Classic Plot Devices Ruined By Modern Life
From what we understand, writing a movie or sitcom back in the day was basically a paint-by-numbers operation. You plug in some stock characters, give them a roadblock, throw in a complication or two and cash your paycheck made of cocaine. That’s a lot harder to do nowadays, and not just because cocaine has become so unfashionable. The facts of modern life have simply rendered a lot of classic plot devices obsolete.
Phones
The complexities of the telephone were all but a weekly feature in the storylines of sitcoms until about 2005. Siblings fighting over its use, members of multi-phone households listening in on each other’s conversations, the comical limitations of the corded telephone — all solved by Steve Jobs. There are entire episodes of Seinfeld that never happen if they have mobile phones.
Getting Lost
Every road trip episode or movie would inevitably find our heroes on the side of the road, arguing about directions or thumbing for a ride into town to call a mechanic. Those are both problems that are also solved by smartphone technology, with Google Maps and Uber, respectively. If a writer is really determined, they can insist their characters have no service, but they need to be truly deserted for that to be believable, so just stick to the main highway to avoid families of cannibalistic murderers.
High School Reunions
As Boomers confronted their first signs of aging, the high school reunion movie became big business in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Big Chill, Beautiful Girls, Grosse Pointe Blank, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. But when was the last time you saw one? The ability granted by social media to look up any of your old classmates at any time to find out what they’re up to kind of sucked all the drama out of the subject. What is the new Romy and Michele even going to be about? They’d be on their 40th reunion anyway. Might as well just send everyone to a Cracker Barrel.
Not Having a Backup Copy
As technology changed, every sitcom had to have an episode where a character is working on an important essay or article when they’re computer crashes before they get a chance to save or completely dies with no backup copy. Well, Big Word Processor was listening, and now they all autosave to the cloud. They had to make Colin Firth’s character in Love Actually a big Luddite weirdo who insisted on drafting his manuscript on an old typewriter to make this plot point work.
Airports
Speaking of Love Actually, a movie that begins with an out-of-place reference to September 11th, every dramatic moment that involved stopping someone at the last minute from getting on a plane after that fateful event would have resulted in getting arrested and semi-permanently grounded. That definitely includes Liam Neeson and baby Jojen Reed in a very awkward offscreen postscript. These days, if you really need to confess your feelings before your beloved’s boarding group is called, there’s a very easy way to do it: the phone.