Comments on: When Did Three’s Company Jump the Shark?

By: NTVNAT

NTVNAT — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:33:47 +0000

When Jack plays his nonexistent identical twin brother, “Austin”, in order to fool Furley in order to fool around with Furley’s niece. The bulk of the absurdity were the scenes while stuck in “the kids” apartment due to a heavy fog outside. Jack switching back & forth from Jack to “Austin”. But the pinnacle of Shark Jumping is when [SPOILER]: an off-camera Jack & “Austin” fighting in Jack’s bedroom followed by a highly drunk Furley challenging “Austin’s” rudeness to in the bedroom by going into the bedroom only to have Furley come out & tell them “Austin” apologized to the astonishment of the roommates.

By: Walter Bishop

Walter Bishop — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 22:03:34 +0000

Jack’s Bistro and the episode with Jack and his fake moustache.
Season 8, last nail in the coffin.

By: Brian Smith

Brian Smith — Thu, 18 May 2023 04:35:41 +0000

I’ll absolutely second this notion; I knew that Jack’s Bistro essentially spelled the end of the Regal Beagle, but I’d never thought about what it meant to the show to get rid of its hangout vibe. (To put it another way, it’s like if Monica Geller bought and ran a cafe with tables and no couch, and everyone started visiting Monica’s Cafe instead of Central Perk.)

I’d like to give an honorable mention to “Love Thy Neighbor,” the first episode with Ann Wedgeworth as Lana. They made a lot of fun episodes after that one, so it’s not the Jump The Shark moment…but to me, that’s the first episode that feels like it went through an entire committee’s worth of meddling before it aired. I don’t know the real story behind it, but it FEELS like the episode was first written as “Jack is desperate to be with a woman, so he dates and spends the night with an older woman who lives in the building, and she becomes, in that episode and subsequent ones, a constant flirt who would absolutely wreck his living arrangement if word got out that they were together.” What we GOT was “Jack is desperate to be with a woman, but that’s just an excuse for some jokes; the main thing is that he’s broke, so he agrees to be a paid escort for a divorcee who’s wealthy enough to afford that, and he rejects her over and over, but she likes Jack enough that she leaves her home and moves in upstairs.”

(I always liked Lana, you see.)

By: My Two Cents

My Two Cents — Wed, 17 May 2023 14:24:45 +0000

Good column, Brian.

My two cents:

I hate to say when Priscilla Barnes joined the cast was the Jump the Shark moment, because she didn’t write the scripts. However, after she joined, almost all of the episodes were about a misunderstanding. During the Summers/Harrison years there were some misunderstanding shows, but they did not dominate the schedule. So I will say, Season 5 (and I liked the Terri character better than the Crissy character) because the scripts predominately relied on the misunderstanding plot.