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Mundane Made Awesome / Live-Action TV

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"Other rappers diss me, say my rhymes are sissy . . . why, 'cause I rap about reality? (Like me and my grandma drinkin' a cup of tea?)"
— "Rhymenoceros" from Flight of the Conchords
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    General 
  • Standard operating procedure for any sports retrospective film:
  • In this youtube video special effects are used to spice up a sumo match. Really, really spice up. At one point a wrestler delivers such a mighty blow that the Earth is split in two.
  • Not that it wasn't epic already, but Roy and HG managed to make Eric Moussambani's ridiculously slow swim in Sydney even more epic.
  • Today's generation of game shows exploit this with unrealistic tension, epic music and dramatic light and camera work. Examples include Iron Chef, In It To Win It, Deal Or No Deal and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (a game of multiple choice questions).
  • Sir Ian McKellen once did "Instructions on changing a flat tire in his most theatrical voice".
    Ian McKellen: REMOVE the OLD WHEEL!
  • Lobster migration from The BBC. Complete with an epic orchestral score worthy of The Lord of the Rings.
  • The block trailer that showcases some of Animal Planet's latest shows (Whale Wars, It's Me or the Dog, Living with the Wolfman) features stark silver and black text for the Animal Planet logo and the names of the shows and a soundtrack that could have come right out of a trailer for an action movie. And the final scene is a woman whipping out what looks like an extendable baton. Complete with Ass Kicking Pose.
  • Pick an NBC reality show. The word "is" is... (20 seconds later) ...contractually obligated to have a pause that is... (we'll be right back)... (after commercials) ...longer than the show itself. Most could, in fact, be comfortably edited to run in a half-hour Time Slot instead of an hour... if the network were willing to give up the extra commercials (yeah, right) and the whole idea wasn't to fill up as much Prime Time as possible as cheaply as possible.
    • The Biggest Loser is usually TWO hours long, and probably 45 minutes is devoted to...each contestant stepping on the scale. "Your final weight is..." Random numbers flash on the screen...shocked face from contestant/trainer...cut to commercial. Frequent viewers can usually predict exactly when commercial breaks are going to happen.
    • Most reality TV in general. It's actually about people cooking, or living an even more empty and meaningless life than most in a house, or whose aspiration is to get to wear clothes for a living. Just putting many of those concepts on television in the first place constitutes this trope, and they don't shy away from more traditional forms of it either.

    # 
  • Subverted in one episode of 30 Rock: Kenneth the NBC page's blazer is accidentally destroyed and his only way to get a replacement is to beat his rival in an epic contest called a "page-off". Just as all the NBC pages are gathered to watch the hotly anticipated battle begin, Pete the producer arrives. He puts a stop to the silly event, points out that there are plenty of unused jackets available for Kenneth, and angrily orders all the pages back to work.
  • Done a lot on the PBS mini series The 1900 House. The new residents of the 1900 house would have a moment of awesome mundanity whenever something that would have been commonplace to an everyday family in 1900 (but unusual in 1999) happened. "The chicken laid an egg!" "I made toast! (without electricity)" or, conversely, when something that would be odd in 1900 happened. "I bought shampoo!" "I'm not wearing underwear!"

    A 
  • The Amazing Race does this at times by making tasks out of everyday tasks. Put a million dollars on the line, and even things like pouring wine can become dramatic as teams race to finish them first.
  • Humorously done by American Eats, a food documentary, to provide a dramatic introduction to the hamburger.
  • Parodied (like everything else) in Angie Tribeca.
    • Not only is detective Geils a longtime admirer of ventriloquism, but apparently ventriloquists are world-famous celebrities who collect trophy wives and go on sold-out world tours.
    • In one episode, Dr. Elderweiss slowly descends downstairs on a powered stairlift seat all while dramatic rock music plays.
  • The UK version of The Apprentice uses a dramatic piece of music called The Fury of Schmidt as a sort of surrogate theme tune. Very powerful, and it's used significantly more often than Dance of the Knights in some series - series 3 uses The Fury of Schmidt more or less exclusively. Usually sets the tone pretty well, but in the 1st episode of the Junior Apprentice, it - like Rhys Rosser's suit - somehow doesn't quite fit. Particularly jarring when it properly kicks in at the 1:00 mark.
    • Near the start of each episode, the candidates are shown arriving for their next briefing with Lord Sugar. Usually this is shot relatively straightforwardly, but occasionally it's full of artistic shots of the London dawn and the music of heavenly choirs.
    • Incidentally, the US version of the show is absolutely drowning in this trope.
  • Anyone who thought the diabolo couldn't be awesome, obviously wasn't watching the 2009 Grand Final of Australia's Got Talent; otherwise they would've seen this kid: William Campbell.

    B 
  • The first season of Babylon 5 had an unfortunate tendency to end random scenes with dramatic musical stings, including many that did not remotely justify such treatment. Later seasons toned it down (or perhaps the series simply got epic enough to keep up with its soundtrack).
    • At least one time it was done on purpose: in a season 3 episode, dramatic swelling music was used when Sheridan declared Ivanova... the official Babylon 5 Sneak.
  • A season 4 episode of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica has a short but very dramatic scene featuring William Adama brushing his teeth with a mean look on his face.
  • In what is possibly the most awesome (and random) channel ident ever, BBC1 brings us dogs doing stunts to a soundtrack that seems to have been borrowed from an action movie.
  • Parodied in The Big Bang Theory with a "montage" to "Eye of the Tiger" consisting of Sheldon and Raj STARING AT A WHITEBOARD with hard cuts between different camera angles in step with the music.
  • Bill Nye the Science Guy is a Science Show built around this trope.
  • Billy the Exterminator: The original Introductory Opening Credits show Billy handling a snake and Ricky handling an alligator. They also show, with the exact same style and tone, the rest of the family doing mundane things at the office.
  • An episode of Black Books parodies this, by featuring Manny's walk to a nearby ice-cream stand to get two ice creams on a hot day filmed and acted as if it were the preamble to a major shoot-out in a Tarantino movie.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Xander gets in a fight with vampire Harmony in "The Initiative". After threatening each other with their new and improved skills, they ... get in a slap fight, with hair-pulling and shin-kicking. In slow motion. With dramatic music. It ends in a dual headlock truce. "Okay... on three." Done to explicitly mock the show's often unrealistic fight scenes.
    • THEY GOT... THE MUSTARD... OUUUUUUUT!
    • Angel has Fred cleaning stuff.
    • Also from Angel, Gavin Park is an Obstructive Bureaucrat who focuses on using legal means to hamper and fight Angel and his team, unlike other people at Wolfram & Hart, who focus on grandiose Evil Plans, demons, and assassins; as he points out, they could put Angel Investigations out of business simply by informing the government of Angel's Undead Tax Exemption, and his plan to have Angel evicted from the Hyperion Hotel only fails because his rival Lilah gives Angel the documents he needs purely to spite him.

    C 
  • Parodied on Chappelle's Show, where Dave shows us that everything is better in... slow motion. Except for dropping a deuce.
  • Happens frequently on Chuck, especially when Morgan is involved. Most notably in the deceptive Cold Open of the pilot episode. A series of dramatic closeups of what looks like an assault team gearing up for a dangerous mission...which turns into Chuck trying to sneak out the window of his bedroom to escape the unwanted birthday party his sister is giving him. Played with even further with Morgan hanging from the windowsill and almost falling during the entire conversation when they're caught. And then he stands up because the room is on the ground floor.
    • Later on, after Ellie and Awesome have Clara, they put her in her crib in her room and then get ready to do something they haven't done in the three months since she was born, complete with specially chosen outfits...sleeping through the night.
    • When the CIA rebuilds the Buy More they staff it with agents who run the place super efficiently, mopping up spills that barely hit the ground, catching things that fall with dramatic cartwheels and backflips, and generally making the place seem like it's fallen into the Twilight Zone. Morgan eventually rings the original crew back to make it seem more normal.
  • Community runs on this. In the show's basic reality, 7 students attend a backwater community college and sporadically study together. This doesn't stop the series from pulling off mafia movies, high-concept sci-fi adventures and more all in the context of everyday college life.
    • A simple on-campus game of paintball can be an After the End Scavenged Punk episode, a Western and a Star Wars pastiche. And yes, it is awesome.
    • When the gang has to bring home a space-simulator after it gets towed, the entire episode is played out like a deadly serious space mission, complete with Mission Control and using The Power of Friendship.
    • An epic campus-wide pillow fight becomes a Ken Burns-like war documentary.
    • A ruined biology project (a knocked over yam) turns the study group into a crime-solving team, Law & Order-style.
    • Season five sees a heavily organized criminal investigation into...a prankster whose "crime" is inserting quarters into unsuspecting people's but cracks.
    • Your best friend is taking a year-long sailing trip around the world? That calls for a school-wide game of "The Floor Is Lava"...which escalates into a send-up of Water World.
    • Leave it to Greendale Community College to beta test a new smartphone app that allows you to rate other people and turn into a dystopian society segregated by rating.
  • In the Corner Gas episode "Face Off", Oscar and Emma get ready to drive to the hockey game, but they can't be sure the car will start because it's been making funny noises lately. As Oscar starts the car, we see dramatic close-ups of his hands and hear epic music.
  • Take a look at the intro to the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage episode "The Lives of The Stars", by Carl Sagan. Ominous music, startling shots, slow motion, sudden violence, all at larger-than-normal scale... Most epic, significant apple pie making ever. And then it turns to perfectly average baking and serving. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe...
    • He does it again when he describes a nigh-magical ability to transcend time itself and learn from all the great teachers, explorers, scientists, and and other minds of history, by...reading. And he really does make it come across as that awesome. And he's right.
    • The trailer for the sequel with Neil deGrasse Tyson gives poking a child's cheek this treatment.
  • The entire CSI-verse does this with lab work, which is shot in fast-paced montages and pounding beats while lab techs take samples and look at slides. CSI: Miami is also infamous for Horatio Caine's....*Glasses Pull*...witticisms.
  • The original CSI hangs a lampshade on it in one episode when it turns out the forensics montage music was coming from Hodges' iPod.

    D 

    E 
  • TLC's Extreme Couponing takes people who obsessively collect and use coupons to rack up hundreds of dollars worth of food and groceries and puts them on television. Some of these people appear to be stockpiling for the apocalypse, and others are feeding half the town for pocket change. Top it off with dramatic stings, exhaustion from walking the store for hours, and stress-induced tears, and you've got a show!

    F 
  • Used in Flight of the Conchords with parody rappers Hiphopopotamus and Rhymenoceros.
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Will passing his "Chicktionary" (A list of girl's phone numbers) to Carlton is done like a sacred ritual, with Carlton having to kneel and cross his arms while making promises to never reveal the secrets within. Once the ritual is complete, the Chicktionary starts glowing orange, and the glow spreads to Carlton's body while he screams about the immense power contained within.
  • The Fringe episode "The Same Old Story" features a scene, complete with tension-building "thriller music", of a scary, sheet-filled cabinet opening!

    G 
  • Game of Thrones: Stannis and Davos go to the Iron Bank of Braavos to request a loan. While normally this would be a boring and dull affair, Davos makes it look positively awesome.
  • Most TV cooking shows are rather boring: the host takes some ingredients, puts them in a pot and/or oven for a while, and talks a lot. Then along came Alton Brown with Good Eats...
  • In The Good Wife episode "Poisoned Pill" lawyer Louis Canning pours himself a glass of water. Even the opposition lawyers can't take their eyes off him, not to mention the jury or audience. No music, Michael J. Fox makes it awesome all by himself.
  • Richard Dawkins did this with being alive at all in the "Waking Up In The Universe" episode of Growing Up In The Universe.

    H 
  • Hannibal shows us how Hannibal Lecter can achieve nigh-Mind Manipulation powers using nothing more than knowledge of psychopharmacology, suggestion and simple cooking spices. Then there are a few scenes where he fights people using kitchen utensils, including one scene where he fights a Musical Assassin armed with violin strings.
  • In one of the episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O comes the most badass line in all of live action television. The scenario; A package, upon delivery to an influential government office exploded violently, killing one person and maiming his secretary. McGarett needs to know if the package was tampered with at any point during the journey. So he asks the courier if he fell asleep at any point, or went to the bathroom, or let the package out of his sight. After a while, the courier holds up his hand and McGarett stops asking questions. He then delivers his line; "Sir. With respect. I take my duties as a courier Very. Seriously." You can hear the capital letters in his words. Bad. Ass. Courier.
  • Did anyone else notice Danko's surprisingly emphasized shaving scene at the beginning of Heroes' "Cold Snap"?
  • House gets a new cane. Cue awesome music, dramatic camera angle and slo-mo (and his trainers synchronize with Wilson's).
  • The How I Met Your Mother episode "Monday Night Football" uses this technique as the main characters try not to find out who won the Super Bowl.
    • Barney plays this trope straighter than an arrow with his video resume. The other characters hang a lampshade on it.
    • Barney is made of this trope. "We're building an snowman in Central Park. It's LEGENDARY!". Also, sometimes the others react like this to Barney's revelations that are either not shocking at all and/or not surprising at all.
    • In one episode, Ted and Marshall have a sword fight to decide who gets to keep the apartment.

    I 
  • iCarly: During the Gibby-Nora fight scene, Gibby gets smacked into a wall. He stands up, brings his hand to his mouth, look at the blood, and... takes his shirt off. All while epic music plays in the background.
  • Japanese example: Iron Chef. Dramatic orchestral music is used for almost all the musical cues, and the lead cameraman is apparently in love with crane shots that pan over the entire kitchen.
    • They use Instant Replay on a cooking show.
    • The dramatic yellow bell pepper eating by Chairman Kaga.
    • "In the immortal words of my uncle... ALLEZ CUISINE!"
    • You will never look at the movie Backdraft the same way again after watching that show. (Not that Backdraft wasn't kind of Narmful to begin with, but the show borrows its music.)
    • The thing that really makes the show go over the top, at least in the English translation, is the way the announcers treat every competition as though it were the Super Bowl. The announcers are sportscasters, determined to pump the drama up to eleven as they call the play-by-play. Commercials for Iron Chef America sometimes resemble — deliberately — promos for big-time Professional Wrestling events.
    • The orchestra playing dramatic music ascending into Kitchen Stadium with Masahiko Kobe in every battle he's in.
    • When boxing commentator and self-admitted non-cook Kenji Fukui was first asked to commentate, he couldn't understand why they'd need him for a cooking show, or what he'd say. "The knife goes up! The knife goes down!" However, once on set he quickly realized that the frenetic action together with his frequent need to ask Yukio Hattori what the chefs were doing gave him the material he needed to keep the show going.
  • Played for all the laughs possible in an episode of The IT Crowd. It revolves around Moss being accepted as a contestant on the gameshow Countdown, where he does very well. Which leads to him being inducted into an exclusive "nightclub", where he's given the name Word, for those who made it through 8 episodes. Roy is suitably amused when Moss takes him to the club and has a "confrontation" with another member who acts very tough and goes by the name Negative One. Things escalate until Negative One challenges Moss to a game of "Street Countdown" to settle things - a parody of Fight Club.

    J 
  • A sketch from Jimmy Kimmel Live!, based on a news story about Starbucks and the right to bring guns in their stores. Kimmel takes it to its logical conclusion when he orders a coffee at gunpoint. Refuge in Audacity occurs at the end when he shoots a man at the door as he walks out.
  • Some of the characters in Just Shoot Me! played paintball in one episode. Dennis had a temporary falling out with Jack (who was on his team) after accidentally shooting him, only to redeem himself later by saving Jack from the blast of shaken up soda can as if it were a grenade, ruining his shirt and making him unable to attend a party. The scene played out as if Dennis were a soldier dying in Jack's arms.

    K 
  • Kamen Rider Kabuto took a (quite literal) Cooking Duel between the eponymous character and a Masquerade monster, and used dramatic camera angles, speed-lined ingredient chopping, and gratuitous usage of the show's rock theme for actual battles to boost the action of preparing a bowl of soup to epic levels. Considering the normally serious tone of the show, this skirted dangerously close to Narm levels. Though to be fair, cooking mastery was a major part of the lead's character.
  • Key & Peele are masters of this trope, using all kinds of dramatic effects in scenes depicting relatively mundane events. Examples include "Duelling Hats" and "Flicker".
  • The American version of Kitchen Nightmares tends to suffer from this a lot. The narrator makes everything from reading a menu to the ethnic heritage of the owner like some Earth-shattering revelation of God and the over-the-top music only adds to this. Downright abrupt changes into dramatic music can occur at anything from verbal fights to Ramsay quickly turning his head. And if something really crazy is implied to happen, the camera may cut, go in and out of focus and jump as many as three times within two seconds. This is quite different from the British version, which is way more laid back.
  • In 1979-1980, Philadelphia station KYW tried something different. They tried... DISCO NEWS! Some people may consider it the greatest local TV news decision ever, while others may consider it incredibly ridiculous.

    L 
  • The Late Late Show has no less than 4 (and counting) elaborate jingles, featuring flaming robot skeletons, lasers, a triceratops, etc. This is all for a segment where Craig reads emails and tweets.
  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a fake movie trailer for a movie about infrastructure maintenance done in the style of a disaster move.
    Edward Norton: I'm ordering uniaxial tests of the slab transverse to the deck corrugations with additional reinforcement and tension tests of the support fastener connections between the deck and the girders, bitch!

    M 
  • In Mad Men, Don Draper lighting a cigarette.
  • NBC's game show Minute to Win It. You know it fits this trope when there's epic music playing complete with Ominous Latin Chanting, and yet all the challenges consist of epic tasks like emptying a tissue box! Later episodes have eased up on this, however.
  • The entire premise of Misfits is essentially a subversion of this trope, and so on the occasions they deliberately invoke it they usually take Refuge in Audacity.
    • In one episode, the Monster of the Week is beaten when he is defeated by his life threatening allergy to peanuts, which had been hurled across the room, in slow motion, in an against all odds, life or death situation, with stirring music ...
    • In the series 2 finale, it is revealed that a side character has inherited the utterly awesome power of ... lactokinesis. Which is the ability to control milk with ones mind, in case you're not familiar with latin. Curtis is later saved by being lactose intolerant, which get even more ridiculous when that information is revealed in a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner.
    • In one episode Nathan, in an attempt to save the local youth from a life of cardigan wearing religious types, delivers a heartfelt and Rousing Speech, complete with orchestral swells and tearful pride about ... the virtues of being a drunken idiot.
      If you could see yourselves... We had it all. We have fucked up bigger and better than any generation that came before us. We were so beautiful... We're screw-ups. I plan on staying a screw-up until my late twenties, or maybe even my early thirties. And I will shag my own mum before I let her.... or anyone else take that away from me!
  • Modern Marvels takes the stuff you probably don't think about even once in a single day (copper, paint, concrete, etc) and somehow makes it absolutely captivating.
  • On the Science Channel, Monster Bug Wars shows footage of various Real Life creepy-crawlies preying on one another. It backs up these miniature confrontations with ominous narration, an action-flick score (suspense chords, dramatic fight music, even somber oh-the-humanity dirges for the aftermath!) and sound effects of snarling big cats, squealing pigs, and Jurassic Park-dino roars. All while being incredibly educational.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus: In 1970 the British Empire lay in ruins...
    • In a world populated by Supermennote  ordinary citizen Mr. F. G. Superman has the incredible secret identity of... Bicycle Repair Man!
    • "Good evening and welcome to another edition of Storage Jars!"
    • "A Scotsman on a horse!" [cue applauding audience]
    • "In 1943, a group of British Army Officers working deep behind enemy lines, carried out one of the most dangerous and heroic raids in the history of warfare. But that's as maybe." Cut to a sketch about a soldier trying to resign from the army because it's dangerous.
  • In his episode of MTV Cribs, Redman gives a tour of his surprisingly modest house in Staten Island and shows off (among other things) a Sega Dreamcast, his porn collection, a living room that doesn't have a coffee table (as well as various films, CDs, and some more porn), his cousin Mr. Cream (known at the time as Sugar Bear) sleeping on the floor, a "dollar box" (a shoebox filled with an assortment of dollar bills), and a broken doorbell that needs to be hotwired. All of this and more is edited as if the subject was a mansion.
  • An episode of The Muppet Show was merciless with both playing this straight and inverting it in a Swine Trek sketch: Because of the presence of a mysterious musical robot outside the ship, everything gets appropriate music. Doctor Strangepork gets a celebratory fanfare on his entrance. First Mate Piggy gets stripperiffic music when she tries to leave. And Captain Link Hogthrob repeatedly gets Losing Horns.
  • One episode of My Name Is Earl has Earl take part in a Bagging Tournament. It is treated as very serious sport (Except by the main characters) as well as taking lots of of digs at the concept.
    Referee: If I let you go out there with a broken finger, I'll lose my Bagging Referee's License... And I can't remember the name of the website I downloaded it from.
    • Also mocked by Catalina:
      Randy: They did it, they won!
      Catalina: We can go home now!
  • Parodied on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which Crow T. Robot practices EXTREEEEEME YOGA! and Tom Servo is into EXTREEEEEEME PHILATELY!. Mike Nelson tried to get in on the action by eating EXTREEEEEEME RICE!, but the bots blithely informed him that there was nothing extreme about it.
  • MythBusters played inspirational/awe-inspiring music when Adam and Jamie successfully created a lead balloon.
    • In a 2010 commercial for the show, they play Ave Maria to things blowing up in slow motion.
    • The show couldn't have existed for so long without this trope. It lived and breathed it. Myth isn't true? Replicate it anyway and bring on the high explosives! Myth was true but still not quite enough? make the explosion even bigger! The final 2 seasons served only to kick things up even further, adding epic new music and "science" graphics to illustrate what the boys were talking about.

    O 
  • The opening credits of the US version of The Office feature energetic rock music playing over mundane things like photocopying, phone calls and the water cooler bubbling.

    P 
  • Patriot: At an industrial piping conference, a speaker delivers a long string of impenetrable Techno Babble to an awestruck crowd of engineers, who hang on his every word as if he's delivering scripture.
  • While most of Planet Earth is nothing but sheer awesomeness, the ending section of one episode features the aerial camera crew climbing into the helicopter in dramatic slow motion.
  • Power Rangers Turbo: One of the lines in the epic rock theme song is "Drive four-on-the-floor!" Because, well, cars.
  • Part of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon's DVD Bonus Material is what is supposedly Tuxedo Mask's origin. Here is Mamoru suiting up as his costumed alter-ego... depicted in the style of a Transformation Sequence.

    Q 
  • The Queen's Gambit: The series has received a lot of praise for making chess - not a classic spectator sport - seem fascinating.

    R 
  • Reading Rainbow:
    • When LeVar Burton is riding on a train, he discovers that "The shower's in the toilet!"
    • Maybe you never thought even Reading Rainbow could make getting a library card awesome, but BEHOLD! In an animated sequence, Conan the Librarian (not the one from UHF) forges a library card for a young boy, bequeathing it unto him with all the portent of a legendary artifact.
  • The Cat from Red Dwarf has a very high opinion of his own awesomeness, and will utilise his yowling, theatrical Catchphrase to emphasise such occasions as walking down a corridor.
  • Red or Black - a 'game' (in the loosest sense of the word) show that has just (Sept 11) started on ITV in Britain. Take 256 audience members, and have them guess red or black in a series of contests that are 50/50 between the 'red' option and the 'black' (although the need to lose exactly half every time means those at the back of the queue get no choice). The last contestent then guesses Red or Black on a giant proto roulette wheel to win "ONE MILLION POUNDS"! There is no skill - each challenge is as close to 50/50 as the producers can get (One show included jousting on top of cars, tightrope walker race, top golfers Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood trying to hit a gong in a lake, and picking a place at a table set for 32. Each had a hidden jelly/jello, and on the word they all lifted the cloches to reveal if it was red or black). Yet each round is turned into an Olympian contest – the winning colour jelly was revealed by the colour of the table top. The cloth was removed by ATTACHING IT TO A MOTORBIKE AND PULLING! AWESOME! Cue interviews with tearful members of the losing half, people upset at being knocked out in round two, and then asking the survivors what their strategy is in the next round. And do these epic contests take place in a normal studio? NO, THIS IS AWESOME, so it starts in Wembley arena (U Sians – think Madison Square Gardens) before the remaining 128 are bussed to a Stately Home for games in the grounds. The final 8 re-enter the studio to an X-Factor style set up, complete with mini-bio films of each, where a more famous people are used to determine red or black, until the high drama finale with the “Red or Black wheel”, all to the sort of effects usually reserved for the winner of “..got talent”, where at least they had to be good at something!
  • Retro Game Master: Arino's "Game Center CX! Kachou, on!" has gotten progressively more dramatic over the years.
  • When the first self-righting mechanism was accidentally discovered on Robot Wars, it was subject to no fewer than six instant replays, each from a different angle. Observe.

    S 
  • Samurai Gourmet subtly presents this as its central concept, with barely a hint of self-parody. Kasumi is a recent retiree who sets about seeking pleasure in his copious free time. The pleasure generally comes in the form of food, and although this comes with plenty of Food Porn, it's notable that most of the food is really rather humble. It's Japanese Comfort Food, but when the circumstances are right, Kasumi goes over the top in his appreciation of it. The mundanity is highlighted in several episodes.
    • In "Pasta the Samurai Way", when Kasumi accidentally dines at a haute cuisine Italian place, he does enjoy the food, but only after he gets over the stifling atmosphere and brings it down to his level.
    • "Anniversary Oden" threatens Kasumi's enjoyment when he realizes that his wife's menu choices are far more adventurous than his.
    • In "Croquettes of the Heart", Kasumi seeks out the same no-frills croquette he remembers from his youth. When a sale starts, he is tempted to try the most expensive croquette on offer, but he decides that the one that comes with memories attached tastes better.
  • Saturday Night Live: Lazy Sunday, an extremely bombastic, hard-hitting and hardcore-style rap about... a guy sleeping in till late on a Sunday and then deciding to go see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with a friend. Their decision to get some snacks before they enter the theatre to avoid price-gouging is played as if it were an example of both planning a heist ("Don't want security to get suspicious!") and flashy, conspicuous over-consumption ("Reach in my pocket, pull out some dough / Girl acted like she never seen a ten before!").
    • There's a sequel. It's equally, if not more, hard-hitting. This time, it involves brunch at a French restaurant and taking in a show of the Sister Act musical on Broadway.
    • In a 1980s parody of Star Trek: The Original Series and its first four films, the Enterprise has been converted into a seafood restaurant. Thus, the usual dramatics must be applied to things like condiment shortages ("The dispenser is jammed, captain. It will take days to repair!").
  • Scrubs:
    • One episode began with a melodramatic portrayal of Dr. Cox's four-year-old son Jack receiving minor stitches on his forehead complete with epic music and a rapt audience. Dr. Cox spends the whole time threatening Turk (who is doing the stitches) coldly that he better succeed. Once Turk finishes, Dr. Cox looks over his work, pauses, and then declares "the surgeon lives!" to cheers.
    • J.D.'s imagined flashback of Dr. Cox in his intern days as a head-swaying, rebellious punk-rocker intern who responds to a colleague's greeting with, "Shut-up jackass. I rock!!".
    • In "My Friend the Doctor", Dr. Cox (who has a hurt back) bends down and picks up his badge off the floor, in slow motion and set to "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias. Carla was impressed because he did the whole thing with a casual cocky grin on his face, even though he was in excruciating pain and she knew it.
  • Spoofed in Seinfeld. Elaine starts dating an aspiring author whose manuscript she's editing, until he neglects to put an exclamation point in a message that her friend had a baby. This causes Elaine to go a little overboard in adding exclamation points to the book, which her boss chews her out for while reading some samples in a mock-dramatic narration.
    • And then there's George's 2 MPH scooter chase, which ends when he figures out it's faster to just run.
    • The foot race between Jerry and Duncan Meyer at the climax of "The Race". A short dash between two high school nemeses is done entirely in slow motion, has the theme from Superman: The Movie playing throughout, and is treated as such Serious Business in-universe that there's an entire crowd gathered and a lot of celebration once it's completed.
  • In Sherlock: In "The Reichenbach Fall", Moriarty is acquitted of breaking into the Tower of London, despite being seen on camera doing it, and is let go. It's obvious he's heading to 221B for a confrontation with Sherlock. So what does our hero do? Make tea, in the most awesome way possible.
  • On Smallville, in a bathroom Lana Lang cuts her hair three inches . . . And she's ready for the world!!!!
  • So Random! has a segment called Anime Brothers; two of the male cast members dress up in clothes not unlike Goku's gi, wear massive plastic wigs, and are enthusiastic about things like Opening! A Juice Box! or Brushing our Teeth!
  • Spaced at many, many points, including Brian taking Marsha's coat, and heroically striding it into the bedroom with stirring, heroic music from The Magnificent Seven.
    • An epic gunfight of everyone pointing their fingers at each other, with slo-mo, gun jams, anguished "deaths", and Big Nos, leading to a classical music soundtrack to highlight the senseless waste of it all.
  • Stargate-verse pulls out deep, Ominous Latin Chanting, full of terror and drama for... someone looking thru a microscope. To be fair it was her creeping on the genes of a helpless girl but still.
    • The Stargate SG-1 episode "Brief Candle" features a scene of epic mass waking-up, complete with the heroic action theme!
      • Season 1 as a whole was pretty over the top with its abuse of their score, and "Brief Candle" is probably the worst episode in that regard. Comparing the musical score in a later season episode to "Brief Candle" is an interesting experience.
      • Similarly, the episode "Touchstone" includes a scene of heroic power-cable coupling. Now, the heroic power-cable-hooking-up is going on in a blizzard, so...
    • The Stargate Atlantis episode "First Contact" features several completely unnecessary pans across the entire city with stirring theme music playing loudly in the background, which cut to Rodney and Daniel Jackson doing something mundane like looking at security recordings. It's so overblown that it's almost certainly intentional. This is Stargate, after all.
      • It was actually reused special effects from the season 1 episode "The Storm", where its use was far more appropriate. So it wasn't so much "intentional" as "cheaper".
      • According to the commentary, it was done specifically because the Powers That Be realized how boring having Rodney and Daniel view security footage and look through storage containers would be, so they decided to spice it up a bit. Definitely on purpose.
    • Despite all the flak it received from its fans, there's one thing Stargate Universe did very much right: making a solar-powered spacecraft awesome in a sci-fi show with a large variety of exotic power sources. By having it DIVE INTO A GODDAMN STAR TO RECHARGE ITS BATTERIES.
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Journey to Babel", in which Sarek is introduced, Sarek's shuttlecraft slowly arriving in the hangar gets louder, more dramatic music than even most battles.
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint", tried to make the separation of the saucer section from the primary hull be a thing of awesome majesty, what with the swelling theme music and the multiple camera angles. The fact that the separation happened so slowly made it even more awesome.
  • Star Trek: Voyager has the Doctor's dream transformation into the Emergency Command Hologram, complete with a closeup on his lapel as the four pips appear dramatically one by one to heroic music. Janeway even comments "Nice touch" upon seeing it.
  • This was a frequent criticism of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which the characters would frequently charge around making dramatic speeches about how what they were doing was The Most Important Thing Ever and acting as if The World Will Literally End If We Don't Get This Right. They did the same thing in Aaron Sorkin's previous show, The West Wing, but the key difference between the two was that The West Wing was set behind the scenes at the White House, where the characters frequently were dealing with issues of major importance, while these characters were working behind the scenes at... a TV comedy show. And so, could probably take themselves and what they were doing a lot less seriously.
  • In the Stick Stickly TV special Stuck, Stick clipping out coupons is done at Super-Speed with inspirational music blaring in the background.
  • Supernatural has one of these in the episode "Mystery Spot". Sure it was awesome when Sam drove the Impala, cleaned the weapons, and (especially) stitched his own bullet wound in a Time-Passes Montage, but the dramatic music didn't really work with the other scenes of Sam brushing his teeth, eating chicken, and making his bed. That's right, Sammy, you show that bedspread who's a badass!

    T 
  • Taskmaster occasionally does this in the video tasks, using cinematic camera shots and dramatic music to underscore the awesomeness of contestants doing things like attempting to pop a roomful of balloons with a frying pan or trying to keep a candle from being blown out.
  • Ted Lasso: Isaac giving haircuts is treated like a grand ritual, as seen when he gives Sam one. The whole team gathers in the locker room with Sam sitting on a chair raised up like a throne as Jamie and Richard drape the barber's cape over him like a cloak while Will stands to the side with a box of clippers and combs like a knight's squire. Isaac then gets to work on Sam with grandiose movements as he cuts his hair. And for all the hullabaloo, the end result turns out to be little more than a neat trim.
  • That Mitchell and Webb Look: Watch the Football!
    • And also Coming up on "The Gift Shop Sketch..."
    • Subverted for laughs in "Coverage of People Buying A House And Then Living In It", in which the titular show is clearly supposed to do this for the process of house-hunting (in the vein of property shows such as Location, Location, Location), but both the host and the participant obviously realise just how teeth-grindingly mundane the process actually is and make no effort to conceal how utterly bored they are by having to make a television program about it.
  • A Discovery Channel show called Time Warp consists entirely of guys running around with high-speed cameras and filming random things, but very slowly. Most things look significantly cooler when shot in 5000 FPS. The great thing about the show is they don't even pretend they're doing it for some higher scientific purpose, like the MythBusters do. They straight up admit that they're just doing what they do because it's really, really cool.
    • To be fair, the first couple episodes were less about "let's just goof off" and had some very interesting analysis of what they were seeing. Things devolved quickly and just got worse when the 2nd season moved from a 30 minute slot to an hour, at which point they just started reshowing the same footage 10 times to fill the extra time, and brought on such guests as Metallica to up the "cool factor". One of the 2 hosts did seem like he wanted to explore the "science" of what they were filling, but the producers and editors weren't having any of that.
  • Tomica Hero Rescue Force, which makes the Rescue genre much cooler then it has any right to be.
  • The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien: TWITTER TRACKER TWITTER TRACKER TWITTER TRACKER!!!!
  • The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon occasionally has a game segment called ''The Wheel of Musical Impression", where his guests are told to sing a song in the style of another singer. This normally would be a simple comedy skit, except that Jimmy specifically picks professional singers as guests for this particular game, often resulting in this trope. For example, witness a simple nursery song, The Wheels on the Bus, being turned into an epic soul ballad.
  • Top Gear:
    • It's never just a shot of a guy standing next to a stationary car, it's a desaturated shot of a guy standing next to a stationary car with forced perspective so he looks like a midget and the shot has been flipped upside down so you aren't quite sure which is the car and which is the reflection of the car in a puddle and also there is stirring orchestral music and a brief jump cut to some sort of atmospheric local wildlife before coming back to the car.
    • Lampshaded in the show's opening, where Jeremy narrates three brief clips from the coming episode, which are usually three very non-epic things like eating food, pointing at things, or wearing hats.
    • Whenever the team gets a sportscar in the studio, they must test how fast it goes around their track. And since none of the trio are professional racers, they have a special crew-member who drives every car for them. But this crew-member's identity is completely covered up, to the extent that the racer wears fully concealing clothing, and he is always introduced by Clarkson listing off two improbable "facts" about this mysterious being, before stating that all they really know is that he is called The Stig.
  • According to Tosh.0, everything is cooler... through a fisheye lens!

    U 

    V 
  • Victorious: At the very end of "Freak the Freak Out", Sikowitz sings Number One by Ginger Fox. And then proceeds to pay homage to Flashdance by banging on a chair while wet. His portrayer, Eric Lange, said that this has been his favorite scene on the show to shoot yet.

    W 
  • Hilariously parodied in the "nWo Saturday Night" segments of WCW Saturday Night, which would see an nWo member take on a Jobber in a five-minute match; each and every move done by the nWo member would be augmented by over-the-top special effects, replayed from at least 5 different angles, and get thunderous, deafening applause and cheers from the (nonexistent) crowd.
  • Parodied in the Whose Line Is It Anyway? game "Improbable Mission", which puts an everyday task to Mission: Impossible drama standards and plays it for laughs.
    • The same goes for their "Film Noir" game, which is always placed in a mundane setting and usually ends up in a detective-versus-detective Gambit Roulette to accomplish an everyday or pointless task.
  • The reality show Who Wants to Be a Superhero? likes to toss in special effects during editing — objects appear in a blast of lightning instead of being brought out normally, etc. Granted, the show is about people coming up with concepts for superheroes, so it's thematic, but when the object is a boring old laptop, it just decreases the "reality" portion of the program.
  • WKRP in Cincinnati, where Les Nessman's promo for the farm news was so massively, enormously overblown that it was an Incoming Ham all by itself.
    • Anything Les did was like that. Parodied yet further in one episode when Nessman, going for pretentiousness turned up to eleven, breaks in on Venus' set to introduce an obituary "breaking news" item with "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..." Venus, sitting behind him, whacks his gong, making Les jump. Even better, Nessman comes in with "And now, Les Nessman's ... Death Watch," and he turns around and gestures for Venus to hit the gong again.

    Y 
  • Yo Gabba Gabba!:
    DJ Lance: Listening and dancing to music iiiiisssssss AAAAAAAAWESOOOOOOMMMME!
    • The "Learn With Plex" segments: "It's fun to brush your teeth / wash your hair / put your toys away / etc."
    • In "Restaurant", the Gabbas are waiting for their meals to arrive and are bored. Their situation? Break into song as they think of something awesome they can do while they wait.
    Muno: Can we climb on tables and chairs, just for fun?
    Plex: No! You could hurt yourself, and that would not be fun!
    Brobee: Can I be loud and make lots of noise, like playing the drums?
    Plex: I said no, that would not be cool! So put down that fork and spoon!
    Toodee: Can I lean back on my chair, what's wrong with that?
    Plex: No, no, no, you could hurt yourself! You don't wanna do that!
    Foofa: Can we run around and play some tag? That's lots of fun...
    Plex: Uh, no! In this restaurant, there's not much room to run! Alright?
    • Most of Super Martian Robot Girl's problems subvert this, but the "Dance Party" comic takes it up to eleven.

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