My friend,
She wants
To be a Suicide Girl
I'll take her picture,
For the whole wide world.
I've known her for a long time
You could say that I'm a fan,
But I always thought that I would be her man

As someone who has seen little of this show, knows all the basic stuff but doesn't have a real emotional attachment to the characters, it's just really, really awkwardly and jarringly executed. Strange pacing, weird tonal shifts, sloppy writing.

It's funny how they avoided the most obvious pitfall that was always inherent in the premise and managed to bring a mother onto the show that didn't underwhelm after years of build-up and most everyone actually liked, and then wrote it anyway as if they hadn't.

That's a nice idea. But I think the ending to Harry Potter is pretty great aside from the actual epilogue, and that one's more cut-off from the rest of the story and thus easier to ignore.

This list covers actors who quit (as stated in the first paragraph), not died. Unless you consider suicide a form of quitting your job, and yeah, then we're back in "insensitive" territory.

I have an idea for a new inventory. Read Beyond The Title: 200 AV Club members who skipped right to the comments and suggested characters that don't fit the criteria of this list

It was the first episode aired, but not the pilot (which was aired as the last episode of the season because the initial aninmation was so infamously bad the episode had to be redone).

Hm? Of course Sam Simon got it.

Good catch! And I've found out That 70's Show did it earlier than Simpsons/TXF as well, in a January '02 episode. So that was the time the phrase/site was really at the height of its pop-cultural relevance.

So I just realized that both "Jump The Shark" and The Simpsons' "Gump Roast" aired on April 21, 2002, which means there happened to be two references to "jumping the shark" on the same night, both of them probably the earliest there were on TV. Or can anyone think of ones that preceed these?

You shouldn't feel forced to defend the right to hate speech, or any of that "tolerance for intolerance" bullshit.

I've never understood how on earth it was legal what they did.

We are richer for having lost him.

Mmm… burger.

That's a typo.

Useless trivia alert: Homer's mother is named Mona Simpson because that's the name of writer Richard Appel's then-wife, who is a novelist and the younger sister of Steve Jobs. This contradicted the information in the "Simpsons Uncensored Family Album", a tie-in book published during the show's second season, where her…

Odd that you didn't decide to wait one more week.

I love that Homer somehow knows who Walt Whitman is, but only uses that knowledge to curse him out.

Man loses pants, life

Uh, I think the interview makes it clear he does realize that, and it's fine that you don't care about his "problems", but it doesn't look like he has any anyway.