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Serious Business: TV Cliche Week- “You’re always proven to be 100% right- but not this time!”

This Cliche is typically used on one hour crime shows that center around a private detective helping the police department, but it has also been used on medical dramas.

The lead character, often depicted as being eccentric, is always doubted by everyone despite always being right. In House, Gregory House was a miserable crank who took on the most complicated cases. While he is almost always right in the end, he is surrounded by colleagues and assistants who doubt him at every turn. In the end, he is always shown to be right about the patient of the week’s disease, yet the show reboots the next week, with the same doubters questioning his diagnoses until he is again proven to be correct.

Happy Days: TV Cliche Week - “The Misunderstanding”

Today’s TV cliche goes back to the very beginnings of television and was even a staple of Shakespeare’s comedies. The misunderstanding typically involves one character on the show overhearing or seeing something that they misinterpret as something else. The 1970’s sitcom Three’s Company typically used this trope just about every week.

When done masterfully, the audience may not even realize that they’re viewing a “misunderstanding” plot line. Most shows, however, use this plot device sloppily. When this happens, it often makes the characters look like idiots who had to be complete morons to be so confused.

TV Cliche Week

This week, Temporary Layoffs will highlight some of television’s worst cliches. Join us, won’t you?

TV Weekends

TV Weekends

And All The Rest: “Consumer Reports”

Love in the Afternoon: “Passions”

Twenty years ago, NBC sought to bring one of the craziest soap operas ever to television. Passions featured a real witch who created her own familiar, a doll come to life named Timmy. She would later enlist the assistance of a burly woman who did her bidding. Odd and bizarre? That was just everyday life in Harmony.

NBC had started to see a shift away from its daytime dramas. It enlisted the king of nighttime soap operas- Aaron Spelling- to produce a successful soap opera that it hoped would bring in a younger audience. When that show- Sunset Beach- failed, NBC looked for something to replace it that would attract attention. It thought it had found that in Passions, which would definitely attract attention, at least in the beginning.

The show would last eight years before getting canceled and resurrected by DirecTV in an experiment it conducted with NBC to air programs with cult followings but low ratings. Friday Night Lights would similarly move to DirecTV, but the experiment lasted just one season. Passions would be gone for good in 2008.

Toon In: “Tom & Jerry Kids”

If Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies was the height of the existing characters in their younger form genre, truly Tom & Jerry Kids was its low point. 

The idea that these two mortal enemies would, at one point, be such great friends was ridiculous enough. That this lazy cartoon was just a cheap attempt to cash in on a trend was like putting toothpaste frosting on a rancid cake.