Amazon’s The Wheel of Time tests fantasy appetites after Game of Thrones’ success as The Great season 2 proves it really is | Busselton-Dunsborough Mail

When The Fonz water-skied over a sea pen housing a shark in that infamous episode of Happy Days there was no deep analysis from my end.

All this then eight-year-old witnessed was a plausible scenario featuring a guy in a leather jacket strapped to a pair of implausibly wide planks executing an audacious act of water-sporting heroism.

The fact Henry Winkler – a short, funny man – was ever cast as the intimidating, albeit charismatic, Milwaukee thug, Arthur Fonzarelli, in the long-running American sitcom, was always odd to begin with, so why should anyone read into something as prosaic as Fonzie v Fish?

Yet, read into it, they did.

In 1985, US pop culturalist Jon Hein looked back at the 1977 episode from season five of Happy Days and coined the term “jumping the shark“; a shorthand way to describe the moment when a TV series, or any creative franchise, begins to go bad.

That term is now nestled nicely into the vernacular and can be applied to anything from politics to fashion design to urban planning, but I sometimes wonder whether its origin wasn’t a bit off the mark?

Yes, in hindsight, Fonzie on water-skis was a bit silly, but surely if there was a moment when things really started to get bonkers in Garry Marshall’s Rockwellian love letter to the Midwest of the 1950s and ’60s, it was when Mork from Ork turned up.

Anyway, no one seemed to care that much. Mork got his own spin-off show, Happy Days lasted for another six seasons and Marshall’s creative crucible produced a steady stream of Hollywood heavyweights including sister Penny, Ron Howard and Robin Williams.

Back then, we barely batted an eyelid at dumb stuff (Skippy, Don Lane) on telly. Compared with today’s snobby strata of streaming sophisticates, we were an audience of credulous simpletons; often with only two channels and an extremely high tolerance for repeats. We’d watch any old dross and be grateful for it.

Forty years later, there is so much content and so little time to absorb it, audiences can afford to be discerning, indeed they must be out of sheer mental preservation.

It’s a little sad we’ve become so flinty and I realised how much my own credulity has been straitened compared to that eight-year-old cheering on a waterborne greaser when, in adulthood, I had my own “jumping the shark” moment, or more specifically, my own “riding the dragon” moment.

It was in season eight of HBO’s Game of Thrones when Jon Snow climbed onboard a giant, be-winged, fire-breathing lizard and flew away.

That was the moment I could no longer hide from the fact Game of Thrones was a fantasy series.

Fantasy is, well, an acquired taste.

With a pop culture closet proudly free of dungeons or dragons or orcs (I prefer Orkans), it was a miracle I joined the hordes of viewers sucked in by the lavish series based on the books of George R. R. Martin and I suspect I form part of a cohort which rode the GoT train for everything but the fantasy components.

We were there for the dynastic plotting, the familial infighting, the betrayals and backstabbing. We were there for the sex and the nudity and the violence and the sets and the locations. We were there for the costumes.

For a while, viewers like us were able to turn a blind third eye whenever a fantasy element was hinted at in Game of Thrones because, for most of the series, it was done so sparingly. We could write a White Walker off as perhaps some kind of homeless man lost in the snow, or a large egg something that might produce a double-yolker rather than a mythical reptile.

As GoT wore on and the fantasy ramped up, we were the ones who could be heard sniffing “Not another bloody giant” under our breath, the same way Oxford academic Hugo Dyson apparently groaned “Not another [expletive] elf,” when subjected to the latest excruciating excerpt from colleague J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Which brings us to Amazon Prime’s new series The Wheel of Time, streaming from November 19.