The actors and writers get bored and do a musical episode.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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When the characters are talking about something and say "oh this is like that time when..." and a flashback scene which is just copy and pasted from old footage is used. Then they do this 5 more times in the episode. So annoying and cheap.
A clipshow episode. These were used as cheap fillers when the shows still had 20+ episode seasons, if the production needed to save money this was the easiest way to do it.
It's less of an issue in comedies, but main characters becoming Flanderised in drama series is where it becomes obvious they've run out of ideas.
For example, at the beginning of Stranger Things, Hopper had basically given up on life, and over the course of the first two seasons he finds purpose again through helping find Will, and later, raising Eleven as a surrogate daughter.... And then in season 3 he becomes ANGERY MAN WHO FIGHTS PEOPLE - and that's about it.
It runs in parallel with a show getting too many characters to handle. It accelerates the Flanderization of characters who don't have a lot to do. Stranger Things had that problem as well, with a far too bloated main cast by the end.
When the potential long-term impact of the events keeps increasing, but the actual long-term impact keeps decreasing.
Sounds like life right now
Dude, put up a spoiler alert!
I'm afraid you've jumped the shark
I did.
Loose ends start accumulating and there comes a point where you realize there's no way they could possibly be resolved coherently in the time the series has left. I was feeling this in a big way during seasons 6 and 7 of Game of Thrones.
That pretty much sums up Lost for me. I probably watched longer than I needed to land on that conclusion, but I wanted to quit on a good point to leave the series behind.
I don't remember exactly when I quit watching, but they managed to contact a ship and they were about to be rescued. My headcanon is that they made it home to live miserably ever after. I've since learned that the show got even worse.
I remember watching early Lost promo videos where a very smug JJ Abrams swore blind there was a fully logical explanation for everything happening. And then a polar bear showed up. And I realised that whatever definition of "fully logical explanation" he was using probably didn't align with my own definitions of those words lol. That show was pure hype with talented actors.
And honestly, when they spend the last two episodes shoehorning all of those loose ends in as if it were somehow the plan all along, but in the process they create plot holes.
For example, Season 2 of Arcane having Heimerdinger being suddenly onboard for the dangerous time travel experiments just so they can have Ekko ready in time for the finale, but they also place a bunch of random restrictions on his powers such that they cannot actually alter the past but they somehow can alter the flow of fights in the present. That whole season was terrible, tbh, none of it made any sense they just wanted to rapidly take the characters from where they were in season 1 to what they are ingame with little to no explanations of how or why.
For example, Season 2 having Heimerdinger being suddenly onboard for the dangerous time travel experiments
Reading this wrong without having seen game of thrones confused me.
Until I realised I didn't read the words "of Arcane"
Heimerdinger being suddenly onboard for the dangerous time travel experiments
As I see it, Heimerdinger was ready to give up, when he was removed from the PiltoverdCouncil by Jayce, his former pupil. He tried previously to dissuade Jayce from using Hextech like this.
Then he found Ekko creating a community in Zaun with an inspiring ingenuity despite pretty much everything else happening, so Heimerdinger decided stayed and helped out while teaching Ekko on how to improve on his designs. Heimerdinger wants to improve the world after all - but safely - and sees his opportunity here.
Then in season 2 they wind up in alternative dimensions due to Hexcore shenanigans, because Heimerdinger wants to help Ekko sustain his community. Jayce ends up in over where the "final battle" already happened. Heimerdinger lands in one where Hextech apparently does not exist at all and the city is better off because of it missing. One where Heimerdinger himself can probably be more relaxed as he has more time for his stuff and has to deal less with politics and betrayal.
Ekko arives 3 years later. And Ekko wants to go back no matter the cost. And this puts Heimerdinger in a pickle: the last time he tried to dissuade his his pupil the results were catastrophic. Ekko would have worked it alone (or would probably have roped in Powder) endangering not only himself but atleast Powder, probably even the Zaun/Piltover (mind you, Ekkos knowledge about Hextech is very limited, while Heimerdinger oversaw the research most of the time - and Hex is notoriously unstable).
So to protect the timeline/city/Powder/peace he liked as well as helping Ekko get back to his community the reasonable conclusion would be to help despite not being keen of the idea. The ~4 second limit of the Z-Drive comes from the instability of the Hexshards. Any longer and it goes boom, potentially killing people around. And this limit is what he uses to bre k Victors mask in the end for Jayce to intervene.
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Depending on the kind of show it is contextual, but here's some.
If it is a tight self contained story that ends...and then more things happen. Stranger Things for example pretty much perfectly ended in season 1. There was a tiny dangling mystery regarding Eleven's fate. Such things do not need to be a sequel hook, they can simply exist to tantalize and never be expanded on. This is like if Inception 2 was made and it answered the questions about Cobb's spinning totem; it would utterly miss the point that the story was over and the ending was intentionally ambiguous.
If the actors or voice actors are simply getting too old for the part. Personally I have a good ear for animation's voice acting. It drives me absolutely crazy when I hear noticeably aged actors reprising role or continuing them as if nothing has changed. Obviously some performers can last longer than others but for example modern Simpsons is unwatchable to me entirely on the basis of the voices. Even if somehow the writing turned around I simply can't get past the voices. Similarly I could barely sit through The Incredibles 2, which supposedly picks up right as the first movie ends but all the voices are aged 14 years and I can hear it.
Modern Marge sounds like Julie Kavner's been fronting a death metal band for the last 30 years. Let the poor woman rest.
I mean her net worth is estimated around 90million (and she makes about 400k per episode.), she could easily quit if she wanted to. She's also in her mid 70s.
I'm kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story... but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can't be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.
Normally when I see that, it is a signal to me that the show as intended ended but it was so popular/lucrative that moneypeople demanded it keep going, so the writers have to take an already concluded story and and un-conclude it. I'm sure shows in this situation have worked, but I'm struggling to think of one.
I suppose certain animes, especially shonen essentially do this, but they are designed from the outset to be nearly endless if successful. I'm thinking about shows like Stranger Things which clearly had one intended season, and then four seasons of whipping together something to put on screen.
Like I disclaimed at the top, it is contextual to the type of show, but I get a Spidey-sense when a show essentially restarts. Even Stargate SG-1 did it near the end, and it was overall a pretty weak few seasons.
That's why young boys are usually voiced by women
That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actors that have already been cast who then play the same role for decades as if nothing about their voice has changed.
Have you heard Bart Simpson's voice recently?
It seems like you’re both saying the same thing! The other person might have been suggesting that women’s voices tend to change less dramatically than men’s as they age. And hey, Bart Simpson is voiced by a woman!
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The "clip show" is a good sign the writers are running out of ideas. The writers write 10 minutes of dialogue and the rest of the show are scenes from previous episodes.
Clipshows were a necessary evil on broadcast shows, especially scifi ones that cost a lot of money. Sometimes the show would have to do a clipshow or a noticeably cheap bottle episode to save up for an expensive episode. Also, in the pre-streaming era, people couldn't just watch all the episodes in order on demand so an occasional episode summarizing what was going on was actually useful.
I liked the clip shows from Community because they showed clips from "episodes" that weren't shown. They would just reference events that we didn't see happen and show a clip of it. Idk if that counts though.
a parody of a thing is not the thing itself.
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When the clip shows start appearing.
On older broadcast shows, sometimes that was just a necessary evil to save the budget up for an expensive episode.
SG1 did clip shows really well.
One before, and one after, they jumped the shark.
Its possible to do it right.
What's a clip show?
It's an episode almost or entirely composed of clips from previous episodes. Usually it has some sort of a framing device - for instance, in an adventure show, it might be the characters taking a 'breather' after a tough encounter and musing on how they got here. Or one character might confront another about a situation that's been brewing, and the clip show is showing bits of that situation leading up to the confrontation.
On an aside, reception to clip shows is an interesting shift. For a long time, one or two were an accepted part of a long-running series - either because it let you make an episode on the cheap using recycled footage, or because in the pre-internet-streaming-on-demand world, it let audiences catch up on what had been happening in episodes they might have missed or seen months ago.
Nowadays, however, they're almost universally viewed negatively, as their reason for existing is absent and they're mostly taken as a sign of poor planning by the creators.
Back in the 80s and 90s, it was when they added a new child character. In the 2000s, it was when they started doing weird crossovers that made no sense.
I always liked on 'Married With Children' the executive forced child character that was wedged in was gone the next season and the only acknowledgement he ever existed was his photo on a milk jug.
Superhero comics are one of those things where I don't think it's possible to jump the shark.
The Justice League itself was kind of an awkward collaboration starting back in the 60s where they brought together a bunch of disparate different comic characters into a shared universe.
That being said, I think a series has jumped the shark when it becomes entirely unrecognizable from its original iteration to the point of absurdity. You would never expect to see a scene where The Fonz jumps over a shark while water skiing if you only saw the first episode of Happy Days
I think with long running superhero comics it is more like, if a specific run has jumped the shark and gotten too stupid.
What is simultaneously good and bad about long running comics is that the continuity is so convoluted that the writers can reset it after an especially bad run, or they can go do stand alone stories; and readers can just ignore entire chunks of continuity they don't like.
That's how I feel about Star Wars movies. And Highlander (there can be only one)
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When they introduce time travel to fix the CF of plot holes.
Gods, I fucking hate time-travel/multiverse plots. They're so overdone.
They're basically used for when the writers are too cowardly to stick to decisions they want to make. Like killing key comic book characters. Nobody stays dead! Except for characters nobody cared too much about or has lost popularity. Spin-offs are different and can be used to tell stories of maybe what things would be like if X character isn't around anymore. That's fine.
But interjecting lazily implemented multi-verse, alternate universe, time traveling wrenches in on-going mainline stories? Fuck no.
jumped its shark
…. Is this a thing? Origin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
The phrase was coined in 1985 by radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom "Happy Days", in which the character of "Fonzie"(Henry Winkler) jumps over a live shark while on water-skis.
Basically any time a show goes on too long and tries to introduce a stupid, attention-getting gimmick to try to stay relevant.
In the old sitcom "Happy Days," after far too many seasons, a new episode featured The Fonz, blue screen water skiing, a crappy looking shark prop, and the Fonz literally jumped over the shark.
Winkler actually took up water skiing IRL.
And shark jumping.
Source: I made it up
It's from Happy Days when the Fonz literally jumped over a shark while water-skiing. Seen as a sign that the show is out of ideas and using crazy stunts or out-of-character actvities to shock some life (money) out of a dying franchise.
Its from the show Happy Days (1977) where Fonzie jumps over a shark while water skiing. Its considered the point where the show took a dramatic turn down hill and the term is still used in that manner today.
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