There’s a dedicated ATK channel on Roku and they’ve been showing some reeeeal early ones from 15+ years ago. When Kimball was still the host. Julia and Bridget are so young and reserved (and 15-20 lbs lighter).
They seemed positively giddy with relief in the episodes right after Kimball left. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think I heard he was kind of a jerk to work with.
Yeah, my impression from watching the show forever is that he got more jerky as time went on. Julia and Bridget positively blossomed after he left. They even tuned up their hairstyles and makeup. Someone else who really seemed to relax post-Kimball was Brian (one of my favorites). He’s the bald guy with the small beard-- he goes on the road and brings back recipes from far-flung diners, etc. He always seemed intimidated by Kimball and was very stiff around him. Brian is actually quite funny and adorable. (IMHO.)
Oddly (and this proves that I need to Get a Life, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon), an assistant on one of the very early ATKs looked familiar, but she wasn’t a regular on the later episodes just prior to Kimball’s departure. Turns out she’s now one of the cooks on his new show, Milk Street. A blast from the past, as it were.
I enjoyed the banter between Chris and the ATK on-screen people. I saw them as his peers. But the banter he attempts with his much younger Milk Street crew falls very flat.
Years of chronic alcoholism and self despair can be beaten permanently without any ill health effects in hours once a protagonist is given a meaningful task.
That reminds me of another one, has it already been mentioned? A psychological problem can be cured by finding the “cause”. Anxious? It’s because Mom yelled at you too much and made you nervous, but now that you know, you stop being anxious!
Similar with addiction. You drink because Dad didn’t show his love, but now that you’ve learned he always loved you, the drinking stops.
Fortunately I don’t think it’s nearly as common as it used to be.
Receive bad news. Punch a mirror.
Broken mirror reveals a hint for an upcoming plot point, reflected in a shard, or a map or other document hidden between the glass and backing
“You can’t! You’ll kill her!/Millions will die/You’ll wipe out the whole galaxy and everyone in it!”
Doctor Who is bad about this one. Like, buddy, this isn’t your first time dealing with daleks. Do you think they didn’t consider the possibility that if they blow up the planet, they’ll destroy it and millions will die? I rather think that might just be the point.
Also, “Oh, you didn’t have to kill her! She was [some normal human thing like ‘a mother’ or ‘just an intern’]” when the bad guy, well into their killing spree, gets one of the named characters. As though all the other people they’ve already killed were no big deal, but they must be really wicked to have killed THIS one.
Another one that always bugs me is when two people are talking and they decide to go somewhere, like to visit someone who might have some information on a crime. Then, mid-conversation, they cut to them pulling up at the person’s house, getting out of the car, and continuing the conversation. Like, did they sit in silence the whole drive there? What?
And the biggest one that really is a dealbreaker for me rather than just something I notice and roll my eyes about, is when a man and a woman who are work partners or friends, but have shown no romantic interest in each other, suddenly confess their love for each other and get together simply because that’s just what has to happen when one character is a man and the other is a woman. Ugh. Just let people be friends.
The bad guy is holding the good guy at gunpoint, probably with murderous intent (or at least with intent that has better-than-even odds of turning murderous.
Good guy says, “You don’t have to do this.”
Yeah, that one is too common.
There are movies that have parodied this; 1967’s The President’s Analyst comes to mind. In that one a conversation, clearly with no gaps in it, happens in five or six settings–the two characters are simply in these different places without any explanation, and the dialogue never ceases.
I think that device has been used elsewhere, too, though at the moment I can’t recall where.
Mel Brooks parodied that pretty well in “High Anxiety.”
If there’s a scene in a parking garage, and you hear the squealing of tires, someone is about to be run over and killed. And the driver always gets away.
Speaking of squealing tires, a whole thread could be dedicated to bad sound cliches, like squealing tires on a dirt road, or the metal-on-metal “shiiiing” sound when somebody pulls a sword out of a leather scabbard. Or the Wilhelm Scream.
What about mistaking a gunshot for a “car backfiring”? Do cars still backfire? I don’t think I’ve heard a car backfire in my adult life.
My lawn tractor engine backfires pretty often, and it’s pretty loud for a two-banger, so I’d tend to say yes, a car backfiring could be mistaken for gunshots. Especially if you weren’t familiar with what gunshots sound like.
I’m not quibbling over whether a gunshot could be mistaken for a car backfiring. (Actually, I think a backfiring noise is much louder than a gunshot, but whatever.)
My point is that modern cars don’t backfire. At least not so often that the random person hearing a gunshot will be familiar enough with cars backfiring to say, “Oh, I thought it was a car backfiring.”
Yeah, I think it’s true that modern cars seldom if ever backfire, but is the “car backfire mistaken for a gunshot” still an active cliche, or has it gone the way of the “needle scratch” sound effect? I remember seeing it in older TV shows and movies, but I can’t think of any recent examples of it.
That may be true… I only watch “older” shows… 
I had an 1960s British classic with SU carburetors in need of maintenance back in 2005 - it would backfire, the first time I ever encountered the sound. A police car was down the street and they actually did a u-turn and came back to investigate. Like me, they’d never heard a car backfire before.
The issue went away when fuel injection become more common. Maybe earlier, as carburetors got better in the 1980s.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Plenty of people under a certain age would never have heard a car backfire.