

There are so many other conventions and crutches used to signpost to audiences a narrative development down the line. It’s been roundly parodied ever since, and appears in everything from bog-standard police procedural NCIS to the quietly excellent Psych. The Simpsons’ affection for cop dramas and their love of playing with clichés was one of the show’s subtler running gags, evidenced not only in the great exchange above between Chief Wiggum and his financial advisor, but also in the McBain ‘show-within-a-show’, particularly in the ‘Get Mendoza’ sequence wherein McBain’s partner is just ‘two days from retirement’ and planning to sail around the world in a boat aptly named the ‘Live-4-Eva’. In the business we call it ‘retirony’.”įinancial Advisor: “What if you don’t get shot?”Ĭhief Wiggum: “What a terrible thing to say. I’ll get shot three days before retirement. Hibbert explains that Homer will need to have heart surgery.Ĭhief Wiggum: “You know how it is with cops. Always annoying, this cliché is beautifully pastiched in The Simpsons episode ‘Homer’s Triple Bypass’ when Dr.
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Other favourites include ‘I was born ready’, ‘ I didn’t come here to make friends’ (popular on reality TV contests) and ‘In English, please’, the latter a particular bugbear of the online community, in which the convoluted jargonistic babble of the show’s designated nerd draws the ire of the wisecracking, no-nonsense (male) protagonist. Sitcoms have become far more self-aware in the last 10 or 15 years, but they still drop the occasional clanger like ‘note to self’ and ‘did I say that out loud?’, both of which seem to be a particular stain on American shows. We’re not so different? You’re a psychopathic mass murderer who just killed 14 people, I’m a pacifist detective who likes yoga and Bruce Springsteen records. ‘We’re not so different, you and I’ is the perennial offender, used across movies, TV dramas and everything in between, often in the most maddeningly arbitrary fashion.
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The joke is likely used most often in British and American shows, considering that the majority of the world can speak at least one other language while most Brits and Americans think that knowing the word ‘fromage’ constitutes fluent bilingualism, but whatever the series and whatever the reason, this cliché needs to get lost. Sadly, it’s been trotted out so frequently, in shows ranging from Top Gear to Gravity Falls, that it’s just starting to lose its sting.Īnother spin on the gag is to have the dialogue obscured by some intrusive noise and simply have the subtitles put humorous words in their mouths, but again, that’s not enough of an interesting spin to warrant its persistent use. How we laughed the first time we saw it used – and quite rightly, it’s a good gag. ‘Tu madre tiene una…boca…sucia…’: your mother has a dirty mouth.

A character who doesn’t speak another language particularly well stumbles and bumbles his way through some broken French or Spanish (often Spanish in American shows), thinking he’s saying one thing while the subtitles below tell a different story. It’s impossible to cover every trope ever pumped out by the studios over the years (although some have tried), but here are 10 clichés that we’ve seen time and again that might need to be sent out to pasture.Ī charming misunderstanding or use of dramatic irony are often welcome comic asides for an audience, but I’m at my limit with the use of this particular trope. Dreadful, copy-paste dialogue, tired gags and predictable characters are all wearing thin on an increasingly discerning audience. We all accept that narratives usually have to exist within a tried and tested framework, but there are certainly some hackneyed old clichés which no longer have their place on the box. Yet there are other tropes and tricks which are now beyond the point of excuse.

There are some things that just work, and there’s no getting away from it, no matter how hard you try. Whether its rehashed storylines, familiar plot developments or well-worn character dynamics, the so-called tropes of the format are practically inescapable.
