4 Clichés That TV Shows Mocked, Only to Run With Years Later

4 Scrubs

In the second episode of Scrubs, our narrator J.D. is still trying to get to know all these new characters, and he makes some assumptions about Dr. Cox. Someone so rough must act that way because he’s lonely, he supposes. Figuring the guy has no one in his life, J.D. comes to visit him at his home, offering to talk. 

In the middle of the conversation, there’s a knock at the door. It’s three of Cox’s friends, there to eat chips, drink beer and watch the game. It’s clear that this is a regular thing for him — he has a perfectly healthy social life. 

A little later into the show, we get an episode where Cox throws a watch party, which sounds a lot like that thing we saw J.D. unknowingly interrupt. J.D. shows up at his door but doesn’t come in this time, and Cox brushes him off, bragging about all the guests inside. Then we follow him inside, to a room filled with chips and beer but no people. He turns the TV off because no one showed up. The poor man has no friends, and this episode treats this very seriously. 

Now, we’re not here to call this a plot hole. They even throw in a little scene elsewhere where Cox reveals the guys he hangs out with aren’t real friends, which explains why they don’t show up here. But you see how they started out by subverting the curmudgeon being quietly lonely, but then they ended up doing that exact thing?

Of course, it was mandatory that they strip him of friends, because in a sitcom, no character is allowed any connections outside the core cast. 

3 Game of Thrones

Tyrion had a wife before the events of Game of Thrones. He tells the story of how he and his brother Jaime met her as she was fleeing a pair of rapists. Their intervention saved her, and Tyrion then took her to an inn, where the grateful woman slept with him. They eloped not long after that. 

But it turned out that this was all an elaborate charade, orchestrated by Jaime. Jaime hired her, setting up this whole tableau so Tyrion would find himself with a woman and lose his virginity. In the present, Tyrion is telling all this to his current love interest, who says the truth of that situation should have been obvious. “A girl who is almost raped,” she says, “doesn’t invite a man into her bed two hours later.” 

Fast-forward four seasons. Bumbling sidekick Sam stumbles on a pair of men about to have their way with the woman he’s been protecting, Gilly. He fights them, they knock him down and he gets up to fight them again. He now scares them off, with some help from a conveniently arriving dire wolf. 

Sam’s resting up in bed afterward, when Gilly comes by and shows her gratitude by mounting him. 

It’s the very situation that the show earlier identified as a fantasy that exists only in fiction. It’s also quite unnecessary for the characters. Though we called him a bumbling sidekick just now, Sam has slain actual monsters, as he himself mentions during this scene. He has previously saved Gilly from actual monsters. This scene isn’t some turning point for him, displaying honor or bravery that he hadn’t shown before. And if the show wants these two characters to sleep together, they really don’t need an excuse at this point.

Incidentally, in the books, that whole story with Tyrion’s wife has another layer, where it turns out no one hired her after all. That was just a lie people told Tyrion to ruin his marriage. But you could call that a double twist. The show, on the other hand, declared a trope to be ridiculous and years later forgot they’d ever said that. 

2 The West Wing

Lots of stories do their own version of a guy saving his damsel from unwanted advances. The West Wing offered a cascading version of this in an early episode. Two guys accost Zoey Bartlet at a bar, and love interest Charlie steps in to tell them off. Then major character Sam steps in. Then other major character Josh steps in. Then C.J. steps in, and she’s taller than any of them. Then the Secret Service steps in, because Zoey Bartlet is the president’s daughter.

In the next scene, President Bartlet monologues about just what he worries could happen, and it’s a bit beyond a father’s usual fears. 

“The nightmare scenario, sweetheart, is you getting kidnapped,” he says. “You go out to a bar or a party in some club, and you get up to go to the restroom, somebody comes up from behind, puts their hand across your mouth, and whisks you out the back door. 

“You're so petrified, you don't even notice the bodies of two Secret Service agents lying on the ground with bullet holes in their heads. Then you're whisked away in a car. It's a big party with lots of noise, and lots of people coming and going. And it's a half hour before someone says, ‘Hey, where's Zoey?’ Another 15 minutes before the first phone call. Another hour and a half before anyone even thinks to shut down all the airports. Now we're off to the races. You're tied to a chair in a cargo shack, somewhere in the middle of Uganda. 

“And I'm told that I have 72 hours to get Israel to free 460 terrorist prisoners. So I'm on the phone pleading with Benjamin, and he's saying, ‘I'm sorry Mr. President, but Israel simply does not negotiate with terrorists, period. It's the only way we can survive.’ So now we've got a new problem, because this country no longer has a commander-in-chief, it has a father who's out of his mind because his little girl is in a shack somewhere in Uganda with a gun to her head.”

This isn’t a comedic scene. But even a few episode into the series, we’re aware that thrilling adventures with guns and airplanes aren’t the sort of scenario that happens in this show. This show is about the characters in the White House PR team and about broadly applicable debates on policy. The point of this scene is to clue us in to Bartlet’s anxieties about his conflicting roles as president and father. The point isn’t to foreshadow something that actually will happen. 

Well, around a hundred episodes later, that exact thing actually does happen. Not only does Zoey get kidnapped, but she gets kidnapped in the exact way Bartlet described. It’s a loud party, they nab her on the way to the restroom and an agent is found right after with a bullet in the head. Terrorist demands soon come from the Middle East, and Barlet finds himself useless as a commander-in-chief — a situation he resolves by having his cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment.

The show never comments that this is the crazy fear he once voiced, word-for-word. But the similarity was not lost on fans, who put together this edit of the show laying the old speech over the later events: 

There’s no way the writers forgot about that earlier speech. Instead, something else might have been going on here. 

Aaron Sorkin wrote both those episodes. He also wrote every single other episode in the first four seasons, right up until NBC forced him out, and he never wrote for the show after that. Zoey’s kidnapping spanned the very last two episodes he wrote. It’s possible he purposely wrote this melodrama he’d earlier mocked as a bit of farewell trolling, leaving the next writer to come up with a resolution.

When he wrote that earlier episode, he didn’t predict that the show would really do that plot four years later. Also, he definitely didn’t predict that “Benjamin” would still be the leader of Israel who’s called to release hundreds of prisoners 25 years later. 

1 Lost

One quiet island day on Lost, a pair of our castaways try repairing a radio, in their latest of many plans to get off the island. By the end of the episode, they succeed, and they pick up a radio station announcing songs from the 1940s. But they can’t transmit, and this signal they’ve received means nothing. “Radio waves at this frequency bounce off the ionosphere,” explains Sayid. “They can travel thousands of miles. It could be coming from anywhere.”

“Or any time,” says Hurley. Then, after an exhausted Sayid refuses to respond, Hurley adds, “Just kidding, dude.” Because, no, they’re not really teasing time travel. That would be ridiculous. 

Well, three seasons later turns out to be the time travel season. Both of these two characters travel through time. In fact, the show’s creators years later came out and said that the radio signal really was coming from the 1940s, which doesn’t exactly mesh with any of the ways the show establishes time travel as working, but the island works in mysterious ways. 

Going just by what we see onscreen, the show declared something to be ridiculous and then did that exact thing. But once again, we need to peep behind the scenes to figure out what’s really going on. 

Early in the show, the survivors encounter someone else who washed up on the island years ago. The pilot episode ends with their discovering her distress call, which has been playing continuously for 16 years. When Sayid runs into her, she says she arrived as part of a science team. She never reveals what her team were researching, but in an early version of the script, she does: They were researching “time.” 

The writers wanted some fantastical elements in the show from the very start. But the network objected to that specific line, so the writers bent to network whims, promising to keep things as grounded as possible.

Hey, maybe when a story says they’re too good for a cliché, they’re really always saying they love that cliché and wish they could get away with using it. 

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