The TVTropes Trope Finder is where you can come to ask questions like "Do we have this one?" and "What's the trope about...?" Trying to rediscover a long lost show or other medium but need a little help? Head to Media Finder and try your luck there. Want to propose a new trope? You should be over at the Trope Launch Pad.
Find a Trope:
openNo Title Live Action TV
I can't imagine nothing like this exists - if it doesn't, I'm so looking into launching it, but I just can't imagine we don't. See, I've noticed, any time anyone is pregnant in any show in which characters are ever in danger of anything, the actual childbirth will happen at the absolute worst moment - right in the middle of a crisis in which the mother-to-be is either the one in immediate danger, or she's the only one with the required knowledge to save someone, only she's busy having a baby. Or both. Finagle's Law is obviously a supertrope. Obvious examples springing to mind immediately include Eureka, in which Allison has a baby while trapped in a lab that's about to kill anything living in it, and everyone who could stop it just got their memory wiped accidentally... and Firefly, where in Heart of Gold, as soon as you see that one of the whores is pregnant, you just know she'll have the kid right in the middle of the upcoming fight. But I've seen it a million times. Do we have it? (Not entirely a tv trope, though seems to show up most often there; I could probably find it in other media that use the Rule of Drama, too. )
openNo Title Live Action TV
I remember reading a page a while back talking about a standard USA Network character trope, where everyone lives in an apartment or house that is way too nice for their salary level, does anyone know what that is?
openNo Title Live Action TV
The first thing we see about a character is that they are having sex. Usually this is meaningless sex with a character who we'll never see again. It's used to introduce Arthur in Camelot, Kailee (sort of) in Firefly, and I know I've Seen It A Million Times elsewhere.
Edited by NoraopenNo Title Live Action TV
What's the name of the trope where characters, typically in mysteries or other shows (Doctor Who in particular springs to mind) finish off each other's explanations? There was also an example in Black Dynamite and they parodied the usage of it in Star Trek The Original Series on Futurama.
openNo Title Live Action TV
"I'm Also Executive Producer": Lead actor of your show is getting a lot of acclaim. In order to keep him on board and not jump ship for a movie career or something, more and more creative control is given to the actor at each contract negotiation. Suddenly the focus of your show goes from an ensemble to focus almost entirely on the lead character. Said character suddenly becomes a paragon of virtue, practically a saint, and the other characters are reduced to being weak-willed or strawmen for the lead to triumph over. Often times an exodus of crew and supporting cast that wouldn't get with the program occurs. Examples: M*A*S*H=Alan Alda, Little House on the Prairie=Michael Landon, Andromeda=Kevin Sorbo
openNo Title Live Action TV
Is there a trope for the following character constellation? An eccentric and off-putting genius/expert partners up with a sidekick who is more down-to-earth and has to constantly excuse or shrug off the protagonist's weirdness. It's fairly common in crime procedurals. Off the top of my head: Life, Lie to Me, Bones, The Mentalist, Sherlock, The Dresden Files, New Amsterdam, Touching Evil (US), arguably Castle, arguably Pushing Daisies, possibly Raines (my memory is a bit fuzzy on that one).
The primary protagonist is usually male (in all above examples except for Bones) and an outsider, the sidekick/partner often female and an actual member of the police force. The sidekick can be The Watson, but doesn't have to be, just like the protagonist often, but not always, is a Defective Detective. Odd Couple and Opposites Attract don't seem to me to reflect that unbalanced dynamic, where one character is perfectly normal and well-adjusted.
Edited by tulipclaymoreopenNo Title Live Action TV
hey everyone. The front doors of people who are dead are often open or ajar even for no reason whatosever, like a suicide. Is there a trope for this? Cause if not there definitely should be, I can think of half a dozen examples off the top of my head.
openNo Title Live Action TV
Do We Have This One? If not I'm going to start a new trope for it.
In the "early days" of television, when there wasn't a signal on your set, or it was tuned slightly off the correct channel, you would see an effect called "snow", which was basically just random noise translated visually.
With the advent of cable television, a different sort of artifact appeared, when the signal wasn't coming in clear or was broken up. There would be rectangular blocks dispersed randomly throughout the picture, and the image would freeze momentarily.
Edited by JonnyBopenNo Title Live Action TV
I'm trying to find a trope for this fairly common situation: Person A is reading a magazine or newspaper, finds something interesting, excitedly says "Hey, look at this!", and hands it to person B. Person B looks at it and reads the title of something else on the page (usually something strange or inappropriate), and doesn't understand why person A wanted to show it to them.
openNo Title Live Action TV
I propose a trope, possibly named Black Leather Attitude, in which a character changes wardrobe into something butch, black, and leather in order to indicate the He/She Is Serious. Fo' Reals. This popped into my mind when watching the most recent couple of episodes of True Blood. Both Bill, who had been dressing like a Corporate Shark and Martonia, who as Marnie dressed like a Pagan Hippy (because she was one) changed into black leather coats before making their big moves.
Badass Longcoat doesn't fit because it's not a specific piece of clothing, and also, it doesn't mean they will be badass. They may fail horribly. But they are putting on the butch to show they Mean Business. It's not Dress Coded for Your Convenience because it involves a change from the character's usual wardrobe (possibly an almost-comical one). Possibly there's one that I missed. Thoughts? Examples?
openNo Title Live Action TV
A character whose profession is their character, in the sense that they do the same thing in their spare time, as if the writers can't conceive of a scene with that character that doesn't relate to their profession. Like say there's a character who's a mechanic by trade, and when he's shown on his day off he's fixing his own car. What is that trope called?
openNo Title Live Action TV
This is related to Special Effects Failure and is a form of Suspension of Disbelief, but I'm not sure it's a trope in and of itself. It's when actors pretend a set is a lot more than it really is, but the viewer can see the shortcomings. For example, characters will act like a chasm is insurmountable without devising some Bamboo Technology solution, but the viewer can tell that they could easily hop over it. Or when characters act like they've gotten separated and lost in a cavernous disintegrating cathedral, but you can tell the set's no bigger than a two-car garage.
Early Doctor Who practically ran on this trope, but perusing its page gets me nowhere due to the Trope Overload.
Edited by FloydPinkertonopenNo Title Live Action TV
I've seen this enough that I'm sure it must be a well-documented trope. I'll call it "Lonely Ladder" for now. The example I'm thinking of comes from the series John Doe, in the episode "Idaho". Without going into too much detail, a fake past life has been constructed for the amnesiac main character. Part of this Truman Show-esque setup is a kindly old couple posing as a friend of his family in this past life (probably at least one trope of its own, there). He visits with them in their home for a while, then leaves. Some time later, he realizes it was a setup and returns to the house, which is now completely bare. It's stripped to the walls and floorboards, not a speck of debris anywhere.... except over his shoulder we see one ladder supposedly left by the workmen in their hasty bug-out. It's obviously meant to convey a sense of some hurried and secret work having been recently done, but its so commonly used and the ladder always looks out of place in an otherwise perfectly cleaned out space. Who leaves a ladder, of all things, behind? Is this already a trope?
openNo Title Live Action TV
Is there a trope for women being catty toward each other? Like Cat Fight if it were limited to verbal sparring?
openNo Title Live Action TV
I've been thinking about something I see on Crime and Punishment shows a lot, where the cops pick up a guy during a murder investigation on something else, drugs, grifting, something, and to get the guy to talk, they say (almost invariably) "Hey, we're Homicide, we don't care about [unrelated crime], we're trying to solve a murder!" Sometimes they suggest that they can make the unrelated charges go away, or suggest that they'll try to hang the murder on the guy, but usually it seems like they're trying to put the guy at his ease, since if he thinks he's on the hook for [unrelated crime] he won't open up with info about the murder. And I don't think I've ever seen this guy turn out to be the murderer.
Anyone know what that's called?
openNo Title Live Action TV
Hello, first time caller.
Is there an existing comedy trope for what I think of as 'false pride or vanity', for example, a character explains to a person outside their group/community that they might not have much material possessions but they have their pride, and immediately following this something will happen to show them up as having no dignity, to give an extreme example their trousers will fall down.
openNo Title Live Action TV
New doctor who last week and thought of a trope and I cant think of what it would be on here, but it must exist. Basically when the characters are in a room with a major historical thing, but they ignore that for whatever it is they were doing in the first place.
Closest I could come was Completely Missing The Point
Edited by lonesharkxopenNo Title Live Action TV
Is there a trope for the stock plot in which a native american shows up at a construction site and we all learn an Environmental Aesop about respecting other cultures? Or something like that?
openNo Title Live Action TV
You're watching an episode of the kind of show that has an ongoing, (mulitple-)season-spanning storyline, and a lot of stand-alone episodes. You're relaxing, thinking this is one of the standalone episodes, surfing the net, not quite paying attention...
And then it all goes BOOM, as the standalone episode is revealed to be a large-ass mythology episode, with answers, new characters and questions, shit going down, the status quo changing, etc.
I, however, can't for the life of me remember what the trope is called. Help?

Are there any tropes about how multiple romance arcs tend to heat up and see some action at around the same time or during the same episode?