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Jump-the-shark moments: 14 and 10 more

My hometown TV critic Matthew Gilbert has come up with a list of the worst jump-the-shark moments in recent television history:

1. '24' : Kim and the cougar
2. 'Heroes': The first season finale
3. 'American Idol': Sanjaya's ponyhawk
4. 'Frasier': Niles and Daphne hook up
5. 'Get Smart': Max and 99 get married
6. 'Scrubs': J.D.'s girlfriend gets pregnant
7. 'The West Wing': Bartlet's cathedral rant
8. 'Desperate Housewives': Wasting Alfre Woodard
9. 'Alias': The arrival of Nadia
10. 'ER': Drs. Greene and Corday
11. 'Will & Grace': Meeting Leo
12. 'The Real World: Las Vegas': The Las Vegas hot tub
13. 'Nip/Tuck': Sean and Christian sell the business
14. 'Grey's Anatomy': Izzy cuts the cord

Rising to the challenge, I am posting my personal Top 10:

1. M*A*S*H: In the fourth-season opener, B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) replaces Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) and ushers in the show's anachronistic "no adultery, no mysogyny, no fun" phase, which would drag on for another seven seasons.

2. Rescue Me: The entire third season was a shark tease. Susan Sarandon and Marisa Tomei guest-starred only to disappear in the show's parade of female characters who were psycho and/or inexplicably obsessed with Denis Leary's character, and "Probie" implausibly went from straight to gay to bisexual and back to straight in a matter of weeks. But the jump-the-shark moment for me was when the chief took a part-time bartending job and the bar owner, for no good reason, refused to pay his wages. The show's theme that everyone except for firefighters and fire victims were assholes was tiresome enough, but the idea that a New York City businessman would carelessly piss off city employees was preposterous.

3. Oz: I switched off midway through the fourth season, when Beecher's children are kidnapped on Schillinger's orders and he receives his son's severed hand in the mail. The initially compelling prison drama had already become less interesting when it became apparent that none of the major characters would ever change (see Poet's release and almost immediate return to prison). This is when the Beecher-Schillinger battle became more predictable than a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

4. The Andy Griffith Show: Don Knotts leaves, and the show pointlessly continues for another three years.

5. Saturday Night Live: OK, this show still has a few memorable moments each season, but it's never been the same since Joe Piscopo impersonated Ed McMahon. That's when the show shifted from the shaggy dog quality of its first few seasons and became an assembly line for celebrity impressions based on make-up and prosthetics as much as good writing. See the Piscopo comedy style in this HBO clip.

6. The West Wing: I'll agree with Matthew that the cathedral rant was pretty cringe-inducing, but I gave this show the benefit of the doubt until two characters discussed the merits of abolishing the penny, and I immediately forgot which character had said what. After that, I couldn't overlook the fact that almost all of the dialogue on this show could be assigned at random to any of the sardonic-but-idealistic characters and no one would notice.

7.  The Simpsons:  Epsiode No. 185, in which Apu gets married after complications of the sort we've seen in countless live-action sitcoms, was when I realized that the show's great episodes were getting farther and farther apart.

8. Columbo: More than a decade after ending his portrayal of the raincoated detective on NBC, Peter Falk returned with new episodes on ABC in 1989. Falk was still great, but the classical-style music and bright cinematography was replaced by a more "modern" score (synthesizers) and lighting (dark). Worst of all, Columbo put his own life at risk in the first episode, something totally out of character for the cautious and meticulous detective. The British have owned the classy murder mystery genre ever since.

9. NYPD Blue:  "Take care of the baby!"  Sharon Lawrence wanted out of the show, so at the end of the sixth season, her character is killed in a courthouse shootout, giving husband Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) yet another personal tragedy to deal with. By this point, I wanted Andy dead just to put both of us out of our miseries.

10. The Practice: For a couple dozen episodes, this was producer David E. Kelley's most tolerable series to date, depicting a Boston law firm that wrestled with such ethical dilemmas as obviously guilty clients. But Kelley couldn't help himself from loading up the show with increasingly bizarre murders that wouldn't be up to the standards of Law & Order. In the 43rd episode, there are two different serial killers terrorizing Boston, and the characters act as if this is an everyday occurrence. Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked like gritty realism by comparison.

Oops, more evidence that I'm not a real American

“I don’t think there is an American who hasn’t stopped today and said a little prayer for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings,” said ABC personality Charles Gibson while moderating tonight's Perry Mason-style interrogation of the Democratic presidential debates. ("Isn't it true that you plan to raise taxes? Isn't it true that you're on friendly terms with someone who isn't sufficiently patriotic?")

Am I really the only person in the US who didn't say such a prayer today? Well, mass shootings happen often enough in America that tomorrow must be the anniversary of another one, so I'll double up then.

Cheese-eating HTML monkey

I'm light on posting this week because I have been:

--Doing my taxes and looking for receipts from anything I can write off as "office expenses."

--Learning webmaster skills at my day job and starting to think in HTML code.

--Getting ready for a trip to Montreal that will take me away from the Boston Marathon and all discussion of the Pennsylvania primary.

More to come when, or if, I get back...

"Hardball" and other vehicles to shut down political debate

Brendan Nyhan informs me that Chris Matthews and company are ridiculing Barack Obama for ordering orange juice instead of coffee at an Indiana diner. When I was in elementary school, I watched The McLaughlin Group because it was fun to see grown-ups in suits and ties maintain the pretense of discussing Important Things but inevitably descending into schoolyard taunts and irrational argument. But I've seen the joke enough times to get me through the rest of my life. And I'm sure that election coverage in hell will be all about gaffes, facial expressions during debates, indelicate statements by friends of the hairstylists of the candidates, and the unforgivable elitism of candidates who have better diets than the average American.

The Handler, or why Captain Hook doesn't have cold sores

Via Boing Boing, here's news of an exciting product for germophobes. The Handler is a little plastic hook that's supposedly strong enough to open doors, punch numbers on ATM machines, scratch behind the ears of kittens, etc. The website explains why you will die without it:

As you go through your day, think of all of the places that you touch -- door handles, sink faucets, hand rails, counter tops, car doors, light switches etc…. People leave their germs behind after sneezing, coughing, blowing their nose and touching their mouth and other more private parts.

But there's a solution: "The best way to prevent problems, of course, is to never touch these 'problem surfaces.'" I think they mean door handles, not private parts, but shouldn't we treat both the same for safety's sake?

And what about other "problem surfaces," such as hands giving us change at the supermarket, or every piece of furniture at your best friend's house? I'm sure strangers and co-workers will understand if you retract your hands into your long sleeves and instead offer your claws in friendship.

Haven't the these guys ever heard of using your knuckles to push buttons and using your elbows to turn door handles?

Fish

Not every post on this blog is negative. Here, courtesy of WFMU, is a song that whose sentiments I endorse heartily.

This photo, from the town of Flockburgh, will have to do until I get a chance to shoot the Happy Haddock restaurant that my family would frequent when I was a child.

"As himself"

Troy Patterson's essay at Slate.com on toothless political satire has prompted me to institute a new rule for television watching: I will cross off any show that routinely features cameos by politicians or celebrities playing themselves.

I have to use the qualifier "routinely" because a few of my favorite shows have had the occasional lapse. A couple of months ago The Wire the real-life CNN host Nancy Grace apparently played herself in a brief scene (someone had to tell me who she was), and I consider it the show's biggest mistake of its final season. Here was a show with an entire fictional universe -- a frustrating, exhilerating, heartbreaking version of Baltimore -- and producer David Simon had to taint it with a publicity hound from the pedestrian real world. Why shatter the illusion of The Wire's Baltimore with a weak in-joke? And don't try to argue that the show was making fun of Grace; if she's given the opportunity to play herself and show she can take a joke, she is not being satirized.

As Patterson notes, Saturday Night Live cannot be considered political satire when people like Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee make surprise appearances to prove they're good sports. In the same way, I can't accept the HBO comedy Entourage as anything but the most affectionate teasing of Hollywood when people like Hugh Hefner appear on the show as themselves. And Murphy Brown is one of my most disliked sitcoms of all time because it tried to pretend it was sharp and subversive but actually kissed up to all the TV journalists who made guest appearances.

In hell, I will see the ostensibly self-effacing Larry King and Hillary Clinton every time I want to watch a sitcom or crime drama. In the meantime, producers, put in a celebrity cameo and risk losing me as a viewer for good.

Here's the last celebrity cameo on TV that worked: Sammy Davis Jr. on All in the Family in 1972. And as far as I know, he was the only person to play himself during the show's nine-year run.

Street eaters

Brendan Nyhan links to -- and mocks! -- this sensible argument by Leon Kass against eating in public:

...eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays ... [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty.

OK, Brendan, I'll concede that I have eaten ice cream cones and chocolate bars on public sidewalks. Eating or drinking anything while walking is a different matter. I've only done that under peer pressure, and I won't do it again. People will just have to copy those walking, talking, and consuming scenes from Law & Order and The West Wing without me. Kass is right: If you can eat something without feeling compelled to stop walking and taste it, either the food is not worthy of your stomach or you're not worthy of the food.

The sidewalk eaters are bad enough -- like people who walk and talk on cell phones, they do not move as fast as they think they do, and they always impede foot traffic -- but there are also the people who spread out full meals on their lap on the subway, and I've seen people eating breakfast sandwiches during a four-floor descent in my apartment building's elevator. (Oh, don't worry about dropping bits of food on the floor! I understand that you don't want you to get crumbs on your desk at work, or your own dining room table.)

I shall certainly meet these people in hell, so I will try to keep my distance in the meantime.

Below: One of a million YouTube videos by European tourists in ecstasy over hot dogs from street vendors in New York. Nothing wrong with a street hot dog -- just find a place out of the way where you can stand still and enjoy it.

Cheesecake

Anything this bad for you should taste a lot better. I love cheese and I love cake, but putting them together creates a piece of sludge. There's a reason we don't eat fresh oysters in dark chocolate, or garnish martinis with lamb chops, or listen to the original cast recording of Gypsy during foreplay. Sometimes the whole is less -- but much more disgusting -- than the sum of its parts.

Other reasons I hate cheesecake:
--The Cheesecake Factory.
--Its repeated use as a plot device on the annoying sitcom The Golden Girls.
--The waste of fruit on top when people try to mask the dessert's irredeemable sludginess.
--The insult to naked women when they're objectified as "cheesecake" and the unfortunate coinage of "beefcake" to describe naked men. Even hairy naked men.

Thank you, but I'd prefer some stale Entenmann's.

In my Absolut world...

I could move to Chicago and speak French all the time. Plus, there'd be single-payer health care and a direct train to Montreal. So I guess I can't get too worked up over this: