If your social media feeds are anything like mine, then whether you’re scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, X, or TikTok, you’re invariably alerted to the many new whisky releases that come out each month. Either a brand’s official channel will announce a new product, or someone you’re connected to will like or comment on that post, and it then turns up in your feed. It’s a convenient, albeit distracting way to stay on top of the endless new whisky releases and expressions that keep appearing. But as you see some of the more intriguing, obscure, and fancy releases arriving on the market – particularly as they hit you in rapid-fire succession – you can’t help but feel that some whisky brands are jumping the shark.
Jumping the shark? It’s an idiom that has its roots back in the 1970’s American television sitcom, Happy Days, although the saying itself was coined a few years later after the show had finished its run. Facing falling ratings, the producers of the show came up with increasingly far-fetched ideas to try and attract/maintain viewers – culminating in an episode where the show’s writers concocted a thin storyline that saw The Fonz jump over a shark whilst waterskiing. It was the television equivalent of clickbait and a weak grab for attention. In modern parlance, one official definition puts it this way: “The idiom ‘jumping the shark’ or ‘to jump the shark’ is a term that is used to argue that a creative work or entity has reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with, or an extreme exaggeration of, its original purpose.”