The bad woman driver (often employed for comedic effect: “But honey, how did you get the car stuck in the mailbox?!”)
Woman is insanely jealous when boyfriend/husband gets a hot new secretary and feels like an idiot when he doesn’t give in to temptation.
Or, the same happens with the husband/boyfriend when the woman gets a new boss who’s a hunk.
The Phone Company is more evil than you think.
Kropotkin arranges a pickup with his trusted CEA colleague Don Masters, but Schaefer is kidnapped again, this time by TPC (The Phone Company), a far more insidious organization than the CSS, the FBR, or the KGB, which had been secretly observing him. Taken to TPC headquarters in New Jersey, he is introduced to its leader, who wants Schaefer’s help in carrying out their plan for world domination. As the TPC leader makes his presentation, a camera closeup reveals electronic cables connected to one of his feet, revealing that he is actually an animatronic robot.
I just read that synopsis, and though I remember enjoying the movie, none of that sounded familiar. Was there a bit where the members of a terrorist cell were in fact all agents trying to infiltrate the cell?
Yes, everybody in the movie were basically spies of one sort or another. Spying on each other, or themselves, or just random people. Really over the top, but I found it humorous.
It occurred to me that old sitcoms used to have a lot more stories about get-rich-quick schemes, like:
- Character buys shares in a silver mine that turns out to be worthless
- Character comes up with a great new invention that causes more trouble than it’s worth
- Character’s wife has a favorite dish to cook and character tries to make money selling it
- Character finds out he has a valuable antique (but it is either a fake or it gets destroyed)
- Character is in line to inherit money from a long-lost relative, but only if they do something drastic (like get married immediately or stay in a haunted house)
The thing is, occasionally that trope plays out in real life. The best-known example would be FDR. Another example would be Ben Hogan, who not only learned how to walk again, but returned to professional golf.
I’ve seen far too many sitcoms where apparently a character hears an expression that’s basically “If you kiss your true love you will see fireworks immediately” and they take it literally, so they kiss someone on the 4th of July, see fireworks, and assume that’s their true love. I haven’t seen that one since a 90s Family Matters episode though.
I never said that it never happens in real life, but it seldom happens in real life the way it does on TV.
On TV, the trope is, a main character has an accident that causes them to not only not be able to walk, but not move their legs at all, or feel any sensation in their legs. I’m not a doctor, but that sounds like a severe spinal injury to me. Then the character makes a miraculous full recovery through sheer determination, because they ‘wanted it enough’. Sometimes in a single episode, sometimes it takes a multi-episode arc. It just seems to me that it’s a trope that sets unrealistic expectations for people who suffer spinal cord injuries in reality.
Your examples are a bit more complicated. FDR didn’t become paralyzed from an accident, he was diagnosed with polio, though some think it may have been Guillain–Barré syndrome. He did partially regain ability to walk, but only short distances with braces, and he needed support when standing for any period of time.
Ben Hogan was severely injured in a car accident, but it doesn’t appear to have been a spinal cord injury, he had a severely fractured pelvis and a number of other problems that threatened his ability to walk again. It sounds like he did recover through sheer determination and hard work, but again, he wasn’t coming back from a spinal cord injury. Tiger Woods has a similar story- from being messed up so badly he almost lost a leg, to returning to professional golf.
How about the montage where they skip the hard parts of beating an alcohol addiction and cut to the part where they’re clean? That was much more popular in the past. The only place I’ve seen it used recently was ironically on Harley Quinn.
“I Love Lucy” did most of these (some of them more than once)
I was thinking about “The Flintstones” and the radio show “Fibber McGee and Molly” as well.
Old sitcoms seem to be more about money, period. When is the last time you can remember a sitcom character talking about money?
Heh? Money and how to get more of it more quickly is a universal, perpetual subject of much comedy and drama, as well as life itself, from the invention of money to today.
Quick answer to the specific question: on ‘Abbott Elementary’, they are perennially underfunded, so much of the plots often involve resorting to creative ‘schemes’ to either raise money on their own or procure school materials in other ways, such as donations.
Young Rock, constantly.
The new CBS sitcom How We Roll – kind of a throwback series to be sure – has been centered around the protagonist’s money concerns throughout the first few episodes.
GHOSTS has the protagonists try a variety of offbeat things to make enough money to get their little Bed-and-Breakfast up and running (which, since the plan is for it to make money, means that’s still the point whenever they engage in wacky hijinks to get a needed permit or comically struggle to un-delete the website they’ve been working on or whatever).
Are “spit takes” still a thing? They never were funny and actually quite disgusting.
They are on the internet, at least…
The Big Bang Theory did a modern take on this. In a flashback, the gang mined some Bitcoin back when it was a brand new thing and most people hadn’t heard of it. In the present day, one of them remembers that Bitcoin they mined a long time ago and realizes it’s worth a lot of money now, and they spend the rest of the episode looking for the old flash drive containing their Bitcoin wallet. IIRC they eventually find it, but discover Sheldon has encrypted it (sort of a twist on the “it gets destroyed” trope).