Classic TV series Cliches (1 Viewer)

[Walter C]

In the older cartoons (especially Hanna Barbera), males being the subject of physical comedy, but not females. For example, you would never see a boulder fall on Wilma Flintstone.

The only exceptions are Popeye and the current FOX cartoons.

 

[Jon_Are]

The Dick Van Dyke Show, where the writers wrote a script making fun of the boss (Alan Brady), then submitted it by accident. They spent the rest of the show trying to retrieve it.

Friends, where Chandler wrote a sexy evaluation of his secretary for fun, but it got sent on to the big boss by accident.

And has any pregnant sit-com woman ever had her delivery without first being stuck in a cab, phone booth, or elevator?

Jon

 

[Tim Tucker]

Lucy Ricardo didn't. She just had to deal with everyone panicking.

 

[Lucia Duran]

How many sitcoms have had cast members go on game shows?

Friends: Joey was on Pyramid

Boy Meets World: Corey was on Singled Out

Cheers: Clif is on Jeopardy

Mamas family: Family Feud

and I also remember a show back in the 80's where a cast member appeared on Hollywood Squares, but I cannot remember the show.

 

[Lucia Duran]

Meddling neighbors:

Alf: The Ochmoneks

Small Wonder: The Brindles

Friends: Mr. Heckles

Two and a half men: Rose

Bewitched: The Kravitzs

 

[Kevin Hewell]

Aside from Seinfeld I can't think of any other show that's done this. I'm sure The Simpsons has but they've done pretty much everything on that show.

 

[Karl Pozorski]

The travel show:

The Simpsons are going to ...(fill in the blank).

The Bradys go to Hawaii and King's Island.

After Disney bought ABC in the 90's, nearly every sitcom went to Disney World.(Family Maters, Full House, Rosanne)

 

[Yee-Ming]

One cliche in weepy Asian drama serials, which I haven't seen mentioned here and don't remember seeing myself in Hollywood productions: boy and girl fall in love, but it turns out the girl was adopted, and *horrors* is the boy's biological sister. Of course, the relationship up till discovery has been perfectly chaste (so no ick factor). On the "plus" side, girl is dying of leukemia or something similar and her newly discovered brother is able to provide a transplant to save her life.

 

[Rob P S]

The insulting mother/mother-in-law: The Jeffersons, Who's the Boss?, The Golden Girls, Everybody Loves Raymond, Roseanne, Family Matters, All in the Family (father-in-law)

The unattainable Christmas gift that suddenly appears without anybody knowing how it got there

Car driven into the house: Happy Days, Family Matters, Full House, Everybody Loves Raymond, Alice (truck)

I can give up something longer than you can give up something: All in the Family, Partridge Family, Three's Company, Alice, Mr. Belvedere

Youngest kid starts a fire that destroys all or part of the house: various 70's and 80's shows

 

[TonyD]

too much soap in the washing machine.

 

[WillG]

This thread is actually making me angry now, because now I am realizing that friggin 95% of the sitcoms out there just recycle the same ideas over and over. We need more brilliant "Arrested Development" like comedies.

 

[mattCR]

Twist on this in "Gossip Girl" where the two love characters find out they share a sybling.. they are not related, but their parents spawned a kid together.. same idea.

 

[David Deeb]

I was about to add this and call it "The Doppleganger".

Gilligan's Island alone had 3 different variations of this: a lookalike Gilligan, a lookalike Ginger & a lookalike Thurston Howell III.

All the Dopplegangers found their way to this island. And fortunately all the Dopplegangers managed to back get off the island.

 

[David Deeb]

The Parent / Child "HUG" - On cheesy sitcoms, whenever there is a falling out between father and son or mother and daughter, all is resolved in the final :90 seconds with a huge hug and grin which is freeze framed over closing credits. Growing Pains, Silver Spoons, Who's the Boss, My Two Dads, yada, yada, yada.

 

[MatthewA]

Actually it's closer to 99%. If they try to make "Arrested Development" like comedies, then they'll just turn that into a cliché. The "wacky family" was a cliché to begin with.

IMO, the problem is not so much the prevalence of clichés as how poorly executed most of them are, especially the current crop of "comedies".

 

[Jon_Are]

You can add Brady Bunch to the list; it was Peter, I believe, who had a double.

Jon

 

[MatthewA]

I have more of a problem with shows where the wife disappears when the actress gets pregnant because they don't want to add a baby. They're always having extended stays with relatives or far-off missions to exotic places.

My list:

Celebrities meeting with people who have no connection to their business and doesn't know anyone who does (almost every week on Lucille Ball's later sitcoms) and not having the private citizen (who usually imposes himself on them) arrested for stalking or harassment

Clip shows (which I hate in and of themselves) where they reminisce about memories that one would think would be too painful to talk about

The "very special episode", which should be called by its proper name: One-sided Propaganda.

Smart kids, uniformly stupid adults (especially on The Simpsons)

Father who thinks his kid is unmanly or effeminate for pursuing interest in the creative arts.

The oval shaped, gaping mouth as an expression of shock. Few actors can get away with that and most look stupid and unconvincing.

Unnatural dinner table seating arrangements due to studio audiences (particularly All in the Family, where they're always situated in a half-circle, and The Golden Girls, where all four are never at the kitchen table and Sophia is always at the island behind them if the other three are seated).

Funny dialogue in sitcoms. It became so cliché that they stopped using it.

 

[TonyD]

the celebrity appearing on a show that he has no business being on.
Bob Costas just happend to know Monk.

 

[David Deeb]

"THE BIG STORM" - one-hour family dramas of the 60s and 70s where a family member or two gets trapped outside the house during torrential rain. Will they find their way back???????? Mother usually goes to the window and looks for them a lot. The Waltons, Little House, Grizzly Adams, etc.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

A couple of general comments, now that the thread has been going for a bit:

I'd wouldn't consider shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy and Futurama to be examples of the cliches that they themselves are spoofing. A normal show falls back on cliches because the writers are geting lazy or because they just don't care about being original. These shows invoke the cliches to point out the fact that they are cliches. They aren't really what I had in mind when I started the thread.

Similarly I don't think things that have simply been common themes in all of literature (and much of human existence) really count as "TV cliches". Having a character go blind for the length of an episode and then recover his/her sight is a cliche. Mother-in-law jokes have been around as long as mothers-in-law, and for the excellent reason that there are often tensions among husbands, wives and in-laws. Same thing with hard-to-find gifts, car trouble, many workplace issues. These are all things we experience in our own lives and writers in all media and in all genres quite naturally write about them. We don't all end up trapped in collapsed buidings with our mortal enemy. (Even those of us who have a mortal enemy.

)


Now this one is self-evidently true.

Regards,

Joe