One of my biggest pet peeves with a lot of tv shows is how cliche they can be sometimes and I feel like almost every show has certain tropes that they stick by through their whole run.

 

Im currently watching a few shows with one of them being Bones, and the sheer in-your-face ness of Booth & Brennans “will they or won’t they” is getting absurd. Perhaps partly this comes from the fact I know roughly what happens next as I’ve watched it in passing on tv before but it’s still crazy. I’m midway through season 5 and it’s been a solid 3-4 seasons of a romantic relationship very slowly growing that’s just so obviously going to happen. It’s probably the most commonly used trope out there, with a major example being Rachel & Ross on Friends which lasted the entirety of its 10 year run.

 

Another cliche I’ve found is how “genius” characters in crime or medial shows get to walk all over side & background characters for no reason that would ever pass in real life (see: House MD, Sherlock). In horror and action shows there’s always a deus ex machina where another good guy shows up out of absolutely nowhere JUST in the nick of time to save a major characters life (see: basically any episode of The Walking Dead).

 

There’s plenty of others out there but I thought it might be fun for us to talk about cliches in television, the good and the bad (as I do love all the shows I’ve mentioned!).

This is a YouTube channel I've discovered recently related to this, and it's hilarious, it's a bit more aimed towards films but a lot of it can apply to TV too.

 

I particularly love the one about Fantasy Characters, he really does get it down to a tee how stereotyped fantasy tropes are :lol:

*Two people fighting against each other for someone of the opposite gender

*The plot where the friend of a character gets lots of attention and that character becomes jealous in an angry way.

 

There's a few more that I forgot about but those are the ones that come to mind. I think

Im currently watching a few shows with one of them being Bones, and the sheer in-your-face ness of Booth & Brennans “will they or won’t they” is getting absurd. Perhaps partly this comes from the fact I know roughly what happens next as I’ve watched it in passing on tv before but it’s still crazy. I’m midway through season 5 and it’s been a solid 3-4 seasons of a romantic relationship very slowly growing that’s just so obviously going to happen. It’s probably the most commonly used trope out there, with a major example being Rachel & Ross on Friends which lasted the entirety of its 10 year run.

 

I'll raise you the anime variation, where two characters clearly like each other but never do anything to advance a relationship (even when they're left alone together, spend time together) until they confess their feelings in the last episode and the show ends. To the point where shows that actually show an active relationship, any active relationship, go straight into high estimations for me.

 

Unearned, savant-like genius is pretty poorly portrayed by TV, yes. Can't be super intelligent in TV land if you're not also obnoxious and devoid of social skills.