ARTICLE/SITE: Building Blocks of Prime Time / tvtropes.org
From the Sept. 2010 Wired - best quote about www.tvtropes.org
The site was launched by a computer programmer, and the coder’s ethos comes through: Seeing all of TV (and film and literature and theater and manga) history written in Trope, you begin to understand how these story widgets—standard, reusable parts like phonemes or Legos or the basic codons of DNA—can be arranged and rearranged to create something unique.
Scott Brown on the Building Blocks of Prime Time
By Scott Brown August 30, 2010 | 12:00 pm | Wired September 2010
It’s fall again, which means a new season’s worth of TV programming packed with network television promises of “original” shows and “fresh” characters. But when I flip on my 152-inch, 1080p, 120-Ghz, 3-D flat-panel display (peering through my LCD stereoscopic glasses, natch), I see… more or less the same stuff I’ve been seeing since Law & Order immemorial. That’s fine by me. After all, it’s often said (with varying degrees of seriousness) that there are only 10 stories total in the whole history of smoke-blowing, from Beowulf to Baywatch. But within those basic formulas, there are tens of thousands of tropes—familiar narrative tics, stock character traits, dialog patterns, and the like. Most of these can be found on TV Tropes & Idioms (tvtropes.org), a no-frills wiki bursting with 20,000 affectionately nicknamed examples of these familiar story-line mainstays. The entries are drawn not only from television but also from film, comics, videogames, manga, and other media. A visit to TVT&I will teach you three things: (1) originality is dead, (2) no one misses it, and (3) you’ve just blown six hours.
To click through TVT&I is to see the Matrix. You’re looking at the source code of television writing itself, basically a TV genome map. Far from being a tedious cliché roster, it’s rapturously fascinating (arguably more so than many of the programs actually mentioned). Start with your favorite show, the nerdier the better. (As with any site that parses pop culture, TVT&I is a geek paradise—the Lost and Firefly entries groan with over-attention.) You’ll pull up a list of the tropes it contains, starting with the obvious (the Cowboy Cop, the Red Shirt marked for death) and progressing swiftly to the sophisticated: the Depraved Bisexual, who’ll supposedly do anything and, thus, might just do anything; the Captain Obvious, an authority figure who vocalizes stuff that doesn’t need saying; and the ever-popular Genre Blindness, where characters have clearly never seen the kind of TV show they’re in. (If they had, they wouldn’t be having sex in the woods with a killer on the loose.) TVT&I’s definitions themselves are so riddled with tropes, you’ll find yourself chain-smoking tropes one off another until you drift into a pleasant Buffy-scented state of unconsciousness.
“Horrors!” squeal the novelty-mongers. But here’s an original thought. Let’s embrace the standard semantics of tropery—let’s stop seeing a welter of clichés and instead call it what it is: a programming language. The site was launched by a computer programmer, and the coder’s ethos comes through: Seeing all of TV (and film and literature and theater and manga) history written in Trope, you begin to understand how these story widgets—standard, reusable parts like phonemes or Legos or the basic codons of DNA—can be arranged and rearranged to create something unique.
Heck, our favorite TV Homers—Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, Ryan Murphy (Glee), Dan Harmon (Community), and of course, Homer’s Homer, Matt Groening—are all highly genre-aware, increasingly interested in cherry-picking from other forms and platforms, and shamelessly transparent about exhibiting their source materials. They do so in recognition of an incontrovertible fact: We all speak Trope now. Which means the industry can more or less forget about pushing stale “freshness” and instead get down to the serious business of making better TV. As for “originality”? Frankly, It’s Been Done. (Which is, itself, a trope.) Besides, I’m pretty sure originality itself went off the air in 506 BC, after the disastrous third season of Lysistrata Hospital. I think we all remember that notorious series finale where Greek civilization turned out to have been All a Dream.
The site was launched by a computer programmer, and the coder’s ethos comes through: Seeing all of TV (and film and literature and theater and manga) history written in Trope, you begin to understand how these story widgets—standard, reusable parts like phonemes or Legos or the basic codons of DNA—can be arranged and rearranged to create something unique.
Scott Brown on the Building Blocks of Prime Time
By Scott Brown August 30, 2010 | 12:00 pm | Wired September 2010
It’s fall again, which means a new season’s worth of TV programming packed with network television promises of “original” shows and “fresh” characters. But when I flip on my 152-inch, 1080p, 120-Ghz, 3-D flat-panel display (peering through my LCD stereoscopic glasses, natch), I see… more or less the same stuff I’ve been seeing since Law & Order immemorial. That’s fine by me. After all, it’s often said (with varying degrees of seriousness) that there are only 10 stories total in the whole history of smoke-blowing, from Beowulf to Baywatch. But within those basic formulas, there are tens of thousands of tropes—familiar narrative tics, stock character traits, dialog patterns, and the like. Most of these can be found on TV Tropes & Idioms (tvtropes.org), a no-frills wiki bursting with 20,000 affectionately nicknamed examples of these familiar story-line mainstays. The entries are drawn not only from television but also from film, comics, videogames, manga, and other media. A visit to TVT&I will teach you three things: (1) originality is dead, (2) no one misses it, and (3) you’ve just blown six hours.
To click through TVT&I is to see the Matrix. You’re looking at the source code of television writing itself, basically a TV genome map. Far from being a tedious cliché roster, it’s rapturously fascinating (arguably more so than many of the programs actually mentioned). Start with your favorite show, the nerdier the better. (As with any site that parses pop culture, TVT&I is a geek paradise—the Lost and Firefly entries groan with over-attention.) You’ll pull up a list of the tropes it contains, starting with the obvious (the Cowboy Cop, the Red Shirt marked for death) and progressing swiftly to the sophisticated: the Depraved Bisexual, who’ll supposedly do anything and, thus, might just do anything; the Captain Obvious, an authority figure who vocalizes stuff that doesn’t need saying; and the ever-popular Genre Blindness, where characters have clearly never seen the kind of TV show they’re in. (If they had, they wouldn’t be having sex in the woods with a killer on the loose.) TVT&I’s definitions themselves are so riddled with tropes, you’ll find yourself chain-smoking tropes one off another until you drift into a pleasant Buffy-scented state of unconsciousness.
“Horrors!” squeal the novelty-mongers. But here’s an original thought. Let’s embrace the standard semantics of tropery—let’s stop seeing a welter of clichés and instead call it what it is: a programming language. The site was launched by a computer programmer, and the coder’s ethos comes through: Seeing all of TV (and film and literature and theater and manga) history written in Trope, you begin to understand how these story widgets—standard, reusable parts like phonemes or Legos or the basic codons of DNA—can be arranged and rearranged to create something unique.
Heck, our favorite TV Homers—Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, Ryan Murphy (Glee), Dan Harmon (Community), and of course, Homer’s Homer, Matt Groening—are all highly genre-aware, increasingly interested in cherry-picking from other forms and platforms, and shamelessly transparent about exhibiting their source materials. They do so in recognition of an incontrovertible fact: We all speak Trope now. Which means the industry can more or less forget about pushing stale “freshness” and instead get down to the serious business of making better TV. As for “originality”? Frankly, It’s Been Done. (Which is, itself, a trope.) Besides, I’m pretty sure originality itself went off the air in 506 BC, after the disastrous third season of Lysistrata Hospital. I think we all remember that notorious series finale where Greek civilization turned out to have been All a Dream.
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