Cliche Storm / Live-Action TV

• Every single Mexican and Brazilian soap opera (and most Korean ones that is over 40 episodes long) is this in spades. You always have the poor girl, who gets beloved with the rich guy, who also falls in love but has a scheduled marriage with another woman (which usually is only interested in his money only), the Corrupt Corporate Executive who is the good guy's rival and wants to get his fortune (and sometimes teams up with the evil woman to do so) and so on and so on.
• The A-Team is an example of an effectively fun Cliché Storm. You know the show's basic formula after an episode or two, but the characters, explosions, and A-Team Firing make the plots entertaining.
• The Charmed episode "Chick Flick" parodies all the typical slasher movie cliches when a demon releases psycho killers from horror movies and sends them after the sisters. Since their powers don't work on the killers, the sisters have to follow the typical cliches. And there's a nice little shout out to Psycho.
  Piper: "I'm being stalked by psycho killers and I hide in the shower?"
• Of the three installments in the Chouseishin Series, Genseishin Justiriser is the one that sticks closest to the standard Sentai formula (e.g. teenagers being chosen to stop an Evil Overlord who was sealed in the past). It's still an enjoyable watch for having excellently shot fights (as is a given with anything produced by Toho), a cast that's decently characterized and for basically being "Power Rangers vs Godzilla kaiju."
• Cruel Summer zig-zags this trope. It has the usual cliches of Girl Posse, Alpha Bitch, Lovable Alpha Bitch, jock characters bullying other kids, bullying in the hallways, and The '90s stereotypes, but on the other hand, it goes far darker than many high-school series are prepared to go as part of its This Is Reality theme, and has researched into what life was really like in the 1990s in order to provide authenticity.
• Emily in Paris: The series has been criticized by reviewers (especially the French) for being this, and not in a good way. Basically, they feel it's portraying every French stereotype including the French Jerk stereotype, and pretty negatively too.
• Gilmore Girls has an episode in which Rory is moving into her college dorm and another student has lost a bet against his girlfriend and must only speak in cliches. Naturally, a cliché storm follows.

• In How I Met Your Mother episode 3x04 "Little Boys" Robin breaks up with a kid. She realises that he has never been dumped before and she takes advantage of it by using "every cliché in the book":
  Robin: We need to talk. I just think, um, we both could use some space right now. It's not you. It's me. Look, I know this hurts, but you deserve someone better. I'm just really trying to focus on my career right now. You know? I just hope we can still be friends.
• Alton Brown's commentary in Iron Chef America has been this from the start. The Chairman's conversations with the challenger have turned into this.
• La CQ plays more like a stereotypical US high school series, only set in Mexico and with (juvenile) comedy cliches thrown into the mix, while the characters are unrelatable due to being high-school stereotypes.
• Legend of the Seeker is a fantasy cliche hurricane. However, many of its fans cite this as why they love the show so much.
• In the season 3 finale of Leverage, the team writes a speech for a politician that is intentionally made up of nothing but political speech clichés. The public eats it up. Granted, it was a small country with a one-party democracy, so the public wasn't yet disillusioned with political cliches, and the team took advantage.
• Col. Blake of M*A*S*H attempted to give a Rousing Speech in "Crisis" but ended up giving the speech version of this trope. Lampshaded by Trapper:
  Trapper: Welcome to the Henry Blake Cliche Festival.
• The Musketeers was praised by Barry Shitpeas in Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe for being this:
  Barry: Wot I like was, because it had all the things you expect, like a bit where someone hides from a husband, and a bit where a young bloke earns the respect of a slightly older bloke, and a bit where someone's framed for murder because someone's picked up a knife and put a fingerprint on it, and a bit where one of the main characters is going to die, and you're like "oh my god, one of the main characters is going to die!", but then the person who was going to kill them gets shot, and it pulls focus and it's someone surprising who saved them—because it had all of that stuff, you already know. You didn't have to waste time figuring out what it is or what you thought about it, or who these people were. You could just sort of look at it while your mind went into screensaver mode? And that proves it's good drama.
• The Mysteries of Laura is a crime show that hits all the typical crime show clichés. Laura is a divorced single mother of Bratty Half-Pint twins who are out of control and constantly getting into trouble. Her boss is her ex-husband with whom she has large amounts of UST. She's a wise-cracking, tough as nails woman with a heart of gold who does everything despite the presence of other detectives who would be expected to help out. She regularly breaks rules in the course of an investigation, up to and including doing illegal searches and breaking the chain of custody for evidence (and not collecting evidence properly) in a way that would almost certainly get the evidence thrown out of court in any other show. The show plays this completely straight.
• Perfect Disaster. A short Mockumentary-styled Documentary series that focuses on horrible natural disasters—ice storm, fire storm, but the most notable is the cliché storm. While the narrator and various experts explain the science behind the phenomenons (sometimes in cut-away scenes), each episode tells a fictional story about how the citizens and the local government of a given town/city would react to them. The set-up of these stories borrows everything from clichéd disaster movies—mediocre (but decent enough for a TV series) effects, overused character archetypes and interactions, even the camera angles can be guessed if you are savvy enough. While this may undermine the intended realism for some viewers, others enjoy it.
• Pitch (2016) zig-zags this trope. On one hand, it's a Jackie Robinson Story about a female entering a male baseball team (the show has some Artistic License – Sports anyway) and has a lot of sport cliches in, but that doesn't have to mean the show is bad because of it.
• Prison Break — Okay, maybe it's not quite a storm, but just too many of the characters are overly familiar—the ominous, shade-wearing government guys, the oblivious warden, the brutish guard captain, the aged Mafia guy with an Italian name, the sweet-yet-daring female leads...doesn't have to mean it's a bad show.
• Reboot The Guardian Code hits this hard. While the original series would often affectionately parody various cliches about video games and cartoons, this one plays it straight. The heroes are ordinary high school students who find that the video game they like playing together was really meant to Recruit Teenagers with Attitude to stop a Generic Dooms Day Villain who doesn't do anything but menacingly spout threats about his Evil Plan.
• Red Dwarf: Lampshaded in series XI when a bunch of evil simuloids use Time Travel to conquer the Earth's past, and Lister calls them horribly cliché. This continues later in the episode (paraphrased):
  Simuloid: Well, well, We Meet Again!
  Lister: Smeggin' hell, you boys really are walking cartoons, aren't you?
  Simuloid: I think we are not so different, you and I.
• Similar to Justirisers up there, Seven Star Fighting God Guyferd (which was also made by Toho) borrows a lot of Henshin Hero cliches, but marries them with a well-rounded cast and great suit designs to make for an entertaining show.
• Star Trek developed its own array of cliches which could be reliably trotted out whenever they were short an interesting script. Holodeck malfunctions, transporter malfunctions, The Main Characters Do Everything, Planet of Hats aliens, attack scenes where the camera is shaken around while consoles explode, and usually at least one character who is trying to sort out their relationship with humanity.
  • Of note is the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Our Man Bashir", which is mostly an Affectionate Parody of early James Bond movies, which manages both a holodeck malfunction and a transporter malfunction, which can only be sorted out by main character Julian Bashir remaining within the holodeck to save the rest of the crew!
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "This Side of Paradise" includes a brief all-cliche speech from Kirk:
    Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • The characters would occasionally indulge in volleys of cliches. O'Neill in particular had a tendency to refer to the Goa'uld as having "very clichéd" behavior, and the last scene in the series is of the characters reciting various proverbs and cliches.
    "The probe indicates a sustainable atmosphere. Temperature 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Barometric pressure is normal."
    "No obvious signs of civilization."
    "P4X-884 looks like an untouched paradise, sir."
    "Appearances may be deceiving."
    "One man's ceiling is another man's floor."
    "A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell."
    "Never run with... scissors?"
  • In the very last episode of Stargate SG-1, at the end, the team use a large amount of cliches to describe what they've learned from their experiences. "Beggars can't be choosers. Better late than never. Look before you leap." "The best things in life are free."
    Vala: Let me guess, beauty is only skin deep?
    Daniel: Silence is golden.
    Cam: Jack of all trades, master of none.
    Sam: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
  • Then Vala says "Life is too short", a statement repeated throughout the episode (and Daniel and Vala's time-erased relationship) but supposedly forgotten when the Reset Button was hit. Suggesting, interestingly, that somehow Vala remembers what happened.
• The Supernatural episode "Monster Movie". Every classic horror movie cliche you can think of—because the bad guy, a shapeshifter, is deliberately invoking them. The entire episode is an Affectionate Parody of the old Universal monster movies, right down to the way it's shot.
• T.J. Hooker is very guilty of being this for cop shows. Every storyline, you've seen before. All of the character types and stereotypes are here. The villains tend to have no characterization, largely being inhumane monsters. The show is such a Cliché Storm, that you might think you're watching a parody of cop shows rather than the real deal.
• On The West Wing, when Bartlet debated his Strawman Political opponent Robert Ritchie, we hear a snippet of one of Ritchie's responses that goes like this:
  ...and the partisan bickering. Now, I want people to work together in this great country. And that's what I did in Florida, I brought people together, and that's what I'll do as your president: end the logjam, end the gridlock, and bring Republicans together with Democrats, 'cause Americans are tired of partisan politics. (Applause)
• The X-Files: "The Post-Modern Prometheus" is one giant, spiral-sliced, and deliciously smoked ham.

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