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"He's a giant robot made out of robotic lions! He's the evil crazed clown who stars in this summer's The Dark Knight! And together, Voltron and the Joker are teaming up to fight cri - Wait, wait. I'm sorry."
—Awesome comic, or unwritable crap? You decide!
Sam: A small band of pilgrims sought out a place in the New World where they could worship according to their own beliefs... and solve crimes. Toby: Sam... Sam: It'd be good.
Many TV shows are based around a simple, intriguing concept: a "hook" which attracts the interest of everyone from producers to advertisers to viewers. Fine so far. But in an effort to stand out from the crowd, some creators go a little too far, producing premises so surreal as to make Grant Morrison hang up his fiction-suit in defeat. Then they have to make the show, and the results aren't always pretty. "She's the Pope, he's a chimp, they're cops", may be, as Michael Cassutt says, the best TV pitch ever, but try writing a pilot. In 'the Biz' it's called a Wunza plot. (One's a... and one's a...)
The name of this trope comes from an automatic TV pitch generator and illustrates how the most bizarre premises can end up rather mundane in execution, with the strange characters — despite initial weirdness — ending up in fairly stock show formats like workplace comedies/dramas, quirky sitcom family hijinks, or, yes, fighting crime as private detectives or freelance do-gooders.
Animation obviously has great potential for silliness, especially if it's an Animated Adaptation of a live-action show.
A silly premise isn't always fatal, and the mention of a series below is not necessarily a criticism. With the right casting and writing, some shows which sound totally ridiculous have been hugely successful and even critically acclaimed.
See also In A World. Compare and contrast with Better Than It Sounds and I Am Not Making This Up.
Examples:
- Meta-example: Boy Meets World used a call-out to this trope as a running gag, where an unemployed Eric Matthews spends his days on the couch watching schlocky syndicated daytime TV and listlessly summarizing the plot to anyone else around — which is, of course, a succession of increasingly bizarre characters "who fight crime". (This eventually leads to a surreal dream sequence where Eric himself wanders through a series of green-screen environments armed with a toy gun intent on finding some crime to fight.)
- Similarly Friends featured the example of 'Mac & Cheese' (Joey's starring role)- one's a hard-bitten detective, one's a robot. They fight crime.
- He's acting in a live-action Robot Novels series?
- My Mother The Car: A man's mother is reincarnated in an antique automobile.
- Blind Justice: A cop loses his sight but stills patrols the mean streets — armed.
- Hogans Heroes: A sitcom set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp.
- Mr Smith: The West Wing, but with an talking orangutan.
- Since Mr. Smith was first, I prefer to think of the West Wing as "Mr. Smith", but not as awesome.
- Blood Ties: She's a Canadian police detective who is slowly losing her sight. He's a vampire. They fight crime!
- This troper actually heard a radio ad for Blood Ties that use almost exactly that same description. Not verbatim, but definitely stressing the trope. This troper thought for sure that the ad was a parody for something, and was shocked to discover that the show is real.
- The Flying Nun: Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- Third Rock From The Sun: Aliens come to examine life on earth. They're a zany sitcom family
- The Brady Bunch Hour: An architect with six children starts a musical and sketch comedy show starring his entire family.
- Homeboys In Outer Space: Jive Turkey IN SPACE!
- Cop Rock: The Police Procedural meets The Musical.
- Mr Ed: It's a horse! That talks!
- Turbo Teen: A teenager gets the ability to Shape Shift into... a car.
- Woops!: A Sit Com, set After The End!
- Automan: A police computer nerd overclocks the computer and creates a Tron-like superbeing. They Fight Crime!
- Heil Honey, I'm Home!: A sitcom about Hitler, Eva Braun, and their wacky Jewish neighbors.
- Life On Mars: He's traveled back in time a few decades, the rest are potentially figments of his imagination. But hey, They Fight Crime!
- The writers actually have said that they work out the details of Sam's situation first (Gene thinks Sam is going crazy, Sam realises he's in love with Anne, etc) then think up a crime investigation to fit it.
- Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch: A Multinational Team of Idol Singer Magical Girl mermaid princesses and their Team Pet battle fish-turned-demons led by Gackt in sing-offs.
- Nerima Daikon Brothers: An anime series about three down-on-their-luck musicians/daikon farmers who scheme to fund their own stadium by stealing money from crooks, a la Lupin III. And did we mention it's a musical?
- Princess Tutu: a duck-turned-girl-turned-Magical Girl fights evil with the power of ballet. Additionally, her ballet teacher is an anthropomorphised cat; no one notices or cares.
- Psych: A devious young man with uncanny detective skills pretends to be psychic in order to solve mysteries.
- Steel Justice: see for yourself. Twenty Minutes Into The Future a cop loses his son to a car bomb and the boy is reincarnated as a toy robot dragon. That can shapeshift into a giant robot dragon and help his dad bring his killers to justice. Apparently the purpose was as an extended advert for the toy dragon in question. I Am Not Making This Up. Perhaps the best bit is that this truly outlandish premise is paired with one of the blandest, most generic titles imaginable.
- The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries: She's a luscious, highly desirable telepathic barmaid. He's a vampire suffering from anachronistic attitudes.
- Not to mention the fact that her boss is a shapeshifter who also helps her fight crime.
- Some of the Simple 2000 games, a series of budget Japanese games for the Dreamcast, Playstation, and Playstation 2, have some pretty weird concepts:
- In The Daibijin, you have to subdue a giant bikini-clad woman who's been brainwashed by evil aliens.
- In The Zombie vs. Kyuukyuusha, you drive around in a heavily-armored ambulance rescuing people from a Zombie Apocalypse.
- In The Oneechanbara and its sequels, you play a scantily-clad girl who runs around killing zombies with a katana.
- Engine Sentai Go-onger: a species of humanoid robots bent on polluting all of reality escape from a dimension populated by giant talking Transforming Mecha vehichle/animal hybrids and into Earth, where a quintet of young adults with vehicle-specific jobs are charged with becoming Power Rangers to stop them. Oh, and said talking mecha vehicle/animal things have their souls downloaded into Game Boy cartridges, and their bodies shrunk down to the size of an RC car when not in use.
- Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds is about people who play Duel Monsters while riding around on motorcycle-Duel Disk hybrids. And apparently there's also a giant robot involved.
- Ironically enough though, the policemen on the show actually do fight crime. While playing Duel Monsters while riding on motorcycle-Duel Disk hybrids.
- Not to mention Yu-Gi-Oh itself, which is an anime about a children's card game.
- The Big O: He's a rich negotiator with a Humongous Mecha, she's a robotic maid. They fight crime!
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They're a meatball, a milkshake, and a box of French fries living in South Jersey. They fight crime! Except... they basically haven't even tried to fight any crime since the pilot, wherein their neighbor hired them to find out who totaled his car. It turned out to be a giant rabbit-shaped robot (designed to fight ordinary vegetables) that went berserk after its mad scientist creator sprayed perfume in its eyes for some reason. It seemed to have been tamed when the meatball turned on a boombox and the Rabbot started dancing, until Shake provoked it again and it chased them back uptown. The show's creators have admitted that they only made the anthropomorphic fast food items into freelance detectives when executives insisted they be employed to ensure a steady stream of plot ideas.
- Those Who Hunt Elves: A gun-nut high-school girl, an award winning actress and a world champion karate black-belt travel the world stripping elves in order to find the parts of a spell that will send them back to Earth. They're accompanied by an elf shapeshifted into a talking dog and a tank possessed by the spirit of a cat.
- M.A.N.T.I.S.: A mild-mannered African-American doctor is shot in the spine, builds a suit of futuristic exoskeleton, and vows to fight cri-oh wait, he was killed by an invisible dinosaur.
- Planetes: This is the story of garbage men, in space.
- Quark: More garbagemen in space! With twin blondes!
- Space Quest: There's just something about janitors in space, isn't there?
- Metal Wolf Chaos: He's the President of the United States, she's his secretary. They fight The Evil Army and the Vice President using a Humongous Mecha and Burning American Freedom.
- Constantly parodied in Mystery Science Theater 3000 when reading the title credits for the movies they watch. e.g. Tom: "Body Care and Grooming! They're cops!"
- Library War: Girl joins an elite special forces team of librarians engaged in a violent civil war against an oppressive government censorship organization.
- Referenced in The Sandman: Matthew describes his brief adventure with the Corinthian as being "like a bad TV show." Borders on a Lampshade Hanging, except that unlike most of these examples, the weird team-up was only a small part of a much larger story.
- Pushing Daisies. A Piemaker with the power to bring the dead back to life and his undead girlfried team up with a detective who knits to fight crime.
- Suprisingly, from that description, an amazingly well done show.
- Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers. Two chipmunks, two mice, and a housefly fight crime among both animals and humans.
- Read Or Die: She reads books... and fights
crimespies!
- The Man From Atlantis: He's part fish, living in the ocean.. and he fights crime!
- This troper heard the first ads for this show second-hand and at first refused to believe they were real.
- And don't forget all the 'high concept' movies that followed Die Hard:
- The Middle Man Superhero with android secretary hires art student with crazed activist roommate as Side Kick and heir apparent.
- These are much more common in comics (the orgin of this series). For example, he's a robot. His buddy's a hard bitten G.I. They fight dinosaurs and japanese giant robots until the robot is sent into space with military werewolves, vampires, etc. and the comic's creator. Bob Kanigher, man.
- Cthulhu Tech: The writings of HP Lovecraft crossed with Neon Genesis Evangelion.
- Either averted or used relentlessly, depending on how you look at it, in the Suzumiya Haruhi franchise. It's got a truly bizarre premise that is usually only used as spice for more formulaic storylines, except it keeps changing the formula with each episode/chapter: a murder mystery will be followed by a slice-of-life teen comedy, followed by a superheroic tale of fighting aliens, followed by an extensive parody of anime cliches in the form of a student film.
- Heat Vision and Jack was a show pitched by Ben Stiller whose pilot (the only episode ever made) is a bit of a cult classic that parodies this whole trope. The premise is that a former astronaut with solar powered super genius (Jack Black) and a talking motorcycle (voiced by Owen Wilson) cruise the country as drifters on the run from NASA. They Fight Crime!
- Space Precinct 2040: A police procedural in space. Da Chief is a grumpy, brown alien with an accent. Its single season featured virtually every trope known to mankind.
- Machine Girl: A Japanese schoolgirl's family is killed by a ninja yakuza family and her arm is cut off. She replaces it with a machine gun to take revenge. I Am Not Making This Up. Trailer.
- Gantz: People who have just died are transported to a room where a sadistic robot (shaped like a giant black ball) sends them out to kill aliens.
- The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: He's a Lord Peter Wimsey clone (more so in the books) with a title and a complicated personal life; she's a cranky, foul-mouthed working-class junk food addict with massive class resentment issues. They fight crime.
- Mnemosyne: A small-time detective solves crimes. While trying to avoid killer cyborg assassins and dying excruciatingly painfully just about every month forever.
- Six-String Samurai: In an alternate history where the Soviet Union has taken over the United States and turned it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a katana-wielding Buddy Holly look-alike heads for the last city the Russians haven't seized—"Lost" Vegas—to become the King of Rock and Roll after the death of the city's old king, Elvis. His main opponent is Death himself, who suspiciously resembles Slash and is heading to Vegas to replace rock 'n' roll with heavy metal.
- Pokemon: A pre-teen assembles a bunch of Mons and in between becoming the Master and catching 'em all, they dismantle entire criminal organisations. And that's just the games.
- Angel: In the Season 3 Episode Dad Fred concocts an ordinary identity for Angel when they have to get his son checked out in hospital. He becomes Geraldo Angel, a pet psychiatrist with a small practice in Pacoima...and he fights crime.
- Not to mention the entire concept of the TV show in the first place. Angel's a 200-year old vampire with a soul who lives in Los Angeles and fights off the forces of darkness.
- Skulduggery Pleasant (book (series) by Derek Landy): She is a 12-year-old girl who inherited a mansion. He is a sixgun-toting skeletal-undead sorcerer detective. They fight crime.
- Angel and the Ape ('60s comic book with revivals in the '80s and '00s): She's a gorgeous super-sleuth who speaks six languages and knows karate. He's a comic book artist who happens to be a talking gorilla. They Fight Crime!
- Bobobobo Bobobo: In the future, an evil empire has taken over the world and is trying to make everyone bald. A man named Bobobobo Bobobo fights them using his nose hair as weapons. Joining him are a giant walking piece of jelly, an orange rock thing, a man with ice cream for his head, a talking torpedo, and a guy who fights using his farts.
- Marvel Zombies: All of the Earth's superheroes are turned into zombies. Later they eat Galactus and become zombie gods that destroy the universe and also become part robot.
- Stephen J Cannell, this one's for you.
- Manimal - He can turn into various animals as the result of an ancestral curse and, er, fights crimes.
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