Submitted 3 weeks ago by violet08@lemmy.today to [deleted]
That’s why It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is my favorite show. 100% idiot plots all the way down. They represent some of the worst human beings on Earth, and it’s more fun to laugh at the morons than think about how much they’re fucking up life for the rest of us…
Seinfeld is also like that. The best ones are where all their individual idiocy ends up making a spectacular fireball of stupidity.
Though I hope Earth gets a better finale.
Wouldn’t Arrested Development fit in here too?
No, they’re not just idiots, and not just “bad people” like in Seinfeld, but powerfully stupid and actively hateful. I just can’t stomach that show.
I can only watch it in small doses
The only episode I’ve seen is the crossover with Abbott Elementary
I remember the first season or two that it was out, it was too stressful for me to watch. I had just never seen any fiction until that point which had that level of consistent, nonstop manic trainwreck quality to it.
I recently watched a miniseries called A Teacher, in which a highschool teacher has an affair with her student and there are actual consequences. With all the people in the epstein files that are escaping justice, it was kind of cathartic to watch a sexual predator be punished for her actions
Oh? They made a tv show about that republican mayor already?
Does this include the plot points where there’s a misunderstanding in a relationship? Like where a girl sees her boyfriend hug another girl but doesn’t know it’s his cousin or something and instead of talking about it just ignores him and so he ignores her and it’s just dumb and entirely avoidable?
“wait! I can explain!”
No waiting or explaining ensues
The real idiots are the audience who finds that compelling instead of engaging
Ah that’s end of season 2 or beginning of season 3 of every series that has a couple in it, right?
Only if 3rd parties who witnessed the context of such misunderstanding re-enforce the stupid. Otherwise that’s just your average contrived romance drama.
They already said idiot plot
I feel like there are so many plots that stem from simple miscommunications or a lack of communication between two charatcers which would easily resolve the whole situation.
That’s gotta be its own trope
It is, they even reference it in the IT crowd.
“So I followed him to the restaurant.”
“She was his sister, wasn’t she.”
“Yeah.”
That’s similar to the one where they couple breaks up over a misunderstanding and all it takes is one of them explaining in like 10s. But instead someone storms off while the other pleas, and deep down you’re like, “That motherfucker so wanted it to end anyway.” But then we deal with post-break up scenes and you realise they’re just idiots that still haven’t even thought to clear up the misunderstanding via a single text, call, or friend like that afternoon.
I think idiot plot is supposed to be so stupid that it’s essentially not possible to happen irl
The example you outlined could happen in real life if one person completely blocks the other or something
Would be an idiot plot if everyone involved is fully able to communicate to the other parties, everyone has plenty of information, and they decide to go through with whatever stupid shit they think they need to do, that would be completely unavoidable and anyone with half a brain would understand that they don’t need to do what they think they need to do.
Like a movie where there’s a killer on the loose and nobody thinks of even trying to call the police. No “oh there’s no signal here”, just straight up nobody even tries.
The entirety of American history, or at least since Jan 6, 2021, when Trump would have been immediately arrested and tried for treason in a sane and efficient society
I earned my Reddit permaban because I said that in most countries throughout history, on the evening of a failed coup like Jan 6, the entire staff of the White House would have been dragged out onto the lawn of the White House and publicly executed.
Brazil nearly suffered the same consequence, thankfully bozonazi is jailed now. Too bad a lot of the supporters are still out and about, including his sons
So… the majority of popular sitcoms and movies.
I immediately thought of the Cohen brothers
Yeah Burn After Reading, Fargo, and the Big Lebowski were my first thoughts
They usually involve competent professionals though. I’d say some of their plots are more about idiots than they are idiot plots.
Isn’t this the plot of C-SPAN?
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve seen another TV show jump the shark so quickly. Still, it’s kinda on brand if you read the series it was based on.
I always call the trope “Steve” when I see it.
“Hey look, Steve left the door open so the dinosaurs got out.”
“Oh no, Steve forgot to zip his hazmat suit now all the apes are smart.”
“Steve took his helmet off on an alien planet because the air smelled fine.”
“Steve went on a spacewalk without a tether cable!”
“Smoking indoors near flammable chemicals again, Steve?”
“Really Steve, no condom?”
That’s the entire “It’s always sunny” plot!
it’s also known as life
What do we call it when it happens in real life? The News… Do I put the /s?
The current state of affairs in the US.
Every episode of Frasier.
It’s crazy to me how many gay and liberal folks worked on Frasier and Kelsey Grammer is a huge Trump supporter.
just like all the news coming from the US nowadays
Oh look, the USA
You shouldn’t attribute to idiocy what is committed in malice.
There is also another similar trope, defined by “Any problem important to the plot that can be solved by 5min honest conversation between participating parties”
Once you learn that term, you start noticing it everywhere in movies and shows. So many conflicts would disappear if just one character asked a simple question. 😅
This is almost every horror movie or series.
Pretty sure most of the Walking Dead cast would never have survived an initial outbreak of gingivitis, let alone zombies…
Makes me think of Gilligan’s Island. The scientist could make a radio from a coconut, but couldn’t fix a whole in the side of a boat, and no one questioned that.
Show should have been over in no more than 2 episodes.
I always wondered why they brought all those clothes on a “three hour tour.”
Honestly, I think the skipper was a proto-Epstein, and had cooked up a scheme with that Sociopathic Oligarch Thurston Howell III to kidnap the hot Ginger, and the adorable MaryAnn, to be their sex slaves on his private island.
I suppose Gilligan was destined for the bamboo cuck-chair.
See: Alien Earth.
I’m wondering about examples of this sort of movie. Are they talking about obvious ones like Dumb and Dumber, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, etc.?
Or do they mean movies that were supposed to be serious, but are accidentally bad because of bad writing?
I mean a whole lot of horror movies would end in 5-15 minutes if the victims weren’t idiots who decide to explore the obviously dangerous “thing”.
Ah, valid, Horror is my least favorite genre. Probably a lot Idiot Plots there.
Romcoms are notorious for it as so many plots come down to a refusal to stop and communicate
Good one. Yeah, there’s some misunderstanding, and she yells at him and stomps out, and he never bothers to say “I wasn’t even there, I was at work.” But then you wouldn’t have 90 minutes of hijinx as he goes on some half-baked but romantic plan to win her back, involving a hot air balloon and dynamite.
Instead of just telling her what really happened.
Life comes to mind for me. Its a set of unfortunate and stupid events made worse entirely by the fact that these highly trained scientists abord a space station are too stupid to do proper quarantine.
Prometheus comes to mind as well. Aww look at this cute alien snake thing. I’m gonna take my helmet off and pet it.
I don’t remember that movie. I first thought you meant that movie with Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence where they go to jail for Life. Hilarious movie.
I like Jake Gyllenhall, so I think I’ll watch your Life, even with your bad review.
I always go back to Prometheus when talking about the “Idiot Ball” because it’s the gold standard. You’ve got these world-class scientists sent on a trillion-dollar mission who don’t even know what they’re doing there until they wake up from cryo, and then they immediately act like children playing in a backyard.
The second the sensors say the air is “breathable,” they’re ripping their helmets off like they’ve never heard of a space-virus or a spore. It’s insane. Then you’ve got the biologist, a literal professional, seeing a hissing, alien “space-cobra” in a clear threater posture and his first instinct is to try and pet it like a stray cat.
And don’t even get me started on the guy who literally mapped the cave with high-tech drones being the one who gets hopelessly lost in it. Or the “Prometheus School of Running Away from Things” where you run in a perfectly straight line under a falling, circular ship instead of just… stepping to the left? It’s like the script needed the plot to happen so badly that it just stripped every character of their survival instincts and professional training.
Compare that to competency porn shows, like the Martian, where they FEEL like the best of the best
I used to hate Prometheus but caught a second viewing years later and came around a bit. The running only straight thing is… yeah. But I’ll defend the inclusion of stupid scientists as a key part of the story because the movie goes out of its way to show that these are people only interested in getting paid, which suggests they might not be the best scientists. Yeah, it’s a “trillion dollar mission,” but I’d assume that in the future that trillion dollars isn’t as much as it might be for us. So these are, perhaps, the cheapest scientists that Wayland can buy, the sort of guys who’d give up years of their lives and careers to fuck off on a starship based solely on the premise of “we might find the aliens that made us.”
Think Burn After Reading
Hahaha precisely the movie I’ve used to describe my feelings about the current illegal war going on right now.
Definitely the badly written movies. Where the whole plot would have changed if they just communicated.
Not a movie, but death note.
If the dude didn’t take the obvious bite every episode there’s no way of catching him.
Sons of Anarchy. There’s a season ender where some Irish bloke kidnaps a child and sails away. They had to make an entire season in Ireland because these knobheads of criminal but also mechanics can’t figure out to follow the kidnapper on water, even of they’re standing on a pier with hundreds of boats.
It makes more sense to me conceptually if I just imagine that most people in this country in the last decade had the tops of their skulls removed, had someone take a dump in there, and then seal it back up.
Seems like there are a lot of 💩🧠s floating around nowadays.
Isn’t this most horror movies? “Oh I’m going off alone”, “let’s check this really dark and creepy area”, “let’s go find the source of that errie noise!” As that all drop one by one.
Real Life.
i usually dont have much of a problem with these, but i have seen one example where the protagonist had the super power of super intelligence
In literary criticism world politics
It’s always sunny does this brilliantly.
The boy in the striped pajamas
I assume we can add “coming clean” to this?
Where a whole movies plot could be solved by the characters just listening to each other
They did read my memoirs!
The plot of Lucy could have been avoided with a set of bolt cutters
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Hitchhikers Guide? I feel like I’ve read that somewhere…?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s the one.
verdare@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
One of my favorite Hitchhiker quotes.
ulterno@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
They didn’t feel the need to make a complex language, because they were content in keeping their more complex thoughts to themselves.