The original post: /r/television by /u/captainsherry on 2024-06-30 05:57:37.
It annoys the heck out of me. One Tv program comes up with a different way of approaching a story - and then everyone else jumps on the trend, fearing to be left behind if they don’t include it, and not stopping to wonder whether it is something the audience will enjoy or not.
First annoying TV trend: they don’t tell a story from ‘beginning-to-end’ as it happened, but constantly jump backwards into the past (and sometimes forwards into the future) before returning to the present. I find this confusing and unnecessary, to boot. I know TV shows often get cancelled these days if they don’t grab the audience’s attention from the first episode. So they show some very dramatic scene at the beginning (like a violent death), then the words I have grown to dread appear on the screen - “three months (or seven days or whatever) ago/before…” Then the audience is stuck trying to tell the difference between the past, the present and the future. One show I watched accomplished a somewhat coherent presentation by shading the different time periods in dark to light tones and changing the appearance of the characters. But most shows just expect the viewer to switch their brain back and forth between the timelines. Whatever happened to just telling the damn story as it unfolds?
Annoying trend number two: Flashing crucial phone texts or written/typed messages on the screen, mostly in tiny lettering, giving the audience only a very quick glimpse and expecting them to catch what was written. Often the character reading the message doesn’t refer to what was written and the audience is left to wonder why the character’s eyes suddenly bulge with surprise. We are not Superman and we don’t have super-vision. Please project the text onto the screen at a size we can decipher - and leave it there long enough to read. Or just have the character read it out to themselves or another person.
Annoying trend number three: this has been around for quite a while (even Jessica Fletcher was doing it, and many crime shows always use this trend) but they still keep using it. At the very beginning of the show, the audience is shown a preview of what is to come. Crime shows often give away most of the secret of the crime and even the perpetrator’s details in this preview. I could understand if this is some teaser or ad well before the show comes on. But this is just before the show starts and the audience has settled in to watch. Why do we need to see what is going to happen when we already intend to watch the show? This is so annoying I now just speed up the preview part. It’s such a waste of time to sit through what is going to happen in the immediately following scenes. It’s like reading the end of a murder mystery before you start the book.
Do you agree with me about any of these annoying trends (or am I just an annoying old fart myself)? Do you have any of your own gripes about TV trends? I wish the producers would do a survey of their audience to see if anyone actually likes these trends and not just mindlessly copy other shows that are using them. Whatever happened to good old story-telling? Have the stories become so thin and unoriginal that we need gimmicks to flesh them out?