AV Clubers Share What TV Tropes Bother Them the Most
What TV trope aggravates you the most? · AVQ&A · The A.V. Club.
I love TV Tropes, the website, but there are certain tropes actually used in television that are getting ridiculously overused. Especially when there are websites and books denoting the most popular storylines, people stick to them because they think they’re the most popular, but once they were and now they’re just the most common. In this ever changing TV landscape, shows might do well to change up their use of certain tropes for lesser known ones. We’re all about experimenting these days.
Here are some of the gripes below.
Tasha Robinson
The oh my God, the main character is totally dead trope. Spoiler alert: Mal on Firefly is only technically dead; he’ll be back in a second. No, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not actually killing off stupid, whiny Skye. No, Sherlock didn’t kill off Sherlock Holmes—his name is the title of the show, for Pete’s sake. I’m all for TV shows with big stakes, but the threats have to be credible to be emotionally effective. It’s far more painful to see protagonists in danger of losing something they really care about, something they might plausibly lose, than seeing them just about to die
Zack Handlen
Can we get a moratorium on scenes in strip clubs? I mean, if someone wanted to do a show actually set inside a strip club, and get the perspectives of the strippers and the bartender and the waitresses and the customers, sure, I’d watch that. Could be fun. But it seems like every detective show in existence, and most of the sitcoms, has to include a scene or two each season of the main characters wandering into a dimly lit bar and trying to hold a conversation while naked women gyrate in the background. The trope turns people into screen savers.
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