Genre Mashup / Live-Action TV

Examples of Genre Mashup in Live-Action TV

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Sorted

• Although we never hear it, Rastabilly Skank in Red Dwarf sounds like it should be a cross between reggae, rockabilly, ska and punk. These four being the soundtrack of skinheads of all political stripes, the mix appearing somewhere, sometime isn't as unlikely as it sounds. "Skabilly" is the closest real thing.

  • We do in fact hear it in the show very briefly: one track that Lister is playing in the bunk room, and the lines that Lister and Ace Rimmer sing ("'do you like rastabilly?'C'mon Dave, sing!").

• Crazy Like a Fox is one part Mystery of the Week, one part Sitcom. Not so surprising when you realize that it was co-created by the minds behind Three's Company and NCIS. Warden was even nominated twice for an Emmy in Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy.

Examples from Genre-Busting not yet sorted:

• The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was a science fiction/western with a lead who was best known for horror/comedies.
• Babylon 5 is spy story combined with Space Opera combined with Lovecraftian tropes combined High Fantasy combined with political drama.
• The BBC Historical Farm Series is part live-action historical crafts recreation documentary, part edutainment reality show starring and featuring actual experts on a specific historical period and the lifestyle of each era. It presents the concepts of living history and experimental archaeology in a very accessible, enjoyable and informative way, within a virtually period-enclosed visual experience, and without any sort of pandering to the audience or dumbing down of the overall presentation. No mean feat for what could have been an otherwise bog-standard documentary series.
• Behind Her Eyes starts out as a psychological thriller and then transforms into a paranormal Body Snatcher story in the final episodes.
• Bones is a forensics procedural romantic dramedy.
• Breaking Bad is simultaneously a crime saga, a family drama, a Black Comedy, a psychological thriller and a modern-day Western, all featuring a realistic Science Hero (well, Science Anti-Hero) in the lead, in one of the few examples of the trope that you'll find outside of a science-fiction work.
• Joss Whedon seems to enjoy this trope as evidenced by his past creations: a Drama/Comedy about Teenaged Monster Hunters and a Space Western.
  • He did this on purpose with Dollhouse. Ostensibly a sci-fi show, but dipping into pretty much every genre out there including romantic comedy.
• Castle, like Bones, is a Police Procedural romantic dramedy. They also like staging episodes around particular subcultures and bringing in various tropes of particular other genres as well; there's been a vampire episode, an alien abduction episode, a few political-spy thrillers, and so forth. Beckett's mother's arc is also a conspiracy thriller in most of the later episodes.
• Chuck combined spy thriller, sci-fi, family/workplace drama, romantic comedy, sitcom, mystery, and even musical (courtesy of Jeffster!). Really, was there any genre it didn't try out at least once?
• Community is definitely a sitcom. With every other genre mixed in with it.
• Doctor Who can quite literally be whatever genre it wants to be when it wakes up in the morning. In series 4 alone it went through comedic romp, family drama, military drama, historical fiction, Genteel Interbellum Setting murder mystery, steampunk, disaster film and horror, all mixed with sci-fi and fantasy fairy-tale elements.
  • And sometimes not mixed with sci-fi, back in the era of pure historical stories (at least, if you exclude the obvious Time Travel element).
    • And Series 5 throws in a Sitcom episode.
  • Even when they were promoting the first half of Series 7, they basically described the whole thing as five individual movies. In order, you had an Action-Adventure ("Asylum of the Daleks,") Sci-fi ("Dinosaurs On A Spaceship,") a Spaghetti Western ("A Town Called Mercy,") a low-key Disaster Film ("The Power Of Three,") and a psychological thriller with traces of a detective-noir mystery ("The Angels Take Manhattan.")
• Fringe similarly is an X-Files-esque procedural which mixes Government Conspiracy stories with a wide variety of science fiction plots, including Mad Science, alternate universes, aliens (well, actually hyper-evolved humans from the future but they're treated essentially like aliens), shape-shifting robots, and time travel, often with heavy dollops of action. About one episode a season also ended up being something completely different: these include a fairy tale, an animated episode, and an Alien Invasion episode which jumps 20 years into the future where the Observers are ruling the planet which turned out to be a preview for the plot of the next season.
• Jessica Jones (2015) is part character-focused drama and part neo-noir detective story, as well as a psychological thriller with horror elements, black comedy, and a deconstruction of superheroes. It's a show about a retired superhero turned private detective with PTSD, and is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but very deliberately Not Like The Avengers.
• Jupiter Moon was British Satelite Broadcasting's flagship soap, written in the style of the then-popular Austalian soaps Neighbours and Home and Away. It was also set 20 Minutes into the Future, on a space station orbiting Jupiter. While the reason it was cancelled was more due to the collapse of BSB as a channel than anything else, the consensus seems to be that it was too fantastic for soap fans, and too mundane for sf fans.
• Legends of Tomorrow is a time travel action ensemble show with a heavy dose of comedy due to our protagonists being Fish out of Water. It is also a Superhero show concerning these Rag Tag Band Of Misfits averting The End of the World as We Know It.
• The Mandalorian The climax of "Chapter 13: The Jedi" features a western-styled Showdown at High Noon between Lang and Din, while at the same time in the courtyard Ahsoka and Elsbeth have an eastern styled Samurai-like duel. Both duels draw very heavily from classic Samurai and Western genre films.
• Match Game in its CBS incarnation (it started in 1962 on NBC) quickly evolved into a comedy game and became the most popular comedy game of all time. There were others that came before (Funny You Should Ask, Hollywood Squares) and after (Tattletales, Rhyme and Reason), but with its question and answer material and a celebrity panel on their worst behavior, the CBS Match Game remains the Ur Example.
• NCIS is similar, but with little romance and more comedy. It's also very unusual for a procedural because of how heavily character-focussed it is even as it doesn't take itself terribly seriously and the actual personal arcs the characters get are limited. It's primarily about how their personalities affect their job and vice versa rather than how the cases are solved. The plots making sense can arguably be considered secondary.
• Psychopath Diary: Half of the series is a thriller about a serial killer. The other half is a comedy about a guy who mistakenly thinks he's a serial killer. The two genres sometimes combine to provide plenty of Black Comedy.
• Pushing Daisies classified itself as a 'forensic fairy tale,' with elements of fantasy, procedural mystery, romantic comedy, musical, and, well, what genre WASN'T it?
• Quantum Leap is basically the trope basically being about a guy who's continually moving through any kind of story the writers feel like.
• Resident Alien bills itself as "The sci-fi murder mystery doctor dramedy Earth needs now."
• While Star Trek is undoubtably science fiction (it could be said to be the Science Fiction), it has, like Doctor Who, also been able to mix in many, many other genres on a episode-by-episode basis. Several episodes (especially in The Original Series) are only science fiction because of the occasional tricorder or phaser.
  • And of course, Gene Roddenberry pitched it as Horatio Hornblower in space. This influence was picked up more heavily by Nicholas Meyer for the second movie which set the tone for the rest of the series.
• Stranger Things plays with this in that overall it's a 1980s throwback sci-fi/horror/adventure blend, but in the first season each of the main sets of characters experience a different kind of sci-fi/horror/adventure until they all end up joining forces in the last few episodes;
  • Mike and his friends are going through a supernatural Coming of Age adventure story; think along the lines of a slightly darker version of early Spielberg/Amblin Entertainment movies like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Goonies, and so forth;
  • Chief Hopper is tangling with a Government Conspiracy straight out of something like The X-Files;
  • Joyce is trapped in a paranormal psychological horror / ghost story like Poltergeist;
  • Nancy and Jonathan's experiences, where they're hunting/being hunted by an impassive and remorseless killer with borderline teleportation abilities, could almost have come from a Slasher Movie like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with a bit of Alien blended into the mix;
  • Eleven's experiences place her as the protagonist in a Stephen King-style story about an outcast with supernatural abilities battling to hold on to her humanity in the face of evils both supernatural and human (think Carrie, Firestarter, a bit of The Shining, etc);
  • Steve, for his part, has a bit of Wrong Genre Savvy going on in that he seems to think he's just in a typical John Hughes-style high school drama, until events quickly prove otherwise and dump him in the Slasher Movie Nancy and Jonathan are involved in.
  • Subsequent series shake up the genres the characters find themselves in while occasionally adding new ones. Series 2, for example, has Nancy and Jonathan take over the Government Conspiracy plotline while Hopper, Joyce, Mike and Will find themselves in the Stephen King supernatural outcast plot, Steve and the other kids find themselves dealing with a Ghostbusters-like supernatural investigation, while Eleven goes on a quest to discover herself, her past and how to control her powers similarly to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. Then everyone realises that they're actually in a monster movie sequel... only unfortunately for them, this time it's Aliens instead of just Alien.
• Supernatural is a fantasy/horror/drama/dark comedy with the classic Monster of the Week episodes playing like combination police procedurals and pulp mystery novels, the overarching plot straight out of epic poetry (particularly the Bible), and much of the character development for one of the main duo in the later seasons coming from a platonic love story.
• Warehouse 13 is an X-Files-esque procedural which combines fantasy, science fiction, and occasional horror with Steampunk elements, all mixed together with a heaping dose of comedy.
• The Wire: A crime show, a political drama, a black comedy, and in its late seasons, a grim coming-of-age tale and an exposé of the news media.
• The X-Files took archetypes and conspiracies from espionage shows and crime dramas, inserted them into plots about sci-fi and supernatural phenomena, and filmed it in horror/suspense style.
• Yellowjackets is promoted as being a mix of different genres. Among these are survival horror, teen sports drama, adult drama, thriller, mystery and even some dark comedy.