Cliche Alert!

The fabulous website 101 Reasons to Stop Writing is celebrating its Clichepalooza, which you simply must check out if you ever plan on writing anything.

But what cliches do we find in TV? Oh, where to begin?

• A sitcom set in a workplace where we encounter wacky customers.
  
• A sitcom where a fat working class guy is married to a woman much slimmer and more attractive than he.
• Dedicated cops go to any lengths to track down a killer/bring back the missing/solve the cold case.
• Dedicated doctors break the rules to help a patient.
• Dedicated doctors who break the rules to help a patient and endanger the lives of others and yet are allowed to go on being doctors.
• The super evil killer who is evil for no reason.
• The super evil killer psychoanalyzed to death to show us why s/he is so evil.
• Psychics who see dead people.
• Dream sequences used to explain the real feelings of our protagonist. Usually these employ Freudian cliches, or cliched Jungian archetypes, or are just wacky for no good reason because hey! We love the wacky.
• One partner believes with a passion in the unexplained while the other believes only in science.
• Everyone in high school is thin, has great fashion sense, and has perfect teeth.
• The kids in high school with braces, zits, or who are virgins are outcasts or geeks.
• Our hero's got a dark past, but now he's gonna redeem himself. But he's got to use what he learned in the dark time to do it.
  
• Starting with a violent incident (an airplane crash, a bank robbery, a woman running through the streets in nothing but a trenchcoat with blood all over her), then using extensive flashbacks to very slowly begin to explain how this all happened.
• She's a woman in a man's world.
• Educated and professional women acting like idiots over men.
• Characters who are best friends getting together romantically over the course of a season. It was meant to be!
• This one little carpet fiber will lead a killer to justice.

You see where I'm going? That's just off the top of my head. There are many more. Try to keep these in mind when you're writing. Truth is, if you're succesful, you're going to employ some of these cliches because TV is all about familiarity. But please, take your preferred cliche and give it some sort of original twist. You'll be original for a few minutes, until four shows copy you.