1. The Monkees (1966-1968)
Thanks to the popularity of the phrase/website "jump the shark," TV fans everywhere are familiar with the idea of formerly good shows starting to suck. But even lousy shows frequently retain the substantial audience they've already built. What's rarer are shows that start out on top, looking like perennial ratings winners, then suddenly drop in viewership and prestige, washing out completely in five years or less. As The Monkees' popularity skyrocketed following its debut in the fall of '66, the hordes of wannabe rock stars who'd descended onto Sunset Strip publicly derided the four actor/musicians in NBC's prefab pop group, even though a lot of those haters hadn't been too proud to audition. The Monkees themselves were stung by their peers' rejection and mockery, and started wrangling for more creative control, with the blessing of pot-smoking producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. For the second season, The Monkees was trippier and less frolicsome, and the band's core audience of pre-teens fled, not to be replaced by the generational tastemakers The Monkees sought. Swinging in '66, The Monkees was grounded in '68.
2. Miami Vice (1984-1989)
Few shows have captured the cultural zeitgeist quite like Miami Vice did in 1984. Embracing the flash and artifice of MTV and glorifying Reagan-era greed while superficially critiquing it, Miami Vice made rock stars out of actors Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, who responded by pursuing undistinguished music careers. Soon, the show's fashionable trendiness became its undoing, and by the end of its run, Johnson's T-shirt-and-Armani-jacket ensemble was well on the way to becoming pop-culture shorthand for laughable mid-'80s excess.
3. Batman (1966-1968)
Debuting as a midseason replacement in January 1966, the campy TV adaptation of DC Comics' Batman was a roaring success in its first half-season, aided by the radical decision to air two episodes a week, with Thursday's installment completing Wednesday's story. For the '65-66 season, the Wednesday and Thursday episodes both cracked TV's Top 10. But when Batman came back for a full season in the fall of '66, the viewing public had gotten bored with the show's formulaic gimmicks, and the ratings sank like fossilized guano. Batman was reduced to one episode a week for the '67-68 season, and bolstered with the arrival of Yvonne Craig as Batgirl, but like Batman himself, the changes didn't fly. The hottest show on television in the spring of 1966 was off the air two years later. (Are you paying attention, creators of Heroes?)
4. Texaco Star Theater (1948-1953); The Buick-Berle Show (1953-1955)
For its first year on the air, Milton Berle's variety show was so popular that nearly 80 percent of the sets in use on Tuesday nights were tuned to NBC. But there weren't that many sets back then. (Less than a million when the show debuted in 1948, and roughly two million by the end of '49.) As television infiltrated middle-American homes in the early '50s, Berle's often-abrasive Catskills humor declined in popularity. It didn't help that Berle relied increasingly on guest hosts, then abruptly changed the show's format to incorporate a mini-sitcom every week. In 1951, riding high, NBC signed Berle to a 30-year contract, guaranteeing a $200,000 yearly salary. In 1955, even though the renamed The Buick-Berle Show was still in the Top 20, Berle and his bruised ego slunk away from weekly broadcasting, and he earned his paycheck instead by putting on occasional shows and specials for NBC, right up to the '80s.
5. Moonlighting (1985-1989)
Some cult shows should stay cult shows, as Moonlighting fans realized when their favorite quirky little detective series—starring Bruce Willis, Cybill Shepherd, and a thick streak of self-reference—became a left-field TV blockbuster in its second season. Problems proliferated almost immediately, as Willis and Shepherd grew exhausted from the demanding schedule of a dialogue-heavy show, and used their sudden popularity to make demands that slowed production down even further. Moonlighting became notorious for its unscheduled reruns, and even made fun of the behind-the-scenes problems during the show. The show's audience started to get fully fed up after Willis and Shepherd's characters slept together at the end of the third season. Partly because of Shepherd's real-life pregnancy and Willis' working on Die Hard, the two actors were separated for much of the fourth season, with increasingly preposterous reasons supplied for the split. Viewers bailed, and Moonlighting was cancelled at the end of its abbreviated fifth season, ending with an episode in which the sets were dismantled and Shepherd and Willis received a lecture on professionalism from an ABC executive.
6. The Arsenio Hall Show (1989-1994)
Although the ratings never quite matched the media hype, Arsenio Hall's syndicated late-night talk show was a definite cultural force at the dawn of the '90s, spawning SNL parodies, incendiary Entertainment Weekly covers, and hand-wringing op-eds about the show providing a forum for political candidates and controversial rappers to reach young people. But PR success isn't always real success, and when the media turned its attention to the Letterman/Leno late-night wars in the fall of '93, the loss of heat around The Arsenio Hall Show proved fatal. By spring of '94, it was put on permanent hiatus.
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