Several of mine have to do with the bedroom:
People wake up in the morning with their pajamas neat and the sheets neat. (My sheets are usually look like a linen cresent roll.)
If the characters are played by actors who has a nice body, in which case they’re nude- if it’s a man and woman in bed together, he has the sheet to just under his navel and she has hers to just over her nipples, but evidently people with Ed Asner and Penny Marshall bodies don’t sleep in the nude). They wake up with their hair just slightly tassled if that, and apparently never ever have morning breath. (When I wake up the last thing on earth I’d do to somebody I love is kiss them with an open mouth and until I’ve had my second cup of coffee I look like Ozzie Osbourne.)
When somebody turns off the light to go to bed, there’s enough ambient light to see every detail in the room. Related to this, a single solitary candle can give off enough light to perform surgery by.
You rarely see the same outfit twice. (Exceptions: Edith and Archie Bunker often wore the same clothes for several seasons, and Tyne Daly on Cagney & Lacey wore the same outfit several times.)
Money problems never last more than a few episodes.
Somehow working class family’s scrimp enough to pay $90,000 for a Halloween or Christmas party.
Family’s on TV actually garnish their dinner with parsley or a bed of lettuce; I’ve seen that on several shows.
All old relatives want to talk about is their sex life, and don’t you know that anytime an old person sexually harasses a younger person it’s funny.
Gay men are all suave, sophisticated, neat, muscular, and nurturing guys that you wouldn’t know were gay if it weren’t for the “you go girl” quips.
Regardless of whether the show is set in Cleveland, Pasadena, or Butte, all dumbasses have southern accents and all southerners are dumbasses who’ve never heard of computers.
All kitchens are the size of supermarkets.
Furniture is always new and perfectly matched.
No house is cluttered.
Of course The Cosby Show has to have set some kind of record. In the first place, he’s an obstetrician and she’s an attorney, yet the family’s considered middle class. In the second place, both have plenty of time to take the kids to burlesque shows or cook barbecue for B.B. King. Claire manages to mother 5 kids, bill 60 hours a week as a lawyer, and still come home to cook supper, while Cliff never gets called away from home during non-office hourse unless there’s a special guest star.
SOAP OPERAS are too easy, but something that’s always irritated me about them in addition to the “just how many people in one small town can be presumed dead for two years then come back with a different face?” and the 2-4-6-18 way the kids age, is that people constantly go to parties attended by their archenemies. If the guy who poisoned your wife and seduced your daughter and ruined your father’s business and kept you prison on a tropic island for seven years was going to be at the opening of the new art gallery or whatever, don’t you think you’d avoid it on principal?