Better Than It Sounds - Television Tropes & Idioms

Mole King: Why live up here on the crust when you can be with me in the soily filling of the sweet Earth pie?

Larry: Better than it sounds!

— The Tick

So you love a series. You own all the volumes, have various merchandise, can quote characters off the top of your head, and know every plot twist by heart.

However, one day someone asks the dreaded question "What's this about?" And suddenly it hits you — trying to sum it up in only a few sentences makes it sound really really ridiculous, and though the show itself may take itself entirely seriously, suddenly all the random parts, nonsensical aspects and just plain weirdness are laid bare before you.

But, really it's Better Than It Sounds once you actually see it in action.

This is the place to record those descriptions — the random, the understated, and the WTF.^* This isn't "Sum up your favorite movie in one sentence!", rather it is for the summaries that would make a person say "This would never sell!". This is not They Fight Crime, since those shows have an inherently ridiculous concept as part of the catch — these are only made ridiculous by us mentioning things out of context.

To keep it interesting, put the name of the series in spoiler tags and try keep this from becoming Complaining About Shows You Dont Like; it's actually Making Fun Of Things You Do Like. And most of all, have fun.

This Trope Contains Spoilers By Necessity. Read At Your Own Risk.

Music

Aerosmith: Five musicians from Boston. They have a Roller Coaster featuring their songs, spent the equivalent of an airplane in drugs, and their first #1 was a Disaster Movie theme song.
Apocalyptica: Finns rocking out with cellos.
The Beatles: Four musicians from Northern England. Before the split, one recorded some incomprehensible and awful albums. After the split, another one married a one-legged woman, the third produced a Monty Python film and nobody cared about the fourth (he even had drinking problems).
The Birthday Massacre: Canadian Perky Goths sing Mind Screwy songs and make disturbing videos. They also jump around a lot, and occasionally wear bunny ears.
Buckethead: Masked KFC-enthusiast who plays the guitar.
Daft Punk: Two French guys who cut bits out of good songs, add a beat, and then appear onstage to perform them standing in a pyramid made of incandescent tubes. Oh, and they pretend to be robots.
David Bowie: British man famous for unusual songs, androgyny, and appearing in movies.
Dragon Force: A Multinational Team whose songs consist entirely of fantasy cliches and guitar solos.
Dragonland: A bunch of Swedes perform songs with fantasy and classical/symphonic elements. Unlike the Multinational Team above, they are actually really good live.
Elton John: Fat, gay, nearsighted, balding piano player from England with silly clothes and Knight Fever. He writes songs about Marilyn Monroe, weird robot rock bands, The Wizard Of Oz, dance steps named after reptiles, and children's music from time to time. Loves to shop, throw tantrums, play tennis and cavort with British royalty.
Elvis Presley: A truck driver from Mississippi who knew how to sing and dance. That in his first appearance was shown only from waist up.
Foo Fighters: Four musicians, named after ufology, and led by a guy who used to be another band's drummer.
Gorillaz: A band consisting of a blue haired childish Casanova and both eyes pressed into his head, a Satanist who owns Satan's own bass (El Diablo), a 15 year old Japanese Super Soldier and a drummer who has been possessed by multiple spirits.
Guns N Roses: Before: Five, and later six, highly intoxicated musicians led by a troublemaker. Later: ~~Troublemaker~~ Prima donna singer and lots of musicians which he hires and fires at will.
Hot Hot Heat: The singer has been described as a "headlong yelper", the rest of the line-up is constantly changing, and they have lyrics about antioxidants and termites.
Iron Maiden: A lot of British musicians, led by a slightly hyperactive bassist and a hammy singer. They like to write songs based on books and movies.
Jellyfish: A drummer and a keyboard player, both childhood friends and music students from a town near San Francisco, form a melodic pop/rock band with a revolving lineup which at one time includes the keyboardist's brother on bass. They write and play a lot of music that has their own unique style, but reminiscent of music from The Sixties and The Seventies. The drummer sings lead in front of the stage while playing drums standing up. They play vintage instruments, can sing nice harmonies and are known to go overboard in the studio. They have an aquatic name and wear colorful, loud, outdated clothes, also from The Sixties and The Seventies. Once wrote a mini-Rock Opera about Super Mario Brothers for a Nintendo tribute album.
Jethro Tull A very hairy, hopping woodwind player in silly clothes forms a band with lots of lineup changes, writes rock operas about disgruntled boy poets pondering the meaning of life and the metaphysical adventures of dead train riders, names homeless people after oxygen tanks, and sings about living in a farm in Scotland. His band's music is eclectic and the lyrics very literary for rock music. He and his band, whose name is often confused with the singer's name itself, play lots of concerts, and they even unexpectedly beat the band of Californians and a Dane mentioned later for a prestigious award in The Eighties.
Led Zeppelin: Four British musicians, who wrote lots of songs based on Tolkien, lost a drummer who choked on his own vomit, and won't reform because their singer loathes their biggest hit.
Linkin Park: Six men who can't decide what genre they belong to and go from angsty rock ballads to angsty rapcore. Also, the lead singer tends to scream a lot.
- Fort Minor: The rapper heads out on his own and comes up with a very popular ringtone and a sports anthem. Surprisingly, little angst is to be found.
- Dead by Sunrise: The lead singer forms his own band that focuses on straightforward rock and whatever's been itching at him in the past few years instead of his childhood.
Madonna: A woman from Michigan who built her career in getting Moral Guardians upset.
Marvin Gaye: A guy who started out as a sideman drummer, did not write many of his own songs, feuded with his record company, and went bankrupt. Also, had really serious conflicts with his father.
Metallica: Three Californians and a Dane who got together during The Eighties, changed their musical style and haircuts (to the chagrin of the fandom) in The Nineties. Their drummer made a total ass of himself about file sharing. Fans are divided as to the exact moment when they Jumped The Shark, but even the band admits that they wish they could just pretend that their ninth album never happened.
- Megadeth: A fourth Californian, who used to play guitar for the above band, gets into a 20+ year feud with his former bandmates (but especially the Dane) after they literally put him on a bus. His fans and theirs don't really get along very well.
Michael Jackson: Former Child Star from Indiana who damn well knew how to sing and dance, with health and emotional problems that steadily pushed him into the Uncanny Valley.
Nine Inch Nails: A guy records himself playing a bunch of instruments, and then edits them together into songs, some of which he makes videos for. Oh, and they're among the most insanely disturbing videos ever. Later, he gets a Grammy for saying "fist fuck."
Oasis: Five British musicians, led by brothers who tend to copy the "Four musicians from Northern England" above and argue between themselves.
Opeth: Five Swedes decide that what death metal really needs is more Hammond Organ and jazz guitar and make many music videos that appear to be set in abandoned Victorian mansions.
The Protomen: A group of musicians from Nashville, TN. join forces to great a Dystopian Rock Opera based off of a series of NES games with vitually no storyline proceed to act out as if it was real.
Queen: A guy with an ABD in astrophysics joins forces with a flamboyantly gay singer to write mini-rock operas about riding a bicycle. Over 30 years later he gets that PhD.
Rammstein: Six Germans with a fire fetish.
Ramones: An authoritarian Republican, baseball card collector and horror movies fan, a left-wing six-feet-ten Jewish geek with OCD, a bipolar German heroin addict and their Hungarian high-school friend become models for generations to come (by making two-minute songs about sniffing glue and hitting people with bats) while not achieving commercial success until the band broke up... 20 years later.
The Residents: Four guys from Louisiana wear eyeball masks and make bizarre music.
The Rolling Stones: Four British musicians tough to kill and/or retire.
- The Who: ~~Four~~ ~~Three~~ Two British musicians. Tough to retire, but easy to kill.
They Might Be Giants: A rock band consisting entirely of nerds named either John or Daniel, except for the one guy named Marty. And there's an accordion.
Tool: A bald man from Uncanny Valley, a long-haired drug addict, a man interested in the occult, and another long-haired man who likes to play crotch-bass get together to perform songs about such topics as drug abuse, child abuse, and transcendentalism.
U2: Four musicians from Ireland that promote awareness for the Environment.
Vocaloid: They aren't even real and the most well known of them is Mary Sue.
Weezer: Four musicians, one of whom is a soccer-loving geek who took 10 years to graduate from Harvard and the other three of whom nobody knows. Originally opened for a band led by Keanu Reeves. Their music videos are mostly famous due to the celebrities in them.

Misc.

Hydrogen hydroxide a.k.a. Water: A chemical that is the largest contributor to acid rain and fatal when inhaled in large amounts. Despite this, it can be found in almost any home and certainly any chemistry lab. No organized movement to make it illegal has ever gathered enough support to be successful.
Pornography: People get naked and are filmed doing things which, sometimes, come waaaaaay out of left field.
Braces: A painful, years-long method of skeletal readjustment and sometimes bone removal, resulting in permanent disfiguration, to which children are subject against their will. This is, for some, necessary to be considered attractive.
Life: A state of being in which those who experience it go through years of slow deterioration of bodily parts and have nothing better to do than talk about random things in places like this, release excess fecal matter, and participate in the world's slowest and least impressive MMO.
- I don't know, the graphics are really good, the dialogue (usually) better than others and the full immersion something else. The quests are bit vague, though.
- Also, it's far too expensive.
- Death: The (mostly) Downer Ending to the above, with little known about what happens after. Depending on the personal views of the participant, what comes afterwards is either good, bad, or ambiguous.
Pregnancy / Childbirth: A parasite (or sometimes more than one) lodges itself within a woman and slowly grows over most of a year, affecting the woman physically and psychologically. Eventually the parasite(s) is ejected painfully from the body; however, it typically stays with the woman for years, and the woman may even be imprisoned if she abandons the creature. Despite the intense physical and emotional discomfort the woman is put through during this time, the growth and arrival of the creature is widely considered a beautiful and life-affirming affair.
- Adoption: After its ejection from the body, the parasite is passed off to a surrogate host, who continues the process as normal.
Sex: An exhausting and at times messy and uncomfortable (physically and emotionally) activity that can cause disease and in some extreme cases even death but which is nevertheless is widely enjoyed, greatly sought after by many (especially those who have not yet done it) and is in fact considered healthy and essential for survival. Despite its widespread popularity, undertaking it in front of other people is widely disapproved of and can be embarrassing. Is the leading cause of the aforementioned parasites.
- Masturbation: the unholy alternative of the above activity, which involves the horrible genocide of said parasites within your body. A deviant practice looked down upon by many religions. Often used as an insult towards people seen as pathetic and unattractive. Can also be very addicting. And messy.
Employment: People engage in a series of tasks, usually of a routine and often repetitive nature. Although the routine in which these tasks are undertaken varies from person to person, for many people this involves getting up very early in the morning and undertaking them for several hours at a time, usually until the day is well and truly over. Despite the fact that few people (unless they're lucky) can truly claim to enjoy this routine, those who do not undertake it are often looked down upon and are widely disadvantaged in society.
- How is that supposed to be better than it sounds?
  - Money Dear Boy.
Breathing The constant repetition of an act that intakes a deadly and addictive poison on principle, can cause internal bleeding and hemmhorage if done improperly, and significantly increases the carbon footprint of every person who does it. Any attempt to stop results in painful and invariably fatal withdrawal.
Organized religion: People around the world argue and kill each other about various books, most of which are driving at the same point, which is not to kill people.
Fiction: People make stuff up; it's sometimes based on truth, but it's often complete make-believe. This results in the formation of multi-million dollar industries, varying degrees of fame and fortune for those doing the making-up, and numerous and often intense discussions about it on the Internet.
- Historical Fiction: Fanfiction about real life.
Music: A series of sounds which need to be heard in the right order and by the right person to be appreciated; otherwise, it's noise.
Philosophy: Endless debates between self-proclaimed geniuses that have been going on since the beginning of civilization.
Warfare: An event in which two nations fight against each other. Sometimes several other nations join in, supporting which side that they feel will help their interests more.
- "Civil" Warfare: Same as above, but this time it's one nation fighting against itself.
- These are, in fact, only better than it sounds when compared to the usual alternative. They have, in fact, been famously described as "hell".
Sports: The distillation of war into various forms for fun and profit. More fun than war, because the rules are easier to follow and far fewer people get killed. You are not considered to be a real man if you do not enjoy it and are often accused of homosexuality, despite the fact that most of these activities involve sweaty, muscular men wearing spandex and grabbing balls.
- Wrestling: a form of the above, with two half-naked men grabbing at each other.
- Baseball: Hit a dude's ball with your rod and run home before his goons catch you.
- Association Football: Men (and sometimes women) kick a ball around a field for 90 minutes. Often for longer.
Video Games: That distillation, but with all the physical aspects that may actually result in excercise removed, and a general aura that only men can participate, although women take place in a different distilation, which is in fact a distillation of lock picking put into the form of moving non-physical jewels around a 2-dimensional surface.
Love: Staking your happiness on another person, often making you miserable, crazy, or and evil. And it's involuntary.
- Some forms can be partly described as a weird trick nature plays on humans to help keep the species going.
- Hopeless Romantics: People who apply this concept to itself.
Marriage: Because of the above (and possibly the "exhausting and at times messy and uncomfortable activity"), two people move together. Many things can go wrong (including results of the "parasite generation") and lead to an end where one tries to extort as much from the other as possible. Almost always ends in either heartbreak or death (death is the "good" ending).
Sleep: A state of semi-voluntary unconsciousness during which strange and occasionally disturbing visions may be experienced.
Dreams: A set of variably bizarre hallucinations happening daily if you're doing it right.
Pets: Creatures which eat voraciously, destroy everything they can get away with, reproduce in spades, and are incredibly difficult to train to do anything, but are kept around mostly because they're cute.
Humans: Creatures which eat voraciously, destroy everything they can get away with, reproduce in spades, and are incredibly difficult to train to do anything, but stick around mostly because they're hard to fully dispose of.
Civilization: Giving up hours of one's species' free time, along with 150,000+ years of tradition, and enslaving other species so your own kind won't go hungry.
The Game: Ignorance is bliss.
- Dammit! You just HAD to bring that up, didn't you?
Action Movies: A body of work dedicated to the belief that the world's problems can only be solved by doing things that will get you at least life in prison.
Eggs: Fowl menstruation used as edible foodstuffs.
- Fruit: Engorged plant ovaries used as edible foodstuffs.
- Honey: Plant semen regurgitated by hordes of flying insects and used as edible foodstuffs.
  - Wrong on one point, I'm afraid: it's not made from plant semen, it's made from odorous secretions designed to attract the insects so that they will facilitate plant sex. (You have no idea how difficult it was to type that in accordance with the style of this page; this troper is a total prude.)
- Forest Honey: Parasite excrements regurgitated by hordes of flying insects and used as edible foodstuffs.
Flowers: Genitalia used to show affection, sympathy, or as a major ingredient to make liquids with no other purpose than to make the wearer stinky.
Piercings: Foreign pieces of metal painfully forced into parts of the body for the sake of (perceived) attractiveness.
Trains: A chain of boxes on wheels travelling along one or two rods.
- Bicycle: A device that is so unstable it must be travelling at speed to remain upright on its own. People, especially young children, fall off them frequently; as a result, many places have laws requiring specialised safety gear to operate them.
Guiness Book of Records: A massive list of who/what is best at something.
Lord of the Dance: A shirtless man in tight pants stomps his feet in complicated patterns, accompanied by about 100 Irish people in funny dresses who also stomp their feet in complicated patterns and hardly ever move their upper bodies.
Vacuum Cleaner: This sucks.
Leaf Blower: This blows.
Jesus Christ: Well-known carpenter who was executed by The Roman Empire for supposedly "conspiring" to overthrow the government under pressure of local religious leaders.
Nascar: White guys in cars driving in a circle for three and a half hours.
- They've got a black guy now.
- And a woman.
- This is actually exactly how it sounds.
Horse Racing: Guys ride animals in circles for hours.
Formula One Racing: People drive around an a figure eight for hours.
Speech: Moving various parts of your mouth and upper respiratory system in order to make a series of sounds with an arbitrary relation to real things. Can lead to fatal choking, and depending on the real or assumed referents of said arbitrary sounds, other fatal consequences.
Drinking: Imbibing the toxic liquid chemical byproducts of decaying plant ovaries in order to impair brain function. Said impairment is caused by the delay between ingestion of said toxic chemicals, and removal of said toxic chemicals by the liver. Come to think of it this is exactly as bad as it sounds, but YMMV...
Disney Theme Parks: You pay hundreds of dollars so you and your family can stand around in the hot sun for hours, watch severely abridged versions of a bunch of movies you've probably already seen several times, and get the autographs of professional cosplayers. The more days in a row you do it, the more people will envy you.
Mathematics: A dark art through which people attempt to learn more about entities not of this dimension, entities that cannot be directly experienced and yet still control much of this universe. Many practitioners of this art are known to have mental illness, and childhood exposure to this art leaves many people in the world traumatised to the point of doing anything to avoid it.
DNA: A very difficult programming language. External factors can flip bits, sometimes resulting in serious program bugs.
Tea: Hot leaf water, maybe with some personal preferences like sweet grains and cow pus.
Tim Curry: An actor whose most famous roles are that of a butler, a clown, talking smoke, and a transvestite.
School: A government-run facility where minors are routinely tortured while their parents abandon them for hours at a time. Those who don't undergo the process for at least sixteen years usually have very little opportunity for a decent future.
- Also, a government-run facility that was created to torture minors save the pencil industry.
Books: Thin slices of dead trees, chemically treated, covered in abstract symbols, and bound together.
- Scrolls: A long thin slice of a dead tree, covered in abstract symbols.
Paintings: A piece of fabric, or possibly a thick slice of dead tree, covered in oily substances. Some people have been known to go insane while creating them.
Abraham Lincoln: A man who was raised on a farm, lost his job, went bankrupt, had a nervous breakdown for six months, was defeated twice for speaker of the state legislature, was rejected for a federal land officer job, and was defeated twice for the United States Senate. When he ran for president, half the ballots in the country did not have his name. He won, but was considered a dictator while president.
Musicals: A bunch of fruity people continuously break Willing Suspension Of Disbelief by at times randomly alternating the pitch of their voices in weird, unnatural ways.
- Opera: Sometimes, this is all that they do.