Speaking of tropes, It's probably because I'm old and jaded but I find it gets harder and harder to enjoy many movies and TV shows because having watched so many I see the tropes.
I think the most obvious pattern in many modern TV shows/movies is the musical interlude. You insert some famous pop song as 3 minutes of filler and try to transfer the affection for the song to the show.
A recent example is in The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes. When they happen though I just tune out as my brain screams "you're being manipulated". They're filler. They're like "design by committee" or "marketing checklist".
Related is the downbeat 3 minute musical interlude montage. Something disappointing to the character happens and then there's a downbeat montage of them brooding etc. IIRC Angel had 1 or 2 per episode but they're all over in modern shows.
I see two ways to get out of this. One is to learn to think of those things and doing them well, even though they're not original, as part of the form. Like meter and rhyming might be part of a poem's form; it's about how you do them, not that you do them, since they're always there.
The other is to consciously decide to ratchet down your consumption of this type of entertainment and put more effort into finding things that are more "for you" -- they don't rely on the tropes you're used to. Look for foreign content, other types / genres of shows, and reduce your consumption so by the time you've watched as much as you used to in a year, several years have passed and the style has morphed a bit.
Sure but Umbrella Academy was a genuinely well produced show aside from the dramatic filler. There's very little to watch if we seek a level of intellectual honesty that is so rarely met by creatives let alone Hollywood.
Really?! I thought it was cliché after cliché after cliché.
I was definitely entertained, but intellectually? No way. The time travel bits make no sense whatsoever if you think about them for more than a few seconds.
It’s definitely a show where a super heavy dose of belief suspension is needed, and I would be ok with that if the clichés weren’t sooo pervasive.
Perhaps you can recommend some movies and shows then? I'd really appreciate it. Aside from Ex Machina and a few choice others like Moon and Black Mirror, I really haven't found any recent intellectual films or shows.
Doing a thing because that's how it's always been done sounds like stagnation to me. The purpose of meter is to make it flow well when you say it out loud. And rhyming, idk, it has a pleasant quality to it too. But if you don't care for these things, then don't force yourself into it.
Consider cooking. Certainly cooking has a lot of "tropes". And that's because they are tried and true methods of making it taste well. In addition I think you will all recognize the "Appetizer, Main, Dessert". Is that a method of "manipulating you" into enjoying your food? Yes it is! And that's why we love it.
Ok, but isn't that..... what a show is? They are actors. Acting out scenes. It is all fake. The reason to watch it is to suspend disbelief, immerse yourself in pretending that it's real, imagine you are the one going through the actions and emotions of the characters. But yeah it gets harder the more you watch and know what to expect.
When is music in shows or movies manipulation, and what counts as genuine use? If one of the characters plays an instrument in the show?
I'd say music is always manipulation as it's always triggering emotions in some way. Unless it's some genre or band you absolutely hate. But even then it's triggering emotions, just probably not the intended ones. :-)
When your parent put sugar in a cake, they you to enjoy the cake for you own enjoyment. They will dose the cake, and make you experience the cake in this context.
Kinder wants you to enjoy it so you buy it again. The goal is not the enjoyment but the reaction after it. Dosing the sugar, the other ingredient, the context you will consume it and the so on are going to be completely different.
When you hear "Ride of the Valkyries" being played in apocalypse now, you don't hear the voice of the director suggesting "now you should feel this particular way, because I said so". You just enjoy the craft.
Some movies and series now, it feels like the way they put music, cuts, etc. are just cheap plots designed by engineers to get something out of you.
You can't feel the desire of creating and sharing something, rather you are given a product designed to specs.
> When you hear "Ride of the Valkyries" being played in apocalypse now, you don't hear the voice of the director suggesting "now you should feel this particular way, because I said so". You just enjoy the craft.
This is a great counter-argument to your theory, since that song (like all choices in that movie) was explicitly chosen to manipulate — to make you feel specific ways about the U.S. military and the Vietnamese villagers, to induce tension, etc.
The intent hasn't changed, you have. You'll discover this when re-experiencing old favorites and discovering that they've lost the magic because you've developed the tools to see behind the curtain.
Exactly, saying intent is what makes the difference is all nice in theory. But faced with reviewing and watching actual shows/movies, true intent is never uncovered (unless the director admits to it). You can get cases where a person enjoys a film and another dislikes how they were 'manipulated'.
Take a example of a clueless director putting rise of the valkeryies on a chopper scene in his movie without knowing about the scene in 'apocalyse now'. He knows the song as certain qualities to it and his intent is to bring these emotions across. Yet, is the watcher being manipulated despite this genuine intent?
What's more useful than making a useless distinction between what's genuinely fake and what's manipulative is looking at execution. Is the director being clumsily formulaic (common with many netflix shows now) or does it fit coherently as a work.
So the AV Club did a thing where they retroactively watched + reviewed all the Futurama episodes, and I think about their review of, you know, that one, Jurassic Bark, an awful lot. Not just because that episode is so emotionally devastating or because the review does justice to that and is emotionally devastating too, but because of this bit:
> I said “Jurassic Park” is manipulative, and I stand by that; the way the episode exploits its flashback structure to build to the most devastating possible conclusion is about as subtle as that Sarah McLachlan SPCA ad. Acknowledging this isn’t the same as criticizing it, though. Manipulation fails when it becomes noticeable, and when the audience resents the efforts made to drive them towards certain feelings. [...] Clumsy manipulation reveals a certain unearned arrogance, even contempt; look how easy it was for me to trick you, how vulnerable you are to control. This episode is more about empathy, and that ending — that uncompromising, agonizing ending — has no contempt in it. Just the knowledge that these things happen, and that we have to live with them.
The difference is when the music doesn't actually enhance the emotional tone of a scene, but instead covers up the lack of impact there may be. Music is much easier to have a feeling over than story, and often they'll play a good song or some emotional music after something happens in a show and I'll think to myself "Would I really feel this way if I hit the mute button?"; the answer is usually no. Just my experience.
Conversely, I had a really interesting experience when taking my young cousin to go see a movie (I think it was GI Joe). I remember leaving the theatre thinking it was terrible, predictable, and full of every overused trope.
He absolutely loved it.
And I realized...he loved it exactly because of those tropes. For him, they were entirely new devices. There is a reason that certain story devices become tropes: they work and work well. And for someone who had not encountered them before it made for a fun/exciting/satisfying story.
Everything in a movie is a lie. All of it. The sound the music the writing. It is all a lie. Someone made it up and a group of people made it 'real'. But it is not real. The one thing that really nailed that home to me was the movie cobra. In the middle of a big fight he stops and drinks a coors beer. They had to stage it, film it, edit and foley it. There is a fractionally small amount of things we see on TV or movies that is real. Even what we watch on the news is an edited show done for effect. Once you know how the sausage is made the 'magic' is gone.
My biggest gripe with many movies is pacing. It is hard to get just right. You either move to fast and everything is a blur, or too slow and it is 'boring'. That is just me though. I enjoyed GI Joe but it is not something I am going to go back and re-watch anytime soon. Something like John Wick I have watched it a few times since it came out. It is full to the brim with tropes. But they are done very well.
I remember seeing Dumb and Dumber in a theater when it came out, and laughing until my gut hurt. While doing this, part of my mind was saying the slapstick was so obvious, overdone and predictable, why am I laughing at it?
Perhaps it's like watching a Laurel and Hardy movie. Fans know that if there's a puddle in the street, Ollie will step into it and will sink in up to his neck. I know it's coming, everyone knows its coming, and it still makes me laugh. Maybe it's so funny because Hardy will look directly at the camera with a long-suffering "look what they made me do again" expression.
>The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes
The Umbrella Academy Tiffany scene was clever, because the characters although physically grown up are known as the Umbrella Academy children, they are in their childhood rooms and dancing alone, but together. So some character development involved in sort of underlining their estrangement from each other but given it is a love song also their love for each other. I could go on as there were several other clever touches in the scene.
The one I remember from Love Actually is the Pointer Sisters Jump, for my Love, which was not clever and sucked.
For what it's worth I dislike both of these songs quite a bit.
This happened to me after awhile, so I literally shifted to watching movies from a different culture. It’s all the same tropes, but delivered differently from a different cultural lens.
Ip-Man 4 is just a hilarious version of Chinese exceptionalism (as opposed to American exceptionalism ((hilarious as in woah this how ridiculous our version of exceptionalism must look like to everyone else))), if you’re looking for an English movie to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
90s Bollywood is great if you want to see how equally ridiculous Indian version of romance/marriage is idealized (as opposed how Americans idealize/romanticize their conception of guy-gets-girl).
The things they do really well are often pretty unique if you’re not familiar with their tropes. It’s very snobby and meta, but I can’t watch American movies anymore without getting bored.
If you want Chinese exceptionalism, watch Wolf Warrior 2. I watched it in a theatre in London full of Chinese people, and it was a surreal experience, because to me it felt like watching a Chinese version of Hot Shots or similar crazy parody, but nobody in the cinema were laughing.
I really enjoyed the movie, but it also shows Chinese filmmaking reaching the level of over the top patriotism you saw in 1980's US war movies.
American studios eventually turned to mocking that, as in the aforementioned Hot Shots movies and others. I wonder when we get to see the same mocking of Ip-Man and Wolf Warrior by Chinese movies.
Another good choice in similar vein is the Soviet MosFilm classics, essentially many of the same themes and tropes but seen through an entirely opposite cultural lens.
I just watched 'Assa' couple of months ago, it is almost like a soviet version of 'Blood Simple', sort, and every minute of it was engaging.
That’s true of all culture. To a great extent the suspension of disbelief requires your effort, not theirs. It can be hard for analytical people to fully engage with something as flimsy as fiction: the more sophisticated you get in your reasoning and perception, the harder it can be to really go with the flow, especially in media that is squarely aimed at teenagers. Ultimately though, no cultural artefact–fiction or non-fiction–can hold against criticism; there’s no cultural edifice that can be built without tool marks. But I still believe that you can enjoy a magic trick and know how it was done.
I’m not one to engage in Internet diagnosis, but Anhedonia is also a symptom of various illnesses including major depressive disorder. I’m not saying that’s you, but it’s all too easy to attribute things to the passage of time when there’s something else going on. Of course, you may just be bored of television – a not unreasonable stance!
Edited to add: would something like Jaws or The Third Man have the same emotional resonance without their iconic scores? Perhaps not, but the addition of music remains an emotional hack all the same.
And then you see the train scene in Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker which is essentially the same, but so well placed and carried out that it stays with you for life.
When I applied for film school, two different film schools had a no music rule for the application process. This rule was in hindsight mainly meant to weed out very bad applications who would try to drown out other issues with music, but it was also a rule meant to be broken.
I feel very much the same as you do about the musical interlude: it mostly gives me nothing and throws me out, despite (or because?) me being a musical person who likes music.
I find the same with age. I've seen every plot, every type of character.
I have a friend who was working with movie scripts, and he described it like a factory. Generally every movie is a 5 act play, you get an intro to some typical character then something happens to them that's either funny or serious depending on genre, then there's a solution, etc.
But perhaps the thing to do is not to expect surprise in the general construction, but excellence in the execution. That's why I can still watch stuff that's highly rated eg Breaking Bad. Shakespeare is another one of those where you can how it's made, but it's made well.
Food is the same. It's gonna be a mixture of fat and sugar, with some water and flavourings. But some things are better done than others.
> There are only two plots: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl?
I suppose the meets-loses-regains sequence can be considered a journey if you squint at it enough, but that doesn't feel quite right.
> Although if you really think about it, there's only one plot, because a man who goes on a journey is a stranger who comes to town in another town.
Ooh, that's an interesting observation, the difference between the two is in swapping the foreground and background.
In fact, hmm, now that I think of it, quite a lot of episodic drama deliberately uses that same swap or superposition to occasionally change things up for an episode. And a few are always about the same stranger on a journey coming to an endless series of towns (The Incredible Hulk, The Pretender, even The Littlest Hobo).
I'll take a shot at it. There are lots of strangers who have come to Los Angeles: Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, Butch and Fabienne, Brett and Flock-of-Seagulls, the Gimp, etc. Marsellus is no stranger to Los Angeles, but he is a bit out of his element at the pawnshop. Vincent has returned home after a journey abroad, as has Captain Koons. Jules is at the beginning of a journey and will soon leave Los Angeles...
Of course there are "townies" like Marvin, Lance and Jody, the Wolf and Raquel, Kathy Griffin, Maynard and Zed, Esmarelda, etc. who mostly serve as foils to those on journeys, but that's perfectly normal. Mia was once a stranger in town, but she liked it enough to stay.
I did sort of like Game of Thrones. Yes, at some point not-formulaic became it's own sort of formula but I did enjoy the series.
Actually, there was that one section where it seemed like the budget for special effects got a boost and from that point onward they displaced a lot of plot.
I'm not sure what your experience with the books are but, as someone who's read a _ton_ on fantasy novels GoT is pretty boring and mundane. I can see where people do get excited about it but I can find a good 10 or 20 high fantasy novels that do everything that GoT does.
GRRM has style, and seems super original if you haven't read a ton of the genre.
I have a hard finding new fantasy books these days, because the synopsis are so boring. It usually goes "Yada yada presentation but bigger picture (usually about how the fate of the world is at stake and only the hero can save it)".
It's fine, that's what I expect from a fantasy book, but what's missing is what's your USP, why should I read your book instead of the countless others. Why did you write the damn book? It's a pretty big ordeal, so surely the author it could bring something different. They just seem to fail at expressing what.
I'm curious to hear your list. I've read a lot of fantasy and IMO the vast majority of it is poorly written schlock. GRRM stands out to me because he can actually write fairly well (though the quality has slipped a bit in the last couple books).
What I recall liking that I read recently was anything by brent weeks (though lightbringer book 5 was a little long), and the chalion series by lois mcmaster bujold.
> But perhaps the thing to do is not to expect surprise in the general construction, but excellence in the execution.
I'm not a huge fan of mysteries, but I do find this to be the main criteria by which I judge them. Dorothy Sayer's "Lord Peter Wimsey" stories, for example, are simply a ton of fun to reread even after I know the solution to the puzzle. Everything else is so well done that the story can still stand on its own.
It's quite interesting when you come across a mainstream film which doesn't follow the standard structure and Tropes.
I remember watching 'About Time' in the cinema - a Richard Curtis concoction and thinking 'This did not follow the structure I thought it would follow at all'. Refreshing.
Tropes don't bother me, as long as they are skillfully executed, or subverted in some way, etc.
For example what you describe about use of music reminds me of "500 days of Summer" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1022603) where I the "musical segment" is used to great effect.
Same here. When watching the Elton John movie, I could see all the artificial image enhancements made to the picture to make it look better, but burning the sincerity out of it in the process. Same for sound, which made characters mouth completely out of sync with the music (the first scene, the voices are singing intensely, but you can see the faces not breaking a sweat, uncanny valley ensued).
This week, I started (and gave up) to watch "the witches", which has clearly been designed by committee. All the ingredients are nice, but there is this feeling that they are put in there because people though they should be, not because they felt it should. It was not story telling, it was product manufacturing. We were being sold concepts: this is a lovable character, here is a tragedy to bound, here is the bad guy, she is scary, oh, look at the grandma you wish you had, and so on.
The problem is, they do that because it works. Star wars remakes made banks. Disney live actions as well.
If I discuss this with my friends, they don't seem to mind, they enjoy it.
Now I ate at Mc Donalds for year, enjoying it, so I get that you can very well enjoy scientifically crafted quick and satisfying experiences.
But at least for movies, it's becoming hard for me. Maybe I have rose glasses about movies in the past, but I watched Groundhog Day last week, and it felt nothing like this. Pure creative and fun experience.
I guess it' a blessing: it will save me time and money.
On the other hand, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Don't know why I'm bitter about this, cause it's not like it's an important thing, but I react strongly to it.
Team America is great because it's still relevant to this day, (and probably for much longer) and it effectively deconstructs and makes fun of the most relevant tropes in contemporary cinema.
I dont think this is only because you have seen a lot of movies already. There appears to be a whole movement of youtubers doing movie critics who pretty much agree that modern productions have very bad story telling. Some of these are indeed a bit older, and that might be a reason why "we" agree.
But when I add my personal experience to the analysis, I can only say that I basically stopped watching TV a few years ago because I couldn't stand it anymore. Action filled stuff is so needlessly loud and over the top, and the story telling indeed feels very shallow to me. In a sense, I miss the times when technology wasn't so advanced and movie makers actually had to make up for that by a good story and nice pacing.
I think Interstellar was the last movie I enjoyed watching. The industry basically lost me as a consumer.
Taking musical training as an adult ruined pop music for me as well. Whether we've become educated or merely adopted a critical framework is a bit grey, but I would say I can still appreciate some modern music through the lens of competence. Although most of it is cloying and pandering.
Yes, it's likely that the best stuff survived, but three chords and an ABABBA song structure is not the same thing as a cantata or a fugue. Classical music is the expression of a different set of technical skills and art where most current pop music is basically a kind of folk porn. Some of it is fun sometimes, but they aren't the same.
It also depends on the style of classical music. The romantic period was an answer to the common man's complaint that Baroque style contrapuntal music was too intellectually demanding. Le sigh...
I know they're annoying, but sometimes, a fun thing to do with these tropes is to enjoy them for how campy and trashy they are, along the lines of B-movies and the perennial Adult Swim sketch which satirizes these tropes, Too Many Cooks [1].
One could probably say the same of most modern music (of any genre, pretty much). 90%+ of art isn't very good; especially when it's deliberately trying to optimize for maximum reach and appeal. It's just a matter of hunting for the stuff that's truly non-generic, creative, and artistic.
Music is still impenetrable to me because each song induces its own emotional landscape that is distinct from every other song, even in the case of over-produced tracks.
Of course, the emotional landscape is often "what is this garbage, turn it off"...
That's interesting, because it really feels like the exact opposite for me and it actually somehow hasn't even occurred to me before that others feel differently. I listen to a ton of music, and after years of hearing a large and broad selection of things, I feel like almost any and every song sounds basically the same as almost any and every other.
The few times I hear something that I consider genuinely novel and creative, I get very excited. I still listen to dozens of new albums per month, every month, just to chase that dragon of finding something actually original like that.
I don't really have an emotional response to music, generally, or even perceive what I'd think of as an emotional landscape, so that might explain the difference here. I just really enjoy music, and enjoy trying to make it, too.
To me it feels like it's just something that can be intrinsically pleasurable. Like Jackson Pollock - I feel zero emotion from any of his work, but it's extremely intrinsically enjoyable and my favorite visual art that I've seen. My favorite music is exactly like that (and often even shares some structural similarities to Pollock's work and techniques). When I look at a Pollock painting or listen to one of my favorite songs, it just feels like wireheading; it feels kind of like a lot of dopamine activity somewhere in my brain, basically. An appreciation of the pure aesthetics and "good"ness, with zero emotional sentiment or perception about it.
Out of curiosity, how many previously-unheard albums do you generally listen to every year?
>To me it feels like it's just something that can be intrinsically pleasurable. Like Jackson Pollock - I feel zero emotion from any of his work, but it's extremely intrinsically enjoyable and my favorite visual art that I've seen. My favorite music is exactly like that (and often even shares some structural similarities to Pollock's work and techniques). When I look at a Pollock painting or listen to one of my favorite songs, it just feels like wireheading; it feels kind of like a lot of dopamine activity somewhere in my brain, basically. An appreciation of the pure aesthetics and "good"ness, with zero emotional sentiment or perception about it.
I've never heard this put in words but that's broadly how I feel about a range of stimuli that is not limited to art or music. I haven't been able to find a clear rule as to what triggers this response.
>Out of curiosity, how many previously-unheard albums do you generally listen to every year?
I couldn't give you a precise measure but definitely in the 200+ range (although this doesn't imply a thorough listen in 90% of cases). Maybe fewer than 1 in 20 songs give me an immediate compelling landscape where I want to listen to it on repeat, but when they do I instantly recognize it. These songs can be unpredictably varied, from classical to obscure autotuned rap and everything in between. The landscape can be typically unrelated to the meaning or theme of the song, and is far more closely linked to the actual melody or instrumentation. For songs that induce a low level of interest, the landscape is very thin and not enjoyable. Sometimes it is even mentally painful to listen to songs I dislike. When I am tired or stressed, most songs can get irritating to listen to and I get close to the impression that all music is the same.
Additionally, it's possible for a landscape to change the more I listen to a specific song or genre. There are some genres like metal that I used to never listen to, but my relationship with most genres has changed quite a bit over the years. I generally classify songs as sunny or dark, sunny being the wireheading type and dark being the intense landscaping (the name comes from the fact that positive songs tend to be the former and more pensive songs tend to be the latter)
I've almost stopped being able to enjoy shonen anime because of this - the exact same tropes just get rehashed in series after series, with every huge success introducing a new one that will invariably get inherited by 90% of new ones in the years after.
Then again, shows like One Punch Man work because you know all of those tropes, and doesn't seem to work nearly half as well if you don't know what they're referring to.
(I've tried showing it to someone with rather little prior exposition to traditional shonen and the person found it rather boring. A sample size of one, I know that says almost nothing)
If you haven't watched it yet, give Hunter x Hunter a try - sure you'll see lots of re-occurring tropes, but it's a bit of a breath of fresh air, promised.
Maybe I'm a bit more old and grumpy than you - for me OPM was great for most of the first season, but quickly deteriorated into spending half the time (exaggerated) ooh-ing and aaw-ing over "the S rank heroes power" and all that. Loved Mob Psycho 100 from the same creator, though.
I did try Hunter x Hunter last year - I gave up precisely because I felt like I've seen everything 100 times already.
I guess I should just take the uncle commentor's advice and stop trying to watch this class of shows if they aren't rewarding.
OTOH I really did enjoy Yakusoku no Neverland and Decadance in the past year, so I guess there's always something.
Seconded that Mob Psycho 100 is an improvement over One Punch Man when it comes to subversiveness, character development, and general storytelling. Extremely relevant to this thread in that it shows how the skillful subversion of tropes can keep the interest of someone who's otherwise numb to those tropes.
I had another theory, budgets for streaming shows are falling. Adding a song as filler is probably one of the cheapest ways to add 3-4 mins to your 60 min contractually obligated episode length? Or maybe not. I have no idea if it's cheaper.
The Queen's Gambit had one in the 2nd to the last episode. It was clearly filler and has been called out by many critics. I still loved the series over all but after few moments of that filler I skipped forward to the end of the song.
I have frequent musical interludes in my own life, so I don't really see this as a problem. Music is important to a lot of people, particularly at difficult times in their lives, so I often find I can empathise with these moments.
I watched Birds of Prey a few days after seeing the finale opera house scene at the end of Season 1 of Umbrella, and I'm a big fan or Heart but both used Barracuda and I'm sure I came across it somewhere else recently as well. Oh well, great song.
I'm sorry but I'm not going to be able to let you say something negative about Love Actually and get away with it... yeah there are cheesy musical interludes, but that's the charm of it - the whole film is designed to be like a box of christmas chocolates.
ps: for Umbrella Academy, keep in mind that it was written by a literal rockstar - explains the heavy focus on music
I watched it recently because it was some podcasters favorite movie. I like good romcoms but sadly I personally found Love Actually to be horrible and was surprised by the high ratings. There is no "love" in "Love Actually" there is only lust except maybe the old rock star. Every pictured relationship is extremely superficial. I'm also surprised the sexual harassment issues in two of the stories are not called out more. Then again, 400k people rated it 7.6 which is high so clearly they all see something I don't. There are plenty of romcoms I like though. ... though if you go read the user reviews on IMDB, after the first page or so they get pretty negative, so I'm not alone in not getting it.
Just a wee laddie. Though I didn't watch hardly any TV until I was in my 30s, because my parents thought TV was bad for kids, and later because my life was full.
Similar to this is the trope of having a short musical suffix to every scene. Music fades up or intensifies during the height of the emotion in a scene and then the show cuts to a new scene.
I first noticed it in Suits and Billions but it's used in loads of shows. It gets pretty annoying once you are aware of it.
In a novel I read years ago one of the characters hates the idea of movies being considered serious art and says something to the effect of, "How can you take a medium seriously that plays music throughout to tell the audience how to feel in any given scene".
That part always stuck with me and made me really notice how overt many movies and tv shows are about the music they use.
I feel similar. There seems to be so little effort spent on the scripts of most shows these days, resulting in tiring copy-pasta plot element etc.
Most recently I tried to watch Cursed. From the very first episode me and my gf predicted every plot beat. I tried to force myself to watch the rest of the show, just to see if it improved, but it was the same lame stuff throughout.
Another big pain point for me it's drama for the sake of drama. I almost categorically avoid 20-episodes-per-season shows because they almost always contains tons of filler drama that does nothing to advance the show or characters.
In sum it really narrows down what I deem watchable. Instead I find myself watching a lot of YouTube videos, with informative or creative content.
At least I avoid yet another rehash of a tired trope which was included solely for the rest of the plot to happen.
Watching shows can be enjoyable but when you observe someone else watching a show, you suddenly realize how contrived and zombie-like the experience is and how grating the tropes and sound choices are.
A friend introduced me to an experiment[0] to reevaluate my relationship with television and I've been spooked enough to not watch a show since
It's the same for me. I think the magic stops working once you see the mechanics. And if you consume enough instances of some medium, you can't help picking up on them.
I've noticed a trend in the final episodes of some shows being cancelled where the primary actors will suddenly start wearing outfits that are much more form fitting (flattering) than their clothing from prior episodes. Not sure if it is driven by a desire to line up future work for themselves or if it is an effort by the director to increase ratings...
It has helped me to adopt the attitude that what matters is the skillful execution of tropes, and whether the artist can make me feel something. Because everything is tropes. Even Charlie Kaufman and Fitzgerald use tropes.
I once spent days reading tv tropes as a kid. I couldn't recognize a single trope until today because of it.
The only thing that causes me to see tropes is to just watch a lot of movies and notice the patterns myself.
I think the most obvious pattern in many modern TV shows/movies is the musical interlude. You insert some famous pop song as 3 minutes of filler and try to transfer the affection for the song to the show.
A recent example is in The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes. When they happen though I just tune out as my brain screams "you're being manipulated". They're filler. They're like "design by committee" or "marketing checklist".
Related is the downbeat 3 minute musical interlude montage. Something disappointing to the character happens and then there's a downbeat montage of them brooding etc. IIRC Angel had 1 or 2 per episode but they're all over in modern shows.