7. Will & Grace Bloated Guest Star list/Stanley Not Dead Season 6/Season 7 Final Episode
Another sitcom which gave me pause on where the Shark Jumping was; the majority of fans will say that it was when more and more guest stars started popping up to bolster ratings, whereas my own personal moment of thinking in my head Really? had to be when it was revealed that Will had been working for Karens thought-to-be-dead husband Stanley. Ill leave this one to a vote for you to decide but in any event here are the cases for both. Guest stars in a TV show can go either way depending on how they are utilised; people will tell you there are rules on how you go about using Guest Stars like for example You can never have more than 2 in one show or They cant make more than two appearances in a series, these are things I have heard from people when discussing Will and Graces Shark Jump but finding actual evidence of these rules is like trying to find loose change on the floor of the houses of parliament. I think these are just unwritten rules that people who think they know the business will use as ammo, in reality so long as the guest stars are used correctly there is no reason to complain; I certainly wasnt complaining about it when I initially watched Will & Grace, but in hindsight and looking back I can see some cracks in this argument now. Take Karens wedding for example, there were stories going on here like, for example, the wedding itself as well as Grace and her husband going through some troubles but these felt more like the gap fillers between the guest star appearances rather than the other way around. You then start to think that maybe this is why the roster was filled with these guest stars, to create a distraction from the fact that they were struggling to write for their main cast, and the more guests there are the higher the likelihood of gaps being filled. In Karens wedding alone I can count at least 3 guest stars (4 if you include Leslie Jordan reprising his role as Beverley Leslie). Also as I said before, if they are used correctly you can get away with Guest Stars; with John Cleeses character he went from being a somewhat eccentric stuffy romantic to basically an arse who couldnt give a damn about his wife to be, but not even over time it literally changed on the wedding day. This was to obviously give Karen a reason to request a divorce and show John Cleese the door but still it could have been handled better than that but clearly the writers bit off more than they could chew with all the guests. This is probably the strongest candidate for the shark jumping but I just wanted to add my two cents (because I cant spend them in the UK anyway) regarding Stanleys return from the dead; to me it was yet another wasted storyline just to get people to react. Stanley
NEVER made an appearance on screen; he was an obscene character usually used as a joke for when Karen was on set. Stanleys character didnt really create any form of last impression on the fans, his death created more sympathy for Karen than Stanley himself because we never met the guy, so why would we care about his return that much? Of course for Karens sake it was interesting, but it lacked the impact of a visible character returning from the grave, plus Alec Baldwin was the guest on this episode so yet again another guest star curse.