Drivin’ N’ Talkin’
Posted on | October 6, 2005 at 5:18 pm | 2 Comments
This is another in my series of TV/movie conventions I’m tired of. I guess previous entries in this series are here and here.
Today’s “What Planet Are They On?” TV Cliché: The End Of The Drive Car Conversation.
How come whenever two people are in a car and have something really important to discuss, they always wait until the drive ends and have the conversation inside the car while it is parked at its destination?
The most recent occurrence of this that I witnessed is in the pilot episode of the new Night Stalker, which I finally got around to watching last night (not recommended, BTW – nothing we haven’t seen before, dull, too fake-stylish/serious, and pretty much nonsensical – no humor like in the old show). In that scene, hero Kolchak is with heroine/sidekick Perri-with-an-I, played by Gabrielle Union, whom I’m sure looks much better and is more fashionable than most crime beat journalists at metropolitan newspapers. She had just inadvertently betrayed him to the FBI. He stopped the car and she suddenly started the conversation with “Sorry about that whole FBI thing, that wasn’t what I meant to do…” and then they have an intense discussion about their lives blah blah blah. So what the heck were they talking about for the rest of the drive? The price of gas? The latest Dodgers game?
I guess we’re expected to think that they both sat in smoldering silence for the entire drive, and it took the end of the drive for one of them to finally break the ice. And I can see that happening occasionally in real life, but it seems to happen far more often on TV. One reason is perhaps that they don’t want to spring for the extra bucks for a fake driving/conversation scene (those rolling backgrounds projected on a green screen sure must be expensive). But the real reason is probably because of that other famously maddening TV driving cliché: Whenever people are shown actually driving, there will be an accident. (Or a monster will reach into the car and pull someone out.) That one is especially true on soap operas.
Anyway… keep a watch out for this one. Once you know about it, you see it everywhere.
On another matter, I’ll be real interested to see if Katie Holmes suffers from postpartum depression after the eventual birth of her sure-to-be Vole-ish offspring, and what she does about it. Hopefully it will involve a frying pan aimed at her future husband.
Latre. My 108 minutes is about up, so I gotta go hit that button.
Comments
2 Responses to “Drivin’ N’ Talkin’”
October 10th, 2005 @ 2:40 pm
Agreed, Kolchak was a complete disappointment (or would have been had I expected much). They’re just trying to dust off the X-Files; it’s about as funny as a water bill compared to the old series.
I’m glad Darren McGavin isn’t around to see this… oh wait, he’s not dead? He even had a cameo in the pilot? Egad.
October 12th, 2005 @ 11:07 am
That McGavin cameo looked so out of place that for a minute I did think he was dead and they just photoshopped in some footage of him from the old show.