Jumping the Shark

Everybody is the hero of his, or her, own life story. You run through the script every day, living up to your character, maybe throwing in some twists and turns and major and minor motivations. You try to bring the story a little closer to its conclusion—hopefully its happy ending—daily, page by page, frame by frame.

When I was a little kid, I’d look at life like that, as a Star Trek episode or an episode of The Wild Wild West, with myself as the main character. The only thing that annoyed me about every episode of those shows was how the lead would develop a love interest through the course of the story, and get her at the end, but then never see or mention her again in subsequent episodes. They’d been through so much together, how could he just let her go? That was just one of the several elements of the undefinable hero-ness that I never seemed to get. It wasn’t always and ever about just me, and frankly, I didn’t really want it to be. Series that are about just me; The Prisoner, The Fugitive, The Hulk, are inevitably depressing.

So maybe, I thought, it was better to look at myself as part of an ensemble cast. Some episodes of the Brady Bunch focused on Peter, some on Jan, some on Marsha and Greg. And though they started every episode fresh, there was also the development of relationships, and continuity. But then there was the downside of the ensemble cast-the fact that sometimes you were just there as a supporting role, and when that support became your main role, where were you left, then? Whatever did happen to Tiger, anyway?

Seriously though, when I was younger, I would wonder about that. Would I be the hero, the one whose adventures the readers wanted to follow, or would I be the sidekick, able to step forward into a solo role from time to time, but mostly the Robin supporting the Batman, the Kato to someone else’s Green Hornet, the essential, but also essentially supporting, character to the heroes quest, without a quest of my own. And I didn’t like that idea very much. It became a sort of paradigm that I’d hold my life up against, from time to time-am I the supporting character in this episode? I mean, I want to support the cast. But by the same token, I don’t want to be easily able to be written off—not without the possibility of a strong spin-off series of my own as follow-up.

Prince Valiant, the classic soap opera daily strip, continued to follow the life of Val well after he was married and had kids, but increasingly the stories began to focus around the kids, to the point of their even taking over the main plotlines from time to time. Maybe that’s the inevitable progression of the storyline, that it passes onto a new generation and they become the heroes of the piece, with our acting as support, supplanted in the feature role, and willingly so. But while there’s something life affirming in that continuity, there’s also something a little sad. We haven’t even come to the main climax, yet, the one we’ve been working toward for decades, the promised “this one changes everything” dénouement. And it is coming, isn’t it? Mustn’t it?

So this is Middle Age, years into the popular top ten hit, and we hit the point where traditionally the series will try to Jump the Shark to keep up viewer interest. All the major conflicts having been resolved, and newer subplots slower to develop, and something needs to change. This is the time when the writers who have been here from early on start scratching their heads for new direction, maybe the time to bring in a new creative team to shake things up a bit. Such a course could create brand new excitement, or it could derail a series and lose all interest. This is the time where everyone looks forward to a season retrospective, and collectively ask, what next? It’s a time when I look over the series a bit dispassionately, as dispassionately as I can in a series in which I’m so intricately involved, and ask; am I still the hero of this story? What to do, what to do?

Sometimes I wish life could be a movie adaptation of a series. In that, you can look back over the whole life of the thing, and craft a specific story, set that story up really early and start to pay it off spectacularly. Watching Spider-Man III (and I will!), you'd never know that Mary Jane Watson was an after-thought girlfriend, brought to center stage when Peter Parker's real love interest was killed tragically by bad and ill-conceived writing. That's because the movie has the entire storyline to pick and choose and pull from, discarding the meandering ideas that went nowhere, and the years of bad writing, to create a new central core of solid story that gives the illusion of intent, and meaning, and a sense of destiny. But something is also lost by eliminating the meandering. I still remember you, Gwen Stacey, and as you were, not as the revisionist current comics are painting you. I still know you were the love of Peter's life. And I still know how important that is.

Anyway, only half of this entry is tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes I really do review my life as fiction, trying to figure out what the current twist means, and working to pull meaning out of disconnected events. Because there has to be meaning in there. somewhere. There must be. Mustn’t it?

Tune in next week, for another exciting episode. One hopes.