Cheese

I've seen a lot of cheesy TV shows. How cheesy was Happy Days?  When a season was almost finished and the writers' already shallow well of ideas was running dry, they'd have the characters do musical numbers!

One cliche on TV shows is The Forgotten Breakup.  In dramatic terms, it's convenient for an episode to end with a breakup between two people, such as a boyfriend and girlfriend.  But the show's structure may require the two of them to stay together, and reconciliation is harder to do.  So they may just wait a couple of episodes, then show them back together with no explanation!  In other words, they just forget about the breakup and expect the audience to forget it too. (I've seen this happens even on shows as good as Upstairs, Downstairs and The Sopranos.)

Another cliche is to accompany a change in a character with a change in his appearance. (That makes it easier for the less attentive viewers to notice it.) There was this British show Tenko, about Englishwomen in a Japanese prison camp in World War II.  There was this older woman who was stiff-necked at first, but then became more sympathetic.  At the time of this change, she also started wearing a cone-shaped Chinese hat!

Such a change in appearance can also underline a change in how we're supposed to see the character.  In the first scene of Pretty Woman, we see Julia Roberts working the street in a miniskirt, thigh boots... and a blond wig.  In a later scene, when we learn that this hooker is a nice girl underneath, the wig comes off and we see her real brown hair.  Yeah, I know that Pretty Woman is a movie, but it's filled with TV cliches. (It was directed by Garry Marshall, who also created Happy Days...)

I could go on and on about TV cliches, of course.  There's the episode where one of the lead characters considers leaving town, but ends up staying. There's the one where a character makes a bad business deal, but before the show starts--we only see the consequences of it. (That cliche also turned up in a movie:  Spike Lee's The Mo' Better Blues.) There's the one where several characters are stuck in a malfunctioning elevator or locked in a bank vault...