing that Henry was really a pretty good water skier ...

So, it's kind of a fun expression, and I get a kick out of the fact that they identified that episode (because granted maybe it was pushing things a little too far), but I think a lot of good work was still done after that show, and audiences seemed to really respond to it.

[4] In a 2019 interview with NPR, Henry Winkler (Fonzie) told Terry Gross that the origin of the stunt began with the fact that he had been a water-skiing instructor as a teenager at a summer camp.

He stated that "newspapers would mention jumping the shark ... and they would show a picture of me in my leather jacket and swim shorts water-skiing.

[7][8] The idiom has been used to describe a wide variety of situations, such as the state of advertising in the digital video recorder era,[9] and views on rural education policy,[10] the anomalous pursuit of a company acquisition,[11] and the decline of republics into degraded democracy and empire.

[19] Director Steven Spielberg later said the scene was "my silly idea" and was glad to have been part of the pop-culture phrase,[20] while the film's executive producer George Lucas took similar credit believing that Jones would have had an even chance of surviving the explosion.