Classic TV series Cliches - Page 3

Re: Classic TV series Cliches

You guys need to get out more. Couches don't "always" go up against the wall, and the arrangment shown in sitcoms is actually common. My sister has two large sectional sofas, one in the living room, one in the family room. One "leg" of the family room sofa is against the wall, the other is "in the middle of the room. In the living room, neither leg of the L is against a wall. My couch is against the wall in my current condo, but in my last place it was free-standing, one of the elements that divided the dining room from the living room in the open-plan space. Behind the sofa was a sofa table - a piece of furniture specifically designed to sit behind a free-standing couch and dress up the usually somewhat blank back of the piece. If free-standing sofas weren't common, no one would have invented the sofa table.


Have you never needed to tell someone something that you couldn't tell them on the phone from where you were (the office, someone else's house) or that was too delicate to handle by phone. ("I think we should see other people." "You cat I've been watching? Dead.") Again, I'm less inclined to gig them on stuff that isn't terribly unusual in real life.

Regards,

Joe

Re: Classic TV series Cliches

And, right on schedule, the producers of House manage to have a regular character almost die and go temporarily blind in the same episode.

Regards,

Joe

Re: Classic TV series Cliches

Antique shops? Not used since the invention of modern heat? Really they do exist. I've seen them. You might want to consider that your own personal experience does not encompass all of reality. Antique shops? I can take you to a dozen new furniture showrooms within ten miles of my house that all stock sofa tables as a matter of course.

And yes, rooms on TV (and apartments) are too large. Almost no character in the history of television could afford the apartment he or she is shown occupying, at least those living in New York or Los Angeles. I'm willing to cut the producers a little more slack on room size because the reality is you have to move bulky cameras to various positions inside all those rooms to cover all the angles. David Gerrold pointed out years ago how absurdly big the compartments and the corridors on Star Trek's Enterprise were, given the need maintain life support in all those areas. The answer was the same - they needed the room for the cameras.

(And speaking of things that are too big: can we have a 20 year moritorium on action heroes and/or lost sitcom characters crawing through air condititioning ducts that are bigger than my master bathroom? Just once I'd like to see somebody take the grate off an ac duct in the teaser, try to get into it and get jammed in at the shoulders and stay that way until the tag. )

Regards,

Joe

Re: Classic TV series Cliches

Here's two more, inspired by recent TV-viewing:

1) You could call this one "Kidnapped!" or "Lost". As in "Vanishing Act" the lead or another regular is separated from the rest of the group for most of the episode by a car/plane crash, or being kidnapped (and often left alone or with only one guard in an isolated area.) But unlike in the "Vanishing Act" cliche, where we never see the missing character until the end of the episode, in "Kidnapped/Lost" we follow two threads: The team's efforts to find the missing member, and the victim's efforts to escape or reach safety.

2) "The Haunting" or perhaps "The Trip". In this cliche the affected character is often isolated for one reason or another (which is why it is often combined with "Kidnapped/Lost", above.) He/She is sick, injured or drugged and must get help. Despite being alone, the character gets help in this endeavor from a hallucination. The imaginary character is often the ghost of a dead friend or loved one, but is sometimes a living person from the character's past who appears as he/she was last seen. (So a grade school playmate will appear as a child, an ex-girlfriend from college as a 20 year old.) In rare cases the imaginary friend will ge genuinely ficticious - a character from a favorite book or movie, or a classic "imaginary friend" from childhood. The imaginary friend not only helps the character escape from peril, it also imparts some life lesson. In the case of ghosts, the writers will usually have something happens that suggests the ghost might have been real - but without coming right out and saying so. (Exceptions: Shows that explicitly embrace the supernatural and Christmas episodes where the imaginary helper is Santa or an elf. )

There is a variant on "The Haunting" that only applies to characters who are unconcious, even comatose. They have to escape back into conciousness itself, ratherr than from physical peril, and often spend the episode in an imaginary dreamspace where they encounter both the living and the dead, and, again, learn important life lessons. They may have one dream guide or several. This is another situation which some writers like to make ambiguou, by having the character wake up clutching some small object that was received in the dream.

This week Bones combined "Kdnapped" and "The Haunting" by having agent Booth drugged and kidnapped, and then being helped out of his jam by his former sniper team scout, who died in Booth's arms decades ago. Oddly, they made it pretty clear that the ghost was real, both because he helped Booth do things that one man couldn't have done, and because he interacts briedly with Bones herself in the tag.

Regards,

Joe