5 TV Tropes We Want More of… and 5 We Never Want to See Again

All media we consume is filled with tropes, especially television. Some tropes are written willfully, some happen as a matter of circumstance, some make us squeal with excitement, and others can completely ruin our enjoyment of a television show.

With the new season of Fall TV approaching, I’ve put together the five TV tropes I’d like to see more of this year, and the five that I never want to see again!

Tropes we want more of

1 . Free-Love Future

It’s 2016, and thankfully society is coming around to the idea that people should be allowed to love whoever they want. What better way to reinforce that idea than to incorporate it into our favorite shows? Show us a spectrum of healthy, functional relationships!

We want to see relationships between LGBT+ people, we want to see polyamorous people, we want to see couples who’ve been married for 20 years and are still crazy about each other. People love each other in an innumerable variety of ways; we should get to see more than one or two of those represented on television. Few shows have given us an OT3 to compete with Leverage‘s Eliot, Parker, and Hardison, but The 100‘s Bravenlarke has the potential to get there. 

2. Platonic Life Partners

In the same vein, not every relationship needs to be romantic, either. Give us shows where the male and female leads love and trust each other without the endgame being the two of them in bed together.

Men and women can be friends, it happens every day. So why is it so hard to find on television? It’s important to show close relationships between men and women that never lead to sex.

Person of Interest could have easily thrown Reese and Shaw together, but instead they kept the “Mayhem Twins” perfectly platonic, and that relationship was one of the strongest on the show. To borrow from the great Ron Swanson, give me all the male and female best friends you have, I know what I’m about, son. 

3. After Action Patch Up

On high stakes television, we’re used to seeing our heroes fight and attack and go to battle, but we rarely get to see them deal with what happened in such instances. As important as the conflict is, it’s also important to see how characters deal with the aftermath, both physically and emotionally. We want to see more of the aftermath.  

Show us a character struggling through PTSD. Show us characters realistically dealing with injuries and wounds. Supergirl gave us an entire episode with a de-powered Kara in Season 1, as well as several scenes with Kara and her friends recovering from the injuries one would expect on a superhero show.

We want to see characters talking about the things they’ve done and the things that have happened to them, not just the next cool fight scene. 

4. The Reluctant Hero

We’ve had our fair share of anti-heroes over the past several years. From Walter White to Clarke Griffin, TV has gained an abundance of heroes with ambiguous or even dark morals recently. As interesting as those characters are, a lighter, and somewhat more relatable option is to write the reluctant hero.

Give us the hero who doesn’t want to put on pants and go save the world, but they’re going to do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do, or their friends are in trouble again, or they just don’t have anything better to do.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones certainly doesn’t see herself as a hero, and she definitely doesn’t want anyone else to think she is one, but she just can’t stop saving people. 

5. Battle Couple

All too often we see the lone hero head off on their own to face whatever looming threat has cast its ugly shadow over the well-being of the good guys. But it’s so much more interesting and realistic to see them not have to go at it alone. We don’t mean give the hero a sidekick.

We want to see our favorite romantic couples stick together and take on whatever approaches side by side, like Person of Interest‘s Root and Shaw. We want to see pairs of best friends use how well they know each other to outsmart the enemy, as Raven and Clarke did in The 100‘s Season 3 finale.

We want to see two characters who rarely get matched up use their contrasting strengths and skills to overcome forces of evil, like Barry and Kara did in the perfect crossover episode of The Flash and Supergirl. Enough, with the lone hero schtick; show us people relying on each other in the face of unspeakable horrors, whether they win or lose.

Next Page