Karl Marx famously called religion the opium of the people. Maybe that was true once. But I think the contemporary opium is television. And I confess that from time to time I’ve been addicted. To series, mostly. Soapies: including Knots Landing, Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, LA Law, thirtysomething and NYPD Blue. But never Happy Days, so I didn’t see the waterskiing Fonzie jump the shark. That scene put ‘jumping the shark’ into the popular lexicon – meaning the point in a TV series where the plot veers off into an absurd storyline and/or the characterisation suddenly and inexplicably changes. Apparently it happens to every series. I don’t know why. It just does. Last Monday evening Sweetheart Vivienne and I watched episode 78 of The West Wing – about half-way through the 155 episodes. Titled ‘The Long Goodbye’, it’s about the Alzheimer’s Disease of a parent of one of the main characters. Compared with all prior 77 episodes it was so vastly inferior – in terms of storyline setting, development and credibility; dialogue depth and realism; attention to detail; and subtext – that I wondered if The West Wing jumped the shark with this episode. Time will tell. I’ll keep you informed. But it won’t be for a while, because we’ve returned to Arrested Development – the start of the second series. Stay tuned, folks. We are.
