> 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).
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).