History Main / Life

Not to be confused with RealLife, or LifeForce, or TheGameOfLife (John Conway's zero-player computer "game"), or the board game Life (where does this article entry go?), or the Eddie Murphy movie ''{{Film/Life}}'', or the DiscoveryChannel/BBC nature documentary miniseries ''Life'', or the {{manga}} series ''Life'', or Life cereal, or LIFE Magazine.

-->"Are you making fun of me?"
-->"It's the universe that is making fun of us all."

-->"Why would the universe make fun of us?"
-->"I don't know. Maybe it's insecure."

-->"We have to use his strength against him."
-->"What's his strength?"
-->"His weakness."
-->"His strength is his weakness?"
-->"Yeah, it's like the one-handed clap."
-->"Are you really Zen?"
-->"Zen-ish."

-->'''Tidwell''': Are you thinking about what I'm thinking about?
-->'''Crews''': [[ActionGirl Reese]] [[ShowerScene in the shower]]? No.

* BewareTheNiceOnes ("Do you know how I survived twelve years in prison?")
* BigBad- Roman.
* TheBigBoard (Charlie's conspiracy board.)

* {{Cloudcuckoolander}}: Mentioned above, but here's a classic [[LampshadedTrope lampshading]] at the wake of a murder victim.
-->'''Charlie''': I'd like to come to my own wake.
-->'''Dani''': But then you'd be dead.
-->'''Charlie''': Except for that part. Just to see who'd show up, see what they'd say. Pretty girls in black dresses...weeping quietly in small groups. Or all by themselves...
-->'''Dani''': Lemme know when you touch down.
* ConvictedByPublicOpinion and in real life as well.
* CowboyCop (Charlie again, sort of)
* CrimeTimeSoap (sure, there are cases, but there's also Charlie's and Dani's personal lives)

*** And Charlie saying something OnceAnEpisode that might be zen but turns out not to be. For instance, telling a suspect who is about to hit him that "By hitting me, you also harm yourself." The suspect asks "is that zen?" Charlie responds "No - if you do it, my partner is going to shoot you in the head."

* [[{{ptitle8px80d2wm3pd}} What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?]]: In season one there is a very dramatic sequence in which a thirty-year-old guy and a teenage girl try to play Prince of Persia to level 10.

*** And more to the point, Charlie saying something OnceAnEpisode that might be zen but turns out not to be. For instance, telling a suspect who is about to hit him that "By hitting me, you also harm yourself." The suspect asks "is that zen?" Charlie responds "No - if you do it, my partner is going to shoot you in the head."

** Charlie repeating everything that's said to him, often to Reeves' dismay.

* BuddyCopShow: subverted, Crews and Reese are definitely not close off-duty. Or on duty.
* BunnyEarsLawyer (Charlie again; he acts very weird at times, but his time in prison also made him an extremely good investigator.)

* CatchPhrase ("Is that zen?")

* ClearMyName (In a rare example, the accused has ''already'' been cleared. Legally, at least.)

* TheDanza (Charlie's ex-wife, Jennifer Conover, is played by Jennifer Siebel)

* HyperAwareness ("It's all here. Except for what's not here." "What does that mean? Does anybody know what that means?")

'''Crews:''' I need a bigger gun.

* IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming (All the Seever episodes included a number.)

* KarmaHoudini (Roman, in the episode "The Fallen Woman," [[spoiler:killed a woman, but is able to get away untouched because he's an informant for the FBI]].)

* PacManFever (See the trope entry. This part of the episode was widely mocked on gaming blogs.)

* SamusIsAGirl: [[spoiler:Ziggy Vadas]]

* TokenMinority (while Dani's father is American, her mother is Persian. Everyone else is white)

* [[TooDumbToLive Too Dumb to Run Psychology Experiments]]: The sociology professor in "Not for Nothing" replicated an experiment specifically known for encouraging abusive behavior in its participants...and then decided that random blackouts with no direct supervision were a good idea. [[AlwaysMurder You can guess what happened.]]
** This may also be a case of DidNotDoTheResearch, as modern ethical guidelines would probably rule out his experimental design in the first place.

** averted or subverted? Seever make a speech about the fact this will forcibly comes. Of course, Charlie was not listening, being in one of his ''EurekaMoment''

* WhatTheyFearEpisode: [[spoiler:Not for Nothing"]] turned out to be this.

* DynamicEntry: [[spoiler:In "One", Charie does this with ''a car''.]]
* EpiphanicPrison: The episode based on the Stanford prison experiment.

Not to be confused with RealLife, or LifeForce, or TheGameOfLife (John Conway's zero-player computer "game"), or the board game Life (where does this article entry go?), or the Eddie Murphy movie ''{{Film/Life}}'', or the DiscoveryChannel nature documentary miniseries ''Life'', or the {{manga}} series ''Life'', or Life cereal, or LIFE Magazine.

Not to be confused with RealLife, or LifeForce, or TheGameOfLife (John Conway's zero-player computer "game"), or the board game Life (where does this article entry go?), or the Eddie Murphy movie ''Life'', or the DiscoveryChannel nature documentary miniseries ''Life'', or the {{manga}} series ''Life'', or Life cereal, or LIFE Magazine.

* FakeAmerican: Charlie is played by Welsh actor Damien Lewis

----
<<|AmericanSeries|>>

* OfCorpseHesAlive: Used to trick a confession in one episode.

* ADayInTheLimelight: Bobby gets an in-universe example in "Hit Me Baby", when Dani leaves for a short-term gig with the FBI. Charlie requests him as a temporary partner until a replacement detective is found. Subverted from an audience perspective, since Bobby ends up not contributing much to the case and plays a similar role to his usual in the second half of the episode.

* ADayInTheLimelight: Bobby gets an in-universe example in "Hit Me Baby", when Dani leaves for a short-term gig with the FBI. Charlie requests him as a temporary partner for the current case. Subverted from an audience perspective, since Bobby ends up not contributing much to the case and plays a similar role to his usual in the second half of the episode.

* GenreSavvy -- In one episode, Reese is away, so Charlie solves the case with the help of his old partner. Then, after catching the killer, he's sitting on the dead guy's roof, talking with Reese on his cell, about how they still don't know why the guy was killed. When he goes quiet, Reese accurately predicts that he's having a EurekaMoment.