Jumping the Shark

"Jumping the Shark" is an idiom used by critics to describe media making something in order to attract attention and stay relevant and ending up introducing something absurd that finally reveals to the public that the writers of the show have, most likely definitely, ran out of ideas, and, in worst-case scenarios, may never produce another good episode again.

Notable Shows that "Jumped the Shark"

 * 1) Happy Days: The first example of "jumping the shark" and also the trope namer. After the Season 4 episode "Hollywood: Part 3", the show centered around Fonzie and his friends, throwing away the Cunningham family (because he was the most popular character), and quality nosedived as a result. Fan consensus is that, of its eleven seasons, only the first four and a half are worth watching. The aforementioned episode in itself also disappointed the public, because in it Fonzie literally jumps over a tiger shark while riding on water-skis, ignoring and undoing his character's development and creating a blatant and huge discrepancy, as in an earlier episode he got badly injured after having jumped with a motorcycle over more than a dozen of barrels and thus claimed he would never do such a dangerous thing again.
 * 2) Avengers Assemble: Season 5 only focused on Black Panther. And, well, being a one-show Replacement Scrappy as it displaced the superior Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
 * 3) The Simpsons: After the infamous episode "The Principal and the Pauper", the series has been continuously trying to create shocking moments and episodes, such as killing off recurring characters like Rabbi Krustofski, as part of ratings traps in a desperate attempt to keep ratings from sagging. This is arguably the show with the most "jump the shark" moments in television history.
 * 4) Scooby-Doo: The show Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo introduced Scrappy-Doo, Scooby's cousin, who was really annoying and acted as the savior in almost every episode. In addition, every Mystery Gang character except for Scooby and Shaggy was removed. Fortunately, he got better once Don Messick replaced Lennie Weinrib as Scrappy's voice, though he was later removed starting with A Pup Named Scooby-Doo!. Warner Bros., the current owners of Hanna-Barbera, have all but distanced themselves from him (the few times he got recognition were his role as the main villain in the 2002 live-action film, and a small hate cameo in Mystery Incorporated).
 * 5) Bunk'd: Season 3 removed Xander, Jorge, Tiffany, Hazel, and Griff from the show and been replaced by three new characters, Matteo, Finn, and Destiny. And even worse, the fourth season also removed Emma, Ravi, and Zuri from the show as well, making them being replaced by Gwen, Ava, and Noah, thus making this show no longer a Jessie spin-off.
 * 6) Family Guy: In Season 7's episode, Not All Dogs go to Heaven, Brian admitted he is an atheist and yet, met Jesus earlier that Season.
 * 7) Mr. Pickles (Momma Named Me Sheriff): Its disastrous Season 4 premiere/series finale shifted the focus to Sheriff, with Mr. Pickles being killed off.
 * 8) Oggy and the Cockroaches: In Season 5, it switched from modern days to the past and future, although there were more variety of characters and it stayed true to the previous seasons.
 * 9) Family Feud: The Bullseye round was added in 1992 (each family starts with $5,000 and all five members must build up their bank for Fast Money), considerably slowing down game-play and lowering ratings, making producers try out gimmicks like celebrity episodes and eventually leading to Ray Combs' abrupt firing in 1994. Said round was retooled as the Bankroll round for Richard Dawson's comeback season (in which only one member of each family plays), making it somewhat better, but it was too late. It made an unwelcome return for John O'Hurley's final season (2009-2010), before being removed for good in the Steve Harvey era.
 * 10) The Boondocks (2005): Season 4 had no focus on Huey Freeman and instead focused on Robert.
 * 11) Ben 10 (2016): This show is all over the place for jumping the shark. In the Season 1 finale, Ben gains Vilgax's DNA which makes Gax (who is basically Vilgax), but he was soon killed off along with Upgrade and in Season 2, Ben gained Omni-Enhanced forms. However, in the Season 2 finale "Innervasion", Shock Rock becomes a villain, and loses his Omni-Enhanced forms, Overflow, Grey Matter, and Wildvine after the Omnitrix reboots again.
 * 12) The Smurfs (1981): The last season focused on the Smurfs time-traveling rather than stopping Gargamel due to NBC's wishes.
 * 13) The Flintstones: The final season introduced the Great Gazoo, a very annoying alien from the future (when the series was set on the Stone Age) who only Fred, Barney and child characters could see.
 * 14) The Brady Bunch: The final six episodes introduced Cousin Oliver, who was meant to be a replacement for the aging Bobby.
 * 15) The Fairly OddParents: In the sixth season, they introduced Poof, the son of Cosmo and Wanda, and had mixed reception. Since then, the show went into an imbalance in terms of the quality of its episodes. But things would get even worse in the ninth season with the introduction of Sparky, a fairy dog that would be the new mascot of Timmy. Fortunately, he was eliminated after the ninth season, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was in the tenth season, where they introduced Chloe Carmichael, an annoying Mary Sue. Her introduction, along with the tenth season's terrible quality similar to the previous season, ended up killing and cancelling the series. It has been speculated that the reason for this is so that the show's creator, Butch Hartman, could move onto other projects; it was only when he left Nickelodeon several months after the show's final episode aired, that the series was officially cancelled.
 * 16) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): In Season 9, the show got rid of Shredder and Krang, replacing them with a more generic villain named Lord Dregg, and introduced Carter, a teenage boy who occasionally mutated into an Incredible Hulk-type monster, to the turtle team. This in the midst of a change in tone for the series in general, as it became edgier in appearance, right down to a Gotham-like red sky.
 * 17) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): In Season 6, the series abandoned the show's dark tone and changed it into a more childish show, thanks to executive meddling. Season 6 was meant to be a darker season.
 * 18) Dragon Ball GT: Turned Goku back into a child in the very first episode.
 * 19) Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015): Bumblebee becomes the new leader of the Autobots and given a redesign with huge shoulders due to Hasbro executives wanting to increase toy sales and appeal towards children.
 * 20) Doctor Who (2005 revival): Series 11 is the debut season of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, and appealed more to SJWs and feminists than anything else.
 * 21) Laverne and Shirley: Season 6, when the girls move from Milwaukee to Burbank. Granted there were still some good episodes in this era, but it is not looked upon fondly by Laverne and Shirley fans. It all hit the fan by the eighth and final season, when Cindy Williams quit the show, leaving it without one of the title characters (who stayed in the title anyway, for some reason).
 * 22) Once Upon A Time: As the show went on, it got repetitive (new curse must be overcome, probably is all about Mr. Gold/Rumpelstiltskin somehow, rinse, repeat), centered around a core group of characters and thus wasted other really good, underused semi-regulars, and Disney's thumbprints became more obvious with the insistence of using Frozen characters and certain characters unsubtly looking like their animated counterparts. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the last season. when half or so of the stars left the show leading to a soft reboot.
 * 23) Are You Being Served?: Two words: Mr. Spooner.
 * 24) Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The episode Intimidation Game was filled to the brim with SJW propaganda.
 * 25) House of Cards US: Season 6, after lead actor Kevin Spacey was fired because of accusations of sexual misconduct, forcing them to completely rewrite the entire season at the last minute to make his character's wife, played by Robin Wright, the new lead character. The resulting season ends up not being able to decide whether to make Wright's character more sympathetic, or just the same as her husband, and ends with what many have called the absolute worst finale episode of any TV show in history - the finale currently has a rating of just 2.7/10 on IMDb!
 * 26) Game of Thrones: The seventh and eighth seasons, after they ran out of material from George R. R. Martin's books to adapt to the screen. Most episodes of those seasons aren't actually too bad compared to everything else on this list, but the second half of the eighth season was where things went horribly wrong, with numerous stupid plot twists, anticlimactic deaths of main characters, and an ending that was a colossal let-down. One of the leading theories for the show’s decline is so showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss rushed the series on purpose so they could focus on their upcoming Star Wars project, which they eventually quit working on.
 * 27) How I Met Your Mother: Season 9, due to the show's writers coming up with a silly gimmick of setting the entire season across a weekend, basically forcing them to write the episodes in real-time. When they realized that wasn't working, they started resorting to flashback episodes and even stupider gimmicks, like an episode where all the characters speak in rhyming verse. And worst of all, the series finale basically undid everything that had taken place in the previous three or four seasons just so that Ted could start dating Robyn again.
 * 28) Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?: Season 7 introduced the clock format, which was controversial. Season 9 got rid of it, but worsened the show with various changes, none of which were for the better. Season 17 introduced a new graphics package that was criticized for being cheap and inconsistent.
 * 29) Two and a Half Men: In 2011, Charlie Sheen quit the show after his infamous public meltdown, leading to his being replaced by an entirely new character played by Ashton Kutcher. The show got back on track a bit in the ninth season with Kutcher, but still wasn't as good.
 * 30) Battlestar Galactica (2003): Starbuck's returning from the dead at the end of Season 3 was the point where the show completely gave up on trying to make any logical sense and just descended into mystical nonsense, eventually resulting in a nearly-disappointing finale with had an anti-technology message that came completely out of nowhere.
 * 31) Wheel of Fortune (syndicated version): When Harry Friedman became the producer in 1995, and was promoted to executive producer in 1999 after Merv Griffin's retirement, he made many changes, few for the better, but the Prize Puzzle (introduced in 2003) is considered the worst of his changes.
 * 32) Survivor: Starting from Season 34, each season has been jam-packed with many different twists and advantages, most of which had a negative impact on the seasons. Due to the overabundance of advantages, it became difficult to keep track of which contestant had which advantage. All of these seasons (except Season 37, which received critical acclaim) received a mixed reception as a result.
 * 33) LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitsu: It's TV special, Day of the Departed was not well received, as the villains were temporarily revived after Cole accidentally brings them back using the Yin Blade… yes, he did, as a trick by Yang so he can become human again. Basically the special was made for only two things: One, a filler for the postponed Ninjago Movie and Two, so that Cole becomes human again. Since then, this show has been slowly declining in quality until Season 13, and during it used cliched elements not just from other media but often itself. Season 7 focused on the villains Acronix and Krux looking for the four time blades (though three of them appeared at a certain location from the time vortex). Basically this copies plots from the Pilot Episodes (the golden weapons), Season 1 (the fangblades), and Season 5 (the keys to Sensei Wu's father's tomb). This would later be copied again in Season 8 with the Oni Masks and Season 12 with the Key-Tanas. Season 10 only had 4 episodes (due to this, it was edited together into a movie in the US) and seemed kinda rushed and somewhat predictable. The Fire Chapter of Season 11 focused on the Ninja fighting the Pyro Vipers, which are just like Season 1 and 7 with the snakes. Season 12 seemed like a rehash of Season 3.
 * 34) Cousins For Life: While there was no episodes that jumped the shark, The shows advertisements made it look like some episodes (mainly the episode "Operation Mom") would jump the shark.
 * 35) American Housewife: Julia Butters was replaced with Giselle Eisenberg to play Anna-Kat Otto as of Season 5.
 * 36) The Ren & Stimpy Show: Following Man's Best Friend in which resulted in John Kricfalusi being fired. The show's dark humor had to be toned down in Season 3. While Season 3 was decent, Seasons 4 and 5 were the worst.