Shark Bytes

Jumped the shark when Sally started to look like Conan O'Brien. GROSS!

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The shark jump was the day I turned it on to see a face I didn't recognize.
Then she proceeded to explain that her appearance was due to a infected tooth. Apparently, she took her audience for fools, for an infected tooth doesn't give you high cheekbones and a pointed nose. She should have sued her plastic surgeon , because if that's not malpractice I don't know what is.

Oh GAWD, SJR!! I could never focus on her "topics," as I was too busy freaking out on her (overly) surgically "enhanced" facial features! If I were a child and she came around a corner sporting that freakish grin of hers- Bozo the clown on crack...and meth...and PCP...(!), I would have SHRIEKED in pure horror. Ah, good times... she was so smug and self-aggrandizing, always blabbing about her husband "Carl"... wonder if HE'S still in the picture. Surely the visages on Mt. Rushmore are holding up better than Ms. Raphael's!

i love the sally show, they still show some of the old one in ITV2 in the UK, and everyday i watch it...and as for Pat Ferrari, i liked her voice and those boot camp episodes where the best and the shockingly good news one...

Whoever told Sally those red glasses were hip needed a lobotomy. She could have afforded to get new shades. (America's Best?)

Thankfully this truly ghastly harridan and her evil cronies Pat 'fearless taunter of children' Ferrari and big, bellowing 'hand in yer face' Sgt. Boy Scout have been banished from the airwaves. One more teen reduced to tears by their blatant bullying and someone may well have snapped. Pity it didn't happen live on the show. Bye bye, Grandma from hell. BTW Sally, how's the 'legal action' against that Enquirer story about you cracking up going? It's been years...

I remember a hilarious little snippit from the simpsons, the episode 'Homer Badman' which has homer accused of sexually harassing the kids' babysitter. Homer, watching TV, turnes to the SJR show. We see a distraught woman in tears as she talks to Sally. 'I don't know Homer Simpson, I've never met Homer Simpson or had any contact with him, but..' she then bursts into tears as Sally says towards the camera, 'That's okay. Your tears say more than any real evidence ever could'. Sums up the SJR show right there and then. BTW, the simpson's have veered close recently, but never jumped the shark!

The day the woman with three first names had her show cancelled was a great day for television. Sleeze and depravity were her standard topics. Lesbo-A-Go-Go? Lord, help us. Good riddance, Sally!

In 1988 I appeared on Sally's show as "an impotent married man cured by a sex surrogate." Two weeks later I was on Geraldo's show as "a male virgin over the age of 30." I was and am a single, potent homosexual. My best girl friend was working for a clinical psychologist in Chicago who was on the guest list for several talk shows. Dr. Dauw, an ex-Catholic priest, supposedly specialized in sex therapy using sexual surrogates. At any rate, he asked me to pretend to play these characters so he could publicize his clinic. As an actor I couldn't resist the challenge. Not long afterward an old friend who was a columnist at my hometown newspaper, The Omaha World Herald, called to ask me what was going on. He broke the story and a wild media frenzy ensued. Sally invited us back on the show to "discuss the issues that had been raised" and proceeded to rake us over the coals utilizing her own fake guests and a loaded audience. Fair enough, I guess. I'm not sure I can say Sally jumped the shark at this time as her broadcast spot in Chicago quickly gained marketing status from a 3 in the morning for a half hour to 3 in the afternoon for a full hour. Perhaps she personally jumped early in her career when she and a photographer dragged a dead body around and posed it in various locations for photographs. See her autobiography for details.

I used to get a laugh out of this show until sally started talking about feminist issues one show & then do a show about strippers/cheating housewives/buxom females the next show. It made a shallow program just that much worse.

Wow. And to think that up until now, I had thought my husband and I were the only ones who could not stand Sally Jessy Raphael. Well after reading these posts I certainly stand corrected. The funny thing is, I once found this show entertaining. Sure, “Sally” was always as cheap and sensationalistic as the rest of the talk show canon, but at least in the 80’s Sally was probing, insightful and charming, and she seemed to care about her guests at least as much as a sympathetic acquaintance. But then came mid-90’s Sally, hyped by a massive image makeover that forever hurt the show and initiated its demise. That trademark silver-blonde hair was dyed a menacing orange (they also feathered the hell out of it), marking an incarnation symbolized by what Howard Stern once referred to as “that Bozo the Clown red hair of hers.” If only the changes had stopped there. For some reason, the woman I had once watched with enjoyment and intrigue became snarky, cynical and, more than anything, one of the most self-righteous people I have ever seen in my life. From then on, every guest she had on was treated to a lecture about how she was such a wonderful person. How she had worked so hard to acquire so much. How she swam all the way from Puerto Rico to New York to make a new life for herself and her 58 children. How she had managed to learn tai chi and finish aviation school all while cleaning her oven at the same time. And that mindless, obnoxious audience cheered every damn time she did it, too. Ugh! She also became disgustingly egotistical -- whoever wrote that above post about how she would look at herself in the camera even while speaking to someone right beside her, you are DEAD ON. She always did that! With this new, cantankerous Sally came a change in the show’s format; before long, every episode had to do with giving lie detector tests to wandering spouses and makeovers to teenage skanks who enjoyed squeezing their husky asses into skirts and crop tops a five-year-old girl would have trouble getting into. And don’t even get me started on Sally’s “aftercare specialist” Pat Ferrari, who seemed to think she was WAAAAAY more helpful to the guests on the show than she actually was. (Did she ever truly help anyone on that show, aside from showing them the horrors of possessing a shrill, chicken hawk voice?) Suddenly the topics that had any relevance were gone -- I can only remember a handful of episodes in the late 90’s attempting any sort of social issue, and even then it was pure bandwagon-jumping. (I’ll never forget the episode where they discussed Eminem and whether he was responsible for sexism and homophobia, featuring Mr. Mathers’ real life mother and younger brother; hearing Sally quote lyrics like “I just found out my mom smokes more dope than I do” is just as funny as you think it is.) But my favourites were, of course, the out-of-control teen episodes, of which there were many. These were kids who stole or f**ked everything in sight and beat the hell out of their spineless parents -- in short, not nice customers. Yet when they came on “Sally,” I found myself strangely sympathetic. First they get ambushed by their jellyfish parental units, booed by an auditorium full of saddle-breasted welfare mothers and reformed gang members, and then they’d meet Sally, who would act all bad-ass and threaten to beat the teens up herself if they got out of line. Then they’d go off to boot camp -- what was the point of these shows? To teach parents that there are people out there you can pay to discipline your kids for you if you can’t do it yourself? I’ve had a lot of fun reading the above posts (especially the Geraldo one), and in particular I noticed the post about the time Sally wore an S.S. officer costume on an episode about prejudice against Jews. That doesn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I was always waiting for the episode where she came on stage dressed like Jesus Christ, beard and all, since that’s how highly she thought of herself. That episode never came, probably only because they cancelled her first.

My all-time favorite SJR moment was the time she did a show on crossdressers and drag queens--yes, I know, she did this at least once a week--and during the course of this particular show, one of the crossdressers bursts into the studio dressed and made-up to look exactly like Sally J.R.--hair, make-up, red eyeglasses, the works-- complete with his/her own microphone. And the best part was the crossdresser was FAR MORE ATTRACTIVE!!!

A lot of people think this show jumped when Sally started doing the boot camp episodes, and, as much as I hate to admit it, I was a total sucker for that topic. At first, it was amusing to watch these little punks get yelled at by the drill sergenats or prison guards or whoever Sally could call, and let's not forget her "After-Care Specialist", Pat Ferrari (WTF!!! THAT'S A CAR, THAT'S NOT A NAME!!!). But after a while, it started to seem less and less believable, and Pat really started to get on my nerves with that annoying, nasal, know-it-all voice of hers, and if any real drill sergeant acted like Sgt. Julu (AKA the poor man's Lou Gossett, Jr.) or said or did even HALF the things he did, he'd be court-martialed so fast it'd make his head spin. But the one episode that convinced me that this show had jumped was the one entitled "Help! My Husband's A Slob!". So, contrary to popular opinion, as overused as the boot camp scenario was, it wasn't responsible for sending this show over the shark. After seeing that particular episode, I turned off the TV and picked up a library book.

Good grief, her and those blasted red glasses. Snooze City should have been the name of her show.