10 top shows that jumped the shark (and when they did it)

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Roseanne: The Connor family wins the lottery

By the end of Roseanne’s first season, it was the second-highest rated show on television. It ranks, to this day, among the classics of American television, and was ground-breaking and subversive in its own right. However, as sometimes happens, viewership fell off the longer it ran, and Roseanne Barr had to fight to keep fans in front of their TVs. Couple this with the very public feud the writer and comedian was engaged in with the ABC network, and you get a ninth season that was just downright strange.

In the second episode of that last season, “Millions from Heaven,” the once-blue collar Conner family won $108 million from the Illinois state lottery. This upended the entire premise of the show, that mostly focused on the lower-middle class family’s struggles to make ends meet and conduct the business of their lives.

The episodes only became weirder from there, and it was clear that either the writers were taking extreme liberties with what they knew to be the show’s last season, or that Roseanne wanted to introduce an absurdist vision to primetime, network television.

No one knew what to make of the new tone and approach of the series, and the family continued to get into more and more bizarre situations. “Millions from Heaven” marked the series’ turn from everything that made it connective and relatable, and fans and critics alike found it distasteful. Some argue that it redeemed itself in the final episodes, constructing the entire storyline as a dream that Roseanne had to cope with the death of Dan from the previous season. Others, myself included, wish that we could just forget it altogether and pretend it never happened.  Which is what the reboot will probably do.