Hollywood Darkness / Live-Action TV

Straight Examples

General:

• It's always fun in older period shows like Bonanza or Little House on the Prairie to watch for scenes where a character extinguishes a lantern: the bright white studio lighting fades down and the blue "night time" lighting fades up.

Specific shows:

• There are many scenes in 24 that are meant to be set shortly before dawn, but were obviously taken during the middle of the day with a grey filter.
• A sketch from Bang Bang It's Reeves and Mortimer involving them being stuck in a car overnight at a gas station features an obviously fake blue filter to signify that it's night. Considering that it's Reeves and Mortimer that we're talking about here, it's hard to tell if this is an actual case of this trope or a conscious subversion/parody of it.
• Appears in Blood Ties (2007) when Vicki and Henry enter a barn at night and Vicki starts going on about how she can't see in the (well illuminated) set. There are two possible justifications: 1) Henry the vampire was facing off against a were-panther, both of whom had no problem seeing in the dark, so the audience was seeing it from their point of view, and 2) Vicki has retinitis pigmentosa, so it appeared darker to her than it actually was.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Utopia": Although the outside scenes on Malcassairo were clearly filmed at night, the planet is still surprisingly well-lit for being at almost the end of the universe with all the stars having burned out.
  • "The Vampires of Venice": The scene where the Doctor and Rory sneak into the House of Calvierri through the trapdoor is relatively decently lit, with blue light. Dialogue and actions make it abundantly clear, however, that the blue light is visible only to the audience.
• In Emerald City, the outdoor nighttime scenes are shot day-for-night with a blue filter.
• In Fawlty Towers: in "The Wedding Party", the studio lights take time to fade down when Sybil switches off the lights. In "The Psychiatrist", a scene when Basil sneaks into a dark room clearly has a light shining on the character in a bed.
• The caves of Fraggle Rock are awfully brightly lit for an underground world. But this is explained in a season 2 episode in which the Fraggles discover the existence of the Ditsies, tiny bioluminescent creatures who feed on music — yet another of the show's many inter-dependencies between species.
• In the 1960's TV show The Green Hornet the night scenes with the Black Beauty driving through town never looked right. Can't remember ever seeing actual shadows, but it didn't look like night.
• In the Haven episode "A Tale of Two Audreys", when the town experiences the biblical Ten Plagues, the plague of darkness is depicted with what seems to be the "full daylight, with a dark lens on the camera" trick or something similar.
• In Keeping Up Appearances, there are several moments when there is enough ambient blue light to see the time on an alarm clock in the middle of the night, before Hyacinth switches on the light and loudly proclaims her latest mad scheme.
• Downright jarring in Kindred: The Embraced, where vampires, walking around outside at what appeared to be 3 o'clock on a sunny afternoon, would urge each other to get to cover quickly, before the sun comes up.
• Hogan's Heroes has this over most of the series mainly because most of the team's work has to be done during night. It gets to comical levels when there's overwhelming light reflecting off character's faces in supposedly the middle of the night. Also times with sharp shadows and light sources that are supposed to be blinding while barely showing up on camera.
• One episode of Kings featured a blackout and street scenes were shot through a very strong blue filter. This only served to highlight the fact that they were shot during the day because characters' flashlights were clearly on but not illuminating anything. The bad quality of these scenes is only highlighted by the fact that the episode ends with a scene actually shot at night and it looks all the better in comparison to the rest of the episode.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The night battle between Southlanders and Orcs takes place in visible darkness with the help of torches that the Orcs carry to see better.
• In the opening multi-part episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers season three, the team is searching through a cave. Billy advises the group to look for any sources of light filtering through. Naturally, the fact that the cave is not even slightly dark and has plenty of light sources unintentionally makes this line freakin' hilarious.
• Many films shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 feature this trope.
  • Los Nuevos Extraterrestres shown as Pod People was atrocious in this regard. In several scenes, dialog indicates that it's supposed to be night, but it's obviously midday, and it isn't even blue filtered. Joel and the 'bots lampshade the mistake: "Night looks like day any time of day around here." To be charitable, this might just be an atrocious translation or editing error (presumably the scenes in question were shot day-for-night and the effect was never applied).
  • Ironically, Manos: The Hands of Fate averts it - the cast later complained that the lights necessary to film at night seemed as though they drew every moth in El Paso, Texas.
  • MST3K The Movie, featuring This Island Earth ^note which is actually comprehensible if you watch it in non-MST3K form, if not precisely great. features bad Hollywood Darkness that prompts Crow to remark that the characters are sneaking away "under cover of afternoon."
  • Crow riffed on this in the first ever episode:
    Crow: That's very well lit for the bottom of a crater of an abandoned volcano at the bottom of the sea.
  • Then there was the Werewolf (1996) episode which is neatly punctuated by Mike's comment:
    Mike: Later, in the middle of blue-filter night...
  • The Sidehackers did the same thing as Pod People, with the addition of crickets. As the characters are conversing in blatant midday, Crow and Tom end the characters' sentences with "at night," to hang a nice little lampshade on the whole thing.
  • Boggy Creek 2: And the Legend Continues showed a flashback of Otis Tucker's deadly encounter with the creature that was intended to be a nighttime scene, but the sharply contrasted shadows and Otis's dim flashlight mark it as underexposed daylight.
  • Attack of The The Eye Creatures (yes, two "The"s) takes this to another level and makes it a Plot Hole: The aliens can only attack at night because they're photosensitive, to the point of exploding if you shine a flashlight at them. Most of their scenes are shot during the day.
    Servo: The night the light-intolerant Eye Creatures' carried out their ill-fated invasion of the earth was actually quite a lovely day! In fact, you couldn't have picked a nicer day to film a NIGHT sequence!! Just after midnight, or high noon? You decide. You see, they just didn't care.
  • A few scenes in Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell are supposed to be at night, but you can't tell except by the in-movie dialogue.
  • In Girl in Gold Boots, the filter was occasionally only on the top half of the camera.
    Crow: Very sunny night.
  • In Gunslinger, this filter was used, but at one point, the sun was so bright, it gave Rose an unearthly glow, leading Tom to making the humming tune from Cocoon.
• Night scenes were shot uncommonly well in Our Miss Brooks. "The Burglar" and "Public Property on Parade" have nighttime scenes that are about as dark as you'd expect. Played straight, however, in "Wake-Up Plan" where the Conklins' hallway is suspiciously light.
• Night scenes in Robin of Sherwood were the worst of both worlds: it didn't look like night-time, but the filter made it too dark to see anything!
• In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Empty House", the titular building is extremely dark, but in the Granada Sherlock Holmes series episode of the same name, it is fairly well-lit.
• Star Trek:
  • The Interstellar space is generally pretty well-lit. Whenever the hero ship faces a power disruption, all the systems will go offline except for a few lights here and there and all you see is the ship vaguely silhouetted by its own running lights. In real life, such a ship would be lit as such all the time, at best.
  • The Voyager episode "Night" seems to establish that starlight also provides some illumination for ships. The ship travels through a pitch-black area of space and is barely visible except for its exterior lights.
  • Caves. Always so well-lit, even when there are no light sources anywhere. This was finally partially fixed in Star Trek: Enterprise, which used the blue filter.
  • Discussed in the TNG episode "Emergence" which opened with Data performing a scene from The Tempest on the holodeck.
    Data: Captain, your attention is waning.
    Picard: Data I can barely see you.
    Data: The illumination level is appropriate for the events being depicted in this scene.
    Picard: Data, this is a play. The audience has to be able to see you.
• In the Supernatural episode "All Hells Breaks Loose, Part Two" (S02, E22), the scenes in the cemetery are well illuminated despite the fact that it is nighttime with no light source, except for possibly the moon.
• The first episode of the second season of The Walking Dead put a filter on the camera that made everything dim and oddly orange to indicate night was falling. Also, people said "It'll be dark soon." Judging by the shadows the sun was casting, it was about 2 PM.
• On WKRP in Cincinnati Venus likes to have the booth dark when he's on the air, which is usually represented by a red light. On more than one occasion Mr. Carlson comes in and switches the lights on full, which temporarily blinds Venus.

Aversions

General:

• There is an old joke to the effect that you need an HDTV to make out what's going on in the average episode of The X-Files, Lost, or Supernatural. In the latter they occasionally throw the audience a bone and light it up a bit. And good luck watching any of them on a sunny afternoon. There's even an edit of the iconic "I WANT TO BELIEVE" poster from The X-Files saying "I WANT TO S E E".

Specific shows:

• In one episode of Batman (1966), the Monster of the Week has invisible henchmen, so Batman turns off the lights to even the odds, and the only thing the audience gets to see are the series' trademark ultra-visible sound effects.
• Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey has the ship of the imagination turn its lights on when visiting the orphan planet and the surface of Titan, which are both otherwise very dark places.
• In the 1990s revival of Dark Shadows, many of the night scenes were filmed during the day, and appeared as night in broadcast and on VHS. Unfortunately, transfer to DVD messed up the filter used and turned many of the night scenes into this trope.
• Doctor Who: In stories involving the Weeping Angels as the main villains, the Angels are able to move only if they are unobserved.... or completely unlit. When the Angels start disabling nearby light sources in the creepiest possible fashion, the screen goes completely black when they do so, during which time the Angels move. Since the camera usually counts as an "observer" in-universe (i.e. Angels can't move when they are on camera, either) except when it doesn't, averting this trope is pretty much required.
• Game of Thrones averts it, with illumination often provided by sunlight, moonlight, candlelight, and fire light. And nowhere it was more obvious than in the appropriately named "The Long Night", where a nocturnal, foggy battle whose visibility relied on sparse fire was deemed too dark in its original broadcast, bordering on incomprehensible, which was considered owing to both Demand Overload and uncalibrated televisions downgrading the footage quality. When discussing the episode's lighting, Vanity Fair even noted the usage of this trope in the comparable Helm's Deep skirmish in Lord of the Rings: "a blue-ish tinge is all [LOTR's cinematographer] needed to connote 'night,' but [GOT's one] had to deal with something much trickier." This problem has been solved on Blu-ray, where the image quality of the episode is clearer.
• The entire Halloween episode of Freaks and Geeks takes place in broad daylight, with the teenage troublemakers home well before sunset, because the directors were unwilling to use Hollywood Darkness and couldn't afford a night shoot.
• Hogan's Heroes. The area around them might be black, but the characters themselves are always well-lit.
• Huge has this problem, which makes the many night scenes a bit distracting.
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Dark scenes in the show actually are dark, so much so that all one can see are highlights, reflections, and the occasional flashlight blotting out the entire screen.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffs on this occasionally.
  • A scene in Clonus has an almost completely dark room with nothing visible but a lamp. In the episode riffing the movie, these pitch-black scenes frequently cause Mike and the Bots to make comments such as "Filmed inside a deacon's hat!" or "This scene must have been lit by an Indiglo watch", and at one point cause the trio to call and whistle for the movie as though it were an inattentive pet.
  • One brief scene of The Giant Spider Invasion is shot in near-complete darkness, prompting this riff in the experiment:
    Mike: But Mr. Rebane, you really can't see anything!
    Tom: Shut up, Mr. NYU Film Pants!
• A common criticism of The Pacific was that the night combat scenes were often dark and confusing (very much Truth in Television, as the Japanese were quite fond of attacking at night). The night attack during the Battle of Gloucester in particular stands out, as the action occurred at night in the driving rain. It was lit almost entirely by grenades and mortar fire, muzzle-flash, and the occasional flash of lightning.
• The exterior of the Red Dwarf spaceship in Red Dwarf is covered in shadows, and is only very dimly lit, presumably from distant stars. Space in general is very dark in the show as well.
• Fixed in the more modern Star Trek series, when the ship suffers a total power failure—the corridors are shown pitch-black, illuminated only by flashlights.
• A few episodes in the fifth season of The Walking Dead (2010) have very dark night/indoor scenes. Some viewers have apparently needed gamma correction just to make them watchable.

---