After sorting through hundreds of shows from the past 18 years, 'The Ringer' presents a definitive ranking of the best episodes since the turn of the century
We’ve all seen so many of them that the tropes are tired, and the jokes have been rehashed so many times we can see them coming long before the laugh track tells us we should be reacting to them. To actually make an impression on viewers in this genre, a show...
Hughes makes use of a number of ghost story tropes in this first episode: dripping taps, a black and white photograph ripped down the middle, an old mill, and plenty of howling wind. That’s not to say that the story is as obvious as the devices used. In fact, after this first epis...
Wayward Pines is a rare example of setting out with the tropes and traps of a genre in order to dodge the pitfalls inherent in telling a type of story that can never fully distance itself from the fact that it’s pretty goofy. The problem is that while the show clearly tries to look ...
that condenses cable shows’ sins into a brisk montage of washed-out tropes. There’s the tough cop, running down rain-slicked alleyways in search of evildoers, and spouting philosophical dialogue that edges close to gibberish. (This is also the episode where the NS...
But it made its most important contributions in the field of family-sitcom tropes. Diff’rent Strokes had them all: The cute kid who steals focus from everyone else on the show (Gary Coleman’s Arnold); a case of “very special episode-ism”; rampant use of a catchphrase (“Whatchoo ...
As true-crime parodies have ably demonstrated, there are also tropes of that genre that rear their heads as reliably as the tropes of a typical police procedural. See: talking-head interviews in dimly lit kitchens, reveals that suddenly change our whole understanding of the case, and an ...