Shark Bytes

A very tricky one to diagnose but I'd go with the Pylea as the JTS moment. The show b4 the Pylea arc was constantly improving but had an significant deterioration. The episodes were designed to give a somewhat gloomy show a more upbeat, fun season finale so it would contrast amicably with the depressingly dull and dark ending to Buffy S5 that preceded it. In this it succeeded Cordy being refered to as "cow" was a great moment as was the "dance of joy", but it also wasted an oppertunity to do something interesting with the characters especially after the impact of the Darla story arc and the continuing plot with Wolfram and Hart. It also introduced the reprehensible character of Fred who was pointless and annoying who was eventually reconstituted as Illyria after wasting everybodys time for more than two seasons. Something any show, even one as strong as ATS could well done to have avoided.

Season 5 was brilliant, but i think that so many people left after season four that it was too late to save. Cordelia always helped to keep the show light during times of great darkness and that was really missed when she became the evil one. The show worked best when it combined comedy and tragedy and in season four the comedy was lost. I think the worst thing that ever happened was connor and cordelia sleeping together as it just came so out of the blue, although it was explained later when we found out the truth of cordy.

But season 5 went back to its best again, and became my favourite season after season 1. The additions of spike and harmony was brilliant, adding back the comedy. And the petty relationship between Angel and Spike has always been Joss and co at their best. And the death of Fred was one of the most heartbreaking things to watch, second only to the death of Doyle.

Loyal fan forever, but wish Season 4 didnt get so bad.

Thanks to season five, I must vote that it never jumped the shark. Had it not been for season five, my vote would have been season four. So much went wrong during season four, the worst of which were Conner and what they did to Cordy. Season Five, on the other hand, showed that there remained much life in Angel.

I don't feel the "irrevocable"standard makes it impossible to jump the shark. Many shows have gotten worse and stayed bad right up until they were canceled.

The whole ridiculous 2 vamps having a kid plot ruined the show. And season 4 was terrible, they basically assassinated Cordy's character. Charisma deserved more than that considering her role on both shows since the beginning

"A show can't get more refreshing and interesting after it jumps the shark."

Art can always become interesting and refreshing again, it just sometimes takes efforts at the height of human ability.

If "irrevocable" was some hard standard, nothing could ever jump the shark.

Angel got awful in season four, but then got interesting again. Switching the role of Angel and Spike in 5 was a really interesting twist on the characters, and lead back to good storytelling raising the sort of tough ethical questions Whedon's vampire series are more famous for.

Ok, we can call this "taking a running start towards the shark, then suddenly backing away," if you want to be a lexical tightwad. But I'm gonna stick to "jumping the shark," and you can figure out whatever I really mean.

JTS for me when he became a father. It was all downhill from there.

It obvisouly fell apart when angel investigations moved to Wolfram and Heart.

One thing I never got about this series is if Wolfram and Hart could subdue Angel with those electric tasers, during the trial episode, why didn't they do that every episode?

Also why didn't Angel have gypsies put curses on other vampires? I feel like that comic book guy on the Simpsons, who looks at the earth destroying meteor and says ("I've wasted my life").

The show was at an all-time high when Angel went dark and let Dru and Darla have a massacre in Holland Manner's wine-cellar.

...Unfortunately, the show's highest point led to the show's lowest point. Angel going dark led to Angel sleeping with Darla, which led to Angel becoming a daddy.

After that, things just got worse and worse; and practically all the stories revolving around Connor led to this show jumping the shark big time.

I posted two posts previously about Angel continually jumping the shark. I understand the term. My point was that I think the writers of Angel were intentionally playing with the notion of jumping the shark. I can just imagine a pitch meeting there: "Hmmm, what would be crazier than having Rosanne win the lottery, nuttier than having Mr. Roarke fight Satan?" "I know, I know, let's turn Angel into a puppet..." Sure, jumping the shark is an indication that a show no longer takes itself seriously and that it is doing anything to save itself. But maybe it's also possible for a show to mock the idea of trying to save itself by just saying, f..it, we'll do what we want.

Dude, I think you've misunderstood the term "jump the shark". A show can't get more refreshing and interesting after it jumps the shark. The jump is when the show begins an irrevocable decline.

I'm rewatching Angel right now and rethinking the series. Angel continually jumped the shark. I think, perhaps, that was the mission statement of the show: to jump the shark in every conceivable way possible. What other show reinvented itself in so many ways? Unlike Lost or Alias, Angel flipped the show over so many times to create story instead of incoherent plot. What was so great was that every time Angel jumped the shark, they landed in a more interesting, refreshingly entertaining world. Sure, some of the jumps seem downright silly--Cordelia gives birth to a goddess?--but once the water settled down after every jump, the show sailed smoothly on.

The beginning of season 5 was the biggest jump. mainly because it completely ignored what happened in the previous 4 seasons. Unlike season 4 that was very plot motivated and you couldn't miss an episode, season 5 worked on an episode to episode sort of plot, in which you can pretty much skip the first half of it, and you wouldn't miss a thing. very unfitting to the show (unlike 'buffy' which was just the other way around). Overall, if i had to choose the exact moment it jumped, I'll have to say the last episode of season 4.

Once Cordy was written off and Spike was introduced that just killed this show for me.

1) Cordy was like, an essential part of the show. I mean...it's CORDELIA! She was just amazing in those first seasons of the show, I never really got around the fact that she was just bumped off like that.

2) Spike moving to the show just seemed like a big thing to draw fans to the show. I know it's doubtful that any of the writers actualy had that in mind, but the whole thing just screamed "Hey, come watch Angel 'cause we've revived Spike!"
And to be honest, I lost a lot of love for Spike after S4 of Buffy, so I really didn't want to see him in Angel.