Your Definitive "Jump The Shark" Moments

[Trust No One]

My personal JTS moment is Stag Night. For the show as a whole, making A and B full-time members of the main cast was prob. the point of no return. If they'd been minor characters who only showed up once every three episodes or something, I have no idea how that would play out or what the results would be. I'd still dislike it and it would still be detrimental, but maybe the show's downfall would've been more like a slow fade than a crash and burn.

I think a personal JTS moment might be different from a point of no return, though. For casual fans who liked the early seasons, I would've guessed that the singing episode, the SIK, and the ILY would've been the final straw, for many of them. Final straw, meaning that they would stop watching altogether. There might be some inertia at play here; it wouldn't surprise me if people find it easier to keep watching than to stop. It's just a habit, a reflex.

Having *any* character get married so soon in the show's run (Halfway through! Or less than half) is something you can't recover from, because it changes the group dynamics and the format, irrevocably. That's true whether it's H. getting married or some other character.

For the show as a whole, the "points of no return" are probably centered on Sheldon.

Other moments that get dishonorable mention from me are:

The speech about "sign the prenup, you'll never do any better, all the women in the world got together and decided they don't want you."

Howard is irresponsible/lazy/doesn't make any money: the Cooper/Kripke Inversion, the Expedition Approximation.

The Letter

The Romance Resonance, AKA singing.

First Pitch Insuffiency: H. is incompetent, Raj is a jerk.

Sort of a second-tier annoyance is Raj having a crush on B, because I don't like love triangles in general and I don't like anything coming between H and R.

Obviously I hate what happens in Killer Robot, but I can kind of mentally delete that from Season 2 and just regard it as an aberration, a weird mistake on the part of the writers. If anyone tries to debate me on it, I go all "This is Sparta!!!!" on their ass, though.

I dislike the space storyline but I find it pretty easy to ignore; it's just some weird detour. Most of the time, it doesn't actively bother me, because I just forget about it.

So, yeah, maybe it's hard to differentiate between a JTS moment and a subjective pet peeve, but the ones that make me *angry* and upset, as opposed to just annoyed, are Stag Night, and all this "H. is financially dependent on B. and is babyish in the extreme, not just amusingly child-like." The latter maybe even more than the former, because the former is drippy but the latter is insulting.

Pretty signficant that *two* of these worst-of moments are from S8, and we're not even halfway through the season. S8 is just a whole other level of bad.

To me, the biggest jump the shark moment was Penny deciding she needed Leonard after finding out he was going to the Arctic for three months. That was the beginning of the downfall that I did not even realize at the time. Amy and Bernie joining full time was just finishing things off. Lenny getting together started the downfall.