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

A dog eats Dan’s potential transplant heart in One Tree Hill

One Tree Hill won’t be remembered as high art, and has become a pulp classic in the five years since it’s fiale. It’s gained a second life on Netflix, as new generations of teen viewers soak up all the camp their tender hearts can bear. It never won any major awards, and it probably won’t be remembered as an immutable contribution to the television canon, but it does boast something no other show can: a storyline centered on a dog eating a human heart, dropped from an Igloo cooler.

For the uninitiated, One Tree Hill was a typical The CW nighttime soap, filled to the brim with rock-hard abs, high cheekbones, and broody teenagers. It focused on the lives of two half-brothers connected by a nefarious, comically villainous father, Dan, and the lengths he would go to ruin their lives. There was other stuff, too, but Dan’s meddling in Lucas’ and Nathan’s lives ran those early seasons.

In a plot that would make any telenovela blanch with worry over believability, writers have Dan’s replacement heart get eaten by a golden retriever. Yup. You read that correctly. Dan, resident bad guy and whipping boy, was up for a heart transplant, but never received his replacement heart because some hospital official dropped it and it was carried off by a dog.

Although the show traded in camp and melodrama, this might have been the height of its absurdity. However nonsensical the antics against Dan became, this was what the show will probably be most remembered for (in certain circles, anyway.) And to its credit, the show didn’t lose steam or momentum, and viewers just took this in stride. Not only did this heart-scene not detract from its place in television infamy, it added to it.