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I picked up the Television Without Pity book because I love the site's snarky reviews (which I read faithfully, whether for shows now off the air like Buffy and the Wire or current favorite shows including House, Fringe and Chuck.
I picked up the Jump the Shark book for $3 after I spotted it used at Wonderbooks, a local huge used bookstore. It happened right around the time I seeded this piece about how the phrase Jump the Shark has itself jumped the shark.
If you have a used book store near you odds are good that can find this book too as there was a time a few years ago when this "jump the shark" phrase/meme seemed everywhere. Thus the good question a while back: Has the phrase "jump the shark" jumped the shark?
OK, enough about the book purchases - let's get down to comparing them...
The Jump the Shark book is a lot of mindless fun as it talks about shows I loved (West Wing and Cheers) and shows I never really got into (Seinfeld and Sex In City, to name two), and when the series came close to jumping the shark and when that shark was actually jumped.
The book is good in so far as it sparks reminders of good - and disappointing - moments of television history. But the entries are short and fluffy, with little depth and few surprises.
The best part of the Shark book is it tips you off on how to know, when watching repeats, when it is an episode that comes post-shark-jumping. For example, the Drew Carey Show went downhill after it switched its theme song to Cleveland rocks.
Much better - more astute, witty, informative and amusing - is Television Without Pity's book.
Additionally, the Television Without Pity book has a wider scope than just on when a series begins to tank, focusing, for example, on trends in television and how inane so many game shows are.
For example, instead of just reviewing the Day After as a program it speaks of how it affected my generation (and yes I had nightmares about that program
remembered by millions of '80s kids as the single most terrifying universal formative event of their childhoods (until the Challenge disaster two years later), The Day After dramatized the aftermath of a nuclear strike on American soil. Critics complained both that it was too sensationalistic a topic to be covered on such a vapid medium as tv and that it soft-soaped some of the catastrophic effects of nuclear warfare. The lasting effect of the film on us include a somewhat irrational terror of all apocalyptic events..."
It also does not hurt that the book properly mocks those who deserve mocking, including David Caruso David Cassidy and Chevy Chase (who was apparently a sexist jerk while at Saturday Night Live. That reminds me - I need to read Tom Shales' book about Saturday Night Live.
I thought it might help to do a side-by-side comparison of the two books addressing the same program, namely Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Compare, for example, sections of the books' descriptions of Buffy
This from the Jump the Shark book
Buffy saved the world... a lot. Thanks to Joss Wheedon, Buffy is a rare gem that has proven to be better on the small screen than it was on the large one. Much better. The show manages to deftly mix comedy and horror with much success and its tongue firmly planted in cheeks and other orifices. ....
Trying to recover from losing Angel, Buffy enters college and meets up with Riley and the Initiative. This mysterious underground lab beneath the college streets catapulted the Slayer right over the shark. Spike's chip, Willow ditching Oz and his wolfman side for Tara (not that there's anything wrong with that), and Faith's body switch were too much for us to handle.
Our fears were confirmed the following season whem, like Ralph Macchio on Eight Is Enough, Buffy's mysterious sister, Dawn, showed up. Granted, tehre have been some brilliantly written episodes since the destruction of the initiative. Buffy has sung, danced, died, and come back again. But regardless of the power it may possess and its ability to repeatedly avoid the shark, no program could survive a move to UPN anyway.
compare that to TWOP:
That rarity among both teen shows and WB (and, later, UPN) fare: a well-written, often touching drama about a ditzy cheerleader type with vampire-killing superpowers, whose metaphorical premise - physical demons standing for inner ones - actually worked. The show provided an excellent role model for young girls. Buffy... kicked ass every week, literally, a long-running schmoopy love story, beloved supporting characters, and meditations on the nature of high school that never got too sticky. Once the characters contrivedly all went to college together, the cracks began to show, but Buffy remained "don't call me during" appointment viewing for all of its seven seasons."
Overall, the Television Without Pity book is more substantive and thoughtful than the other. There is a reason why the Pity site is my go-to site for television reviews and recaps.
