You all remember The 100 right? The TV show that took the “bury your gays” trope
so far that an entire convention was made in response? Yeah, that show. Well,
it kept going after that moment, which happened in season 3, and in fact, it had four more seasons.
The seventh and final season only recently finished airing a couple months ago, and
trust me, it was a wild ride watching them try to keep that show going for as long as they did. But
it made me want to discuss a really interesting phenomenon in TV writing called jumping the shark.
Jumping the shark is essentially when a TV show reaches what should be the natural end
point of its storyline, but it wants to keep going or has been greenlit for more seasons,
so it does something completely far-fetched and out-of-the-blue to generate viewer interest
and also continue moving the plot forward. It originally began with an episode of Happy Days
in the 70’s when Fonzie literally jumps over a shark while on water skis, something which
was unusual and gimmicky in comparison to what the show had been. At first, jumping the shark
had the specific connotation of being just for similar types of comedic shows being more and
more gimmicky to hold audience attention as they went on for season after season, but since then
it’s been used for other types of media as well, and even to describe things like when a brand has
a notable shift in its creative tone that people don’t like as much. Jumping the shark is usually
said with a negative connotation, to point out that the show or franchise or whatever it may be
is past its peak, or that it had a specific moment when it abandoned its original intent.
That being said, jumping the shark for a TV show doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.
Some people love a TV show that’s unpredictable and changes wildly from season to season.
And that’s where The 100 comes in. This show doesn’t just jump the shark once,
but I swear like 46 different times. Okay, realistically, there’s like 3 moments that stand
out to me as particularly shark-jumpy, but the show as a whole just manages to get more and more
out-there and disconnected from the original storyline with every season. I think also that
if you’ve read The 100 book series, the TV show kinda feels like it jumps the shark in
episode 1 just because of how wildly it diverges from the books. Which is fine,
the TV show definitely doesn’t have to mirror the books perfectly, and it’s clearly done well
as its own entity, but they are just not even remotely close to the being the same story.
When I first heard about Clarke and Lexa, before Lexa was killed in season 3,
I went and read The 100 books first, expecting to read about their relationship. But uh,
Lexa isn’t even in the books. She’s a character that was made for the TV show, along with like,
most of the other characters in the TV show. So obviously a lot of people would’ve watched
the show without reading the books and wouldn’t have any sort of baseline idea for the story,
which is completely fine, but if you have read the books first, even the first
season of The 100 show is just like, “Wow what in the world is even going on here.”
They blow through like an entire book’s worth of content in maybe half an episode.
But then, even ignoring the books, the show does have a kind of original storyline that it follows
for the first couple of seasons. The 100 kids from the space station are down on a post-apocalyptic
Earth trying to survive while fighting each other and the grounders. Arguably, the first time it
jumps the shark is at the end of season 2 with the introduction of an artificial intelligence
named ALIE. Up until then, the show was about survival in a post-apocalyptic world without much
technology, but then all of sudden there’s a fancy mansion and an AI? It’s a pretty big departure
that I found surprising watching the show through at first. That doesn’t mean it was a bad writing
choice per se, just that it was a huge shift so that the show could go in a different direction.
They’d obviously exhausted the original plotline. From there, there’s like a whole storyline with
this AI and this chip that embeds itself in someone’s neck. The show does reach some sort of
semblance of a normal progression through seasons 3 and 4, but it’s the end of season 4 where things
change drastically again, because there was only so far they could go with that storyline.
Basically a death wave passes over the planet, forcing some of the humans to hide in a bunker
while others flee to space. We then fast forward 6 years to see Clarke has somehow survived and
now . . . has a child? I think I laughed out loud at the season finale when I first saw it.
It was so weird to just skip so far forward in this show and give Clarke a kid. Because, again,
they had exhausted the whole ALIE plotline and just needed to do something different.
But honestly, it’s the third shark-jumping that really gets me,
that’s really just next-level, that’s iconic The 100 style. And that’s when they continue
all their fighting on earth, blah blah blah, but then, at the end of season 5, they just nuke the
whole planet and go into space. Like they really were like, “Okay, not only have we exhausted this
one specific storyline, but we’ve exhausted every possible storyline on this planet. So screw it,
just nuke the planet. We’ll go to a new one.” I kinda love and hate this decision at the
same time. Like, it’s undeniably ridiculous, but it’s also pretty fun to see how they continue to
keep this show going? How many planets will they have to completely destroy before just
moving on to the next one that also probably has some deep morally-grey crisis going on?
When I was reading up on the ol’ Wikipedia page for jumping the shark, I ran into a few other
related phrases like nuking the fridge, marrying the Irving, and growing the beard. But honestly
I think we need a fourth entry to this list, and that would be nuking the planet. It’s like jumping
the shark on steroids. It’s not a little gimmick to continue the show, it’s just hitting a massive
reset button and taking your entire cast into a brand new setting and destroying the old setting
permanently. I’m sure other shows have done this in some shape or form, but this is definitely the
most extreme example of it that I’ve seen. And if we keep renewing shows for countless
seasons past their natural end point, we’ll continue to see more shows nuking the planet.
A solid antithesis to this is The Good Place. That was a show that ran exactly as long as it
needed to, and had a beautiful and perfect and meaningful finale that fit within the original
storyline. A lot of people were sad that it ended after 4 seasons, but extending the show
beyond that would’ve ruined it. They would’ve had to jump the shark or nuke the planet and
do something completely different to keep it going. But, fortunately,
that didn’t happen, and we got the ending of The Good Place as it should’ve been.
I can’t imagine what a fitting ending for the original storyline of The 100 would’ve
been. I think it was kind of destined from the beginning to be this whacky going-on-for-too-long
kind of show. And maybe we need some shows like that, where you stick around just to
see how they can keep it going. But I think in general, letting a show run its course and end
when it feels like it should end is the best path for most TV shows. Then the writers and
showrunners and everyone can go work on another show and keep bringing us fresh new stories.
But for The 100, the writers of the show obviously wanted to go in a very different
direction from the books. They wanted it to be fast-paced and intense and unpredictable,
and throwing in these massive change-ups to the storyline along the way helped them do that. To
some viewers, it may have been off-putting, because The 100 season 7 is unrecognizable
to The 100 season 1, or even like season 4. But for other folks, that may have been the appeal.
You’re not ever coming back to the same thing because the show is always changing. That will
work for some people and won’t work for others. It was fascinating to see The 100 lean into jumping
the shark fully as a tactic from the start, rather than as a gimmick at the end. Jumping the shark
is usually a final act of desperation to keep a show going and keep it interesting, but The 100
flipped that and said what if we do that from the get-go? I think The 100 jumped the shark so many
times because they wanted to see if they could, they wanted to see what the reaction would be,
they wanted to make a show unlike most other shows. In the end, they got 7 seasons out of
this show and potentially a prequel spin-off, so if that’s how you define a show’s success,
then I guess jumping the shark over and over again worked out pretty well for them.
It’s not a perfect show by any means, and I’m absolutely still bitter about how they
treated Lexa, but it was interesting to see how they managed to keep the story going for
so many seasons. Do you know of any shows that have jumped the shark at a similar level to
The 100? What do you think of The 100 now that it’s done airing? Let me know in the comments.
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Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.