I’m feeling a little out of sorts today, which means it’s time for another dancing monkey post. This time courtesy of deepfishy (aka JJ Irwin) over on LJ: This may veer too close to writing, but: tropes you’re drawn to in tv shows or films. (For instance, for myself I get a lot of joy out of variations on and subversions of the Defective or Exotic Detective – Life, Psych, Nero Wolfe, The Dresden Files, Foyle’s War…)

Originally I thought I was going to have trouble answering this – my inclination towards SF aside, there doesn’t always seem to be a lot of continuity to the types of shows I find myself watching. Naturally I went to TV Tropes and plugged in a few of my favourite shows to check this and quickly discovered it wasn’t the case. As such: I’m probably overly-drawn to the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, but primarily in TV shows that stack their decks pretty heavily with examples of that type (Boston Legal, Scrubs, NCIS, Firefly). I can also be lured by specific examples of Crazy Awesome, and general eccentricity among the cast.

But, overall, I think that’s all a little misleading. I’m hard on TV, as a general rule. I demand a lot from it and I’m a cranky, unpleasant viewer. And hitting those tropes alone isn’t enough to drive me to watch a show – Six Feet Under is, by all accounts, a show full of quirk and eccentricity, but I’ve never really gotten a grip on it. CSI apparently has its share of crime-fighting bunny ears lawyer types in the same vein as NCIS, but again I’ve never managed to wrap my head around it.

A list of things that will sell me on a TV show regarldess of genre and trope:

  • Fast-paced, well-written dialogue: this is still one of the biggest selling points for the Gilmore Girls, and the thing that eventually lured me to Buffy after years of mocking it.
  • A consistent and engaging supporting cast, preferably built slowly and carefully (or a very strong ensemble cast, in the case of shows like How I Met Your Mother):I’ve never really jibbed with the reset-button approach to television and having the same extras/minor characters floating around gives a sense of narrative continuity.
  • Fringe-dwellers, punks, goths, geeks & weirdos: basically, if you find a social group/sub-culture that doesn’t usually get positive airplay, then give it to them, I may well be yours for life (this is, incidentally, the reason I still watch NCIS despite the horrible, horrible subtext of the show)
  • Do Future Imperfect SF: Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, even Dark Angel
  • Do something narratively/culturaly interesting: I dig How I Met Your Mother because of the non-linear structure; similarly, I dig Boston Legal because it has a kind of subversion of traditional masculinity going on in what’s traditionally been a hyper-masculine profession.
PeterMBall

PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.
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