Tropes have their place in TV, just as they do in all forms of storytelling. The underdog with little skill but a lot of heart, the soon-to-be-murdered teens splitting up to search the abandoned warehouse, the ragtag group of misfits discovering it’s not the destination but the journey that bonds them—these tropes lay a foundation of familiarity onto which (fingers crossed) more nuanced arcs can be built. Or perhaps the expectations they play upon are used to set up reversals, like the first scene of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the seemingly innocent and frightened teenage girl turns out to be a cunning predator.
Unfortunately, tropes can go the other way, too—traits and plotlines failing to rise above our lowest expectations, and instead sinking into the clichéd, unimaginative masses. The more TV you watch, the more repetition you are bound to see, but that doesn’t mean series should get away with piling onto these tropes out of laziness. Here are six things proposed in writers’ rooms that I’d like to see responded to with “…let’s not.”
1. Sad character deaths are sad
I know Game of Thrones made killing main characters the “cool” thing to do, but some series seem to think that offing their protagonist in the final minutes automatically lends an air of gravitas or bittersweetness to the show. (And of course, even GoT fell on its own sword in the end.) Last year, two more joined the ranks:
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, after an entire season of wandering plotlines and about-facing characters, tries to play like the “always one last trick up her sleeve” and literal queen of hell protagonist’s death-defying schemes have finally caught up with her, despite her being buried in a graveyard famous for resurrecting witches. This sort of rushed and overstuffed finale can never do justice to the characters we’ve grown to know and love over the years, making their death(s) feel more like a sucker punch than a gut punch.
Jane of Blindspot, a death-defying heroine in her own right, came full-circle by meeting her end on the same Times Square sidewalk where she entered the series (depending, of course, on which ending you choose to believe was the dream sequence). My problem with this ending was not in the execution, but with this longstanding idea that action heroes, having just defeated the ultimate villain or saved an entire country, must be forced into a final sacrifice instead of retiring into normalcy—as if they are nothing without their heroics, and should go out in a blaze of glory instead of being rewarded with years of peace and relaxation. (Though the best option is somewhere in the middle.)
It’s certainly a very American viewpoint to expect the good guy to triumph and survive, but there’s something especially disingenuous about a years-long TV show placing that period on a character’s story before it fades to black forever—and not because the death brings about meaningful close to the show, but because writers want to rack up quick and dirty shock value or sentimentality among viewers. Though I suppose the infamous up-in-the-air Sopranos finale is even worse?
On the flip side, 3%'s Michele met her end in the penultimate episode in a shocking, but perhaps more earned way. Though full of good intentions, Michele couldn't outlast her history of side-swapping and betrayal in this economic disparity thriller, finally becoming a martyr for La Causa while trying to thwart the brother she so wanted to save. The remaining characters didn't need this sort of "Phil Coulson motivation boost," but her death was a harsh reminder that there are no real winners in class warfare. Especially if your last name is Alvarez.
2. Water is life
On the opposing side, series also seem to think that no matter what else happens to a character, as long as they fall into water, they cannot die. A quick web search tells me a fall of 200+ feet into water is fatal for 98% of humans, and evidently the World High Diving Federation has stated that no untrained person should attempt a jump from even 66 feet. Now combine that with the fact that most TV characters are flailing, unconscious, or otherwise not entering water at the preferred position, and the survivable height shrinks considerably farther. (And that's assuming the water in question is deep enough and clear of rocks.) Good guy or bad, having been pushed or having jumped, the worst that usually happens to a character who ends up in a river is that they disappear… and even then, they almost always pop up again, drenched and ready for vengeance.
What’s more, writers seem to attribute magical healing properties to the water that should be the character’s coffin. Think of Octavia being stabbed and kicked over a cliff in The 100 or Nimue from Cursed being twice shot with arrows and slipping over the edge of a waterfall (we’ll never see a season 2, but I guarantee she would’ve been fine). I’m sorry, but Elizabeth in Pirates of the Caribbean, Bond in Skyfall, Aladdin in… Aladdin—they should all be dead.
The only possible exception to this trope is in the “It Isn’t the Fall that Kills You” episode of Scorpion, where our team of genius scientists decides the best way to save their leader from his fall from outer space is to trigger an underwater explosion just before his body hits the ocean, so as to displace the surface tension… or something like that. Though of course, as an IMDb-er later pointed out:
And speaking of things not interacting with water properly…
3. That Marriage You Forgot About
Of all the tropes on this list, I consider this to be the most unforgivable and least successful drama grab. I feel pretty confident saying that the lines “Will you marry me?” / “I would but… I’m already married!” didn’t elicit a gasp from audiences even the first time they were uttered. I have never seen it add anything more than a fleeting and needless obstacle to an otherwise fan-favorite romance.
Bones’ Angela may be the most egregious example here, but she has been followed up by Beckett on Castle, Happy on Scorpion, Nicole on Wynonna Earp, Amy on All Rise, and, in their own ways, Winston on New Girl and Kimmy on The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. At this point, secret marriages are just one of those things that happen 100 times more often on TV than in real life. Like tracheotomies. Or zombie apocalypses. Or five-second childbirths. How about the next time writers want to hinder a romance, they just push one of the partners off a cliff?
4. The Not-So-Quick Anecdote
I understand that flashbacks can be useful—that literally seeing characters’ past triumphs or tragedies can add to our understanding of their psyches in ways that a verbal retelling, however emotional, never could. But the mid-season, full-episode retrospectives are getting to be a problem.
If you’re going to stall the main plot (or worse, sideline the most beloved characters) for a full week’s installment, it better pay immediate dividends. Because more often than not, this step back to explain becomes a step back from narrative progression.
Stranger Things 2 is guilty of this, kind of, in having Eleven go on a blast-from-the-past, identity-seeking mission in its seventh episode. As Eleven communes with fellow experimentees we will never meet again or care about, we are completely cut off from the main narrative, where the rest of our characters were dealing with this little thing called demodogs invading Hawkins! Though not strictly a flashback, it was strictly pointless.
Ozark had its narrative-derailing flashback in its eighth episode, wherein I suppose we do learn more about the origins of the Byrdes’ marital strife and money laundering scheme, but overall left me feeling that their past dangers had nothing on their present dangers, and I’d be far more invested in continuing with the latter. Unless we are going to gain insight that will allow us to better understand a coming plot twist or lend significance to a character’s impending choice, I would like for the writers to trust that they have given us enough information, and intriguing enough characters, that we can imagine (or didn’t think to question) how characters got to be the way they are, and why the situation is as it is.
Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet has, at least once per season, delivered a flashback episode that only marginally connects with the plot and utilizes a completely different cast. (In both cases, I legitimately had to check that I was watching the right show.) The first of these detailed the history of two game designers whose inability to communicate led to the downfall of their creation, as a foil to the current pair’s troubles; the second chronicled the early employment of side character CW, which set up the subsequent present-day CW-focused episode. Mythic Quest can be rather choppy in its delivery of classic ensemble sitcom and somber character spotlight episodes, but these two episodes were especially… unique. I want to applaud the show for expanding its genre, but I’m left desiring only to send the script back to the creative department.
These series’ episodes simply did not win the tradeoff between adding to the show world’s history and moving the present-day story forward. Really, they should take a page from Jessica Jones or The Handmaid’s Tale, which feature concise flashbacks inserted into episodes when those histories are most relevant; or they could do it like Westworld, with a so-complex-yet-brilliant-you-didn’t-even-know-what-was-a-flashback-and-what-wasn’t timeline (jk, no one can do it like Westworld). Just don’t save it up and then disgorge it all at once, making us wade through our characters’ pasts and try to decipher which pieces are important and what message we’re supposed to take away. And even when the information gained is worth it, we shouldn’t be made to wish we were watching the present-day storyline instead. An episode shouldn’t be boring, but worth it. It should just be worth it.
And besides, if it was a remotely interesting backstory, there would already be a prequel series about it.
5. The All-Too-Frequented Frontier
Depleted life support. Asteroid debris collisions. Damage so critical, “we’ll have to spacewalk.” If you’ve seen one space drama bottle episode… you might not remember which show it’s from because they’re all the same.
But for this Let’s Not, outer space itself has become the trope. Space is no longer the final frontier on our TV screens; it's as traversed as the Mall of America. Unlike their fictional astronauts, TV writers don’t seem to be boldly going anywhere they haven’t gone many times before.
To be clear, I'm fine with the sci-fi series set in space, where it's a regular action, comedy, or drama series that happens to take place in the cosmos (Firefly, Killjoys, Dark Matter, The 100 (sometimes), Avenue 5, The Orville, The Expanse, Lost In Space, Star Trek, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (sometimes)), but not so much with the space dramas that are about space travel and focus primarily on the isolation and interpersonal conflict suffered by space crews... while still drawing from the tropes mentioned above for a good drama kick. The First, Another Life, and Away are the latest to attempt to adapt the silver screen’s success to the small screen, following the recent spate of movies like The Martian (no shade… but its success is to blame for what followed), Interstellar, Gravity, The Midnight Sky, Ad Astra, and now Stowaway. I mean, not even Anna Kendrick is going to lure me into another “captain balancing crew anxieties with the mission’s importance” space movie. Anna Kendrick, you guys.
Outer space may be limitless, but there’s still not enough space for all these series.
6. Overdose of Antiheroines
If a woman who strives to be equal to a man lacks ambition, why, then, are writers forcing female leads to go through same hero and antihero arcs as men? We asked for strong female characters, and they gave us superheroes. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that when we clarified we didn’t mean “strong” in only a literal sense, writers again looked to plop a female lead into a copy of whatever was trending with male-led shows: the antihero. Just like that, we went from the courageous bestower of justice to a reckless ne’er-do-well half-assing her way through life.
Strong female characters have vulnerabilities, yes, but not all the vulnerabilities. The characters I’m seeing a surplus of are defined by a bad attitude, self-destructive behaviors, and a dependence on or downright addiction to drugs and/or sex. Most often, they are once-carefree women saddled with heavy responsibilities or soured by tragedy and hardship—and now, they are unreliable in all but the direst of circumstances. These characters are also frequently stricken with House-wannabe syndrome, in which the main character is an asshole, but is great at her job and deep down has a good heart, so her flaws are more or less accepted.
These antiheroines pop up all over the law enforcement genre, from Stumptown to Hightown to Mare of Easttown. But to various extents and successes, protagonists of In the Dark, Wynonna Earp, Absentia, Fairly Legal, The Queen’s Gambit, The Flight Attendant, and even my favorite shows, Jessica Jones and Orphan Black, dip into this well. For sure, some manage to weave these malbehaviors into the protagonist’s backstory or arc at large, imbuing them with enough meaning to justify their presence; but it’s all too common for storylines to dump such “flaws” into a character’s lap just to give her a sense of danger or intrigue, or indeed, to gain an R rating.
I promise, there is a middle ground. One where a character doesn’t have superstrength, and isn’t bogged down by super-pessimism and unrelenting vices—but is still interesting. Whether trying to stay afloat in the criminal underground like in Good Girls or navigating young adulthood like in The Bold Type, interesting women are capable of forging their own paths in between all the damsel/femme fatale, Madonna/whore, mother/breadwinner dichotomies.
They can do anything, and so can TV writers. So stop with the tropes already!