Reassessment...

For some reason, a new series of ads has been showing up on Facebook, playing video clips from classic television sitcoms.  Some of them are as funny as ever, like Barney Miller, Designing Women and WKRP in Cincinnati. But one show that hasn't aged well seems to be Happy Days.

Fonzie, Richie, Potsie and the bunch gave us the phrase "jumped the shark" when a Happy Days episode showed Henry Winkler waterski-jumping a buoy-outlined patch of water that the script said contained a shark. We knew it did because before the scene that showed Winkler skiiing towards it we saw a fin in the water. And interpolated between parts of the sequence showing Fonzie approaching the ramp (in leather jacket, of course) we saw footage of a shark that was definitely beneath the surface of some water somewhere. Conventional wisdom says that's when the show began to decline, even though it lasted several more seasons.

But watching other clips from the show makes it clear that the silliness that led to its decline began somewhere about season 3, when the characters became caricatures and the every conversation became setup/punchline, setup/punchline, setup/punchline ayyyyy.

So let the shark off the hook, OK? It may be a vicious predator laying waste to hundreds of smaller, cuter and more colorful fish and occasionally attacking a human, but it didn't signal the ruin of Happy Days. That, apparently, had already happened.