At some point or another, most TV shows jump the shark. And from there on in, you just know the end is nigh.
Our favorite programs, those that have stood the test of time, know how to avoid that one little slip. But if they jump, they somehow manage to pull on their big-boy water skies and jump right back over the shark cage.
But jumping the dark, that’s another thing entirely. We’re not talking about situations like the old pedophile neighbor on Family Guy. Somehow that guy’s a recurring character that we all just accept and even laugh at. Other shows like Game of Thrones or Walking Dead are supposed to be dark and brutal.
I’m talking about great television (well, except for The Brady Bunch) that just tried a little too hard to be deep, yet ended up mired in quicksand.
Here are some of television’s finest masterpieces (well, except for The Brady Bunch) — including something from Masterpiece, actually — that really just didn’t need to go there.
When Vincent Price abducts the Brady Bunch boys on their Hawaiian vacation
I think every person of a certain age knows what they were doing the day they saw Marsha Brady in a bikini. Events like that are dramatically etched in our collective consciousness. Often ignored during that particular hormonal outbreak, though, was what happened to her adopted brothers. While trying to break the spell of the cursed tiki statuette, Bobby, Peter and Greg slip away at night (or during bright daylight, but with those horrid “nighttime filters” they try to pass off as realistic looking) take a bus to the middle of Oahu and enter the lair of schlock horror-meister Vincent Price.
With a blunt-end spear, old Vincent Price — aka Professor Hubert Whitehead (yuck, right?) — somehow captures three strapping young Brady Boys and ties them up to primitive tribal totem poles clearly carved from exquisite ancient styrofoam.
Forget all the contrived plot twists. 1972 was a different era where we believed anything a narrator told us, including something like “Mike’s boss foots the bill for the whole family, including Alice, to vacation in Hawaii.”
Don’t worry, all’s well that ends well. Carol, Mike and the gang forgive the abduction and it all ends in a luau. Cue the sappy, early 70s closing music.
FUN FACT: Vincent Price talks to a statue named Oliver. In the very next season, Cousin Oliver comes to stay in Bradyville, finally cursing the show into oblivion (or syndication). Coincidence?
When Sam Beckett is forced to become Lee Harvey Oswald on Quantum Leap.
Quantum Leap was a remarkable mixture of humor and science fiction. The show was perfect for the late 80s/early 90s. And it was humming along just fine as Scott Bakula got himself into all manner of mischief by randomly popping inside people’s bodies. Yeah, just go with it.
Then there was that one episode. Bakula’s character, Sam Beckett, leaps into the body of none other than Lee Harvey Oswald and suddenly we’re supposed to just go along with that pathology.
He fights it though. It takes two whole episodes with Al, his mentor-from-the-future played by Dean Stockwell, trying to help him out of that incarnation of evil. But lo and behold, in the end he grabs a rifle, stumbles through Dallas and whacks the 35th president of the U.S. of A.
Nope, going against every single viewer’s wishes, he doesn’t stop the assassination. The whole plot line goes against the show’s credo and opening narration, “To put right what once went wrong.”
The show’s creator, Donald Bellisario, actually served in the Marines with Oswald so maybe that lets him off the hook a bit. But then they try to toss the stricken audience a bone at the end, supposedly making things right by explaining he did good, real good, because the original Oswald killed Jackie O as well. O For God’s Sake!
When Ginsberg slices off his nipple and gives it as a gift on Mad Men
Artist Vincent Van Gogh had nothing on this disturbed character from Sterling Cooper & Weiner. We’ve loved every stinkin’ episode of Mad Men and we’re as sad to see it leave as we were happy when the networks canceled Selfie.
As fantastic as it was, there are times, though, that left us scratching our chests, wondering what in the hell was going on. Why would a plot line include having a creative soul get all Cyclopsy on his own nipple? And if someone really had to pop a nip, why couldn’t it have been Lou Avery?
When the Korean woman smothers her baby on M*A*S*H



Which came first, the chicken or the baby?