Adult Sitcom Tropes

Adults use children in drama as props, sensitive props upon which to pair off the so-called complexities of adult affairs. How many tender scenes depicting two adults engaged in so-called painful dialogue are intercepted by some child of theirs, seemingly catapulted out of nowhere and who's arrival signals the complete closure of the "dirty" "dark" "depressing" adult-talk? Suddenly the adults in these fictionalized portrayals decide to go all-smiles at the sight of the child with the subtlety of a painted clown face. What's worse is how the child is to remain oblivious to the crying clowns--which is what these adults are--and skip along merrily as if to fulfill every wish an adult could have about a child.

Children are perceptive. They are not as perceptive as they are often made out to be when adults wish to showcase their perceptiveness, but they are not the "runaround dunces" they are commonly depicted as in the sitcom world of adult wish fulfillment. As perceptive as they are capable of being, even adults eventually have to concede that as they grow, children do develop more direct ways to express their ability to decode the so-called "sophistication" of adult affairs. These are called "teenagers" in this same sitcom universe, and because adults have to accept that teenagers are no longer runaround dunces and have powers of perception, they choose to recast them as the enemy.

Runaround dunces are no threat to the adult's self-inflated perception of their importance, so they are more or less depicted as inconvenient playthings. However, teenagers, being also under the adults' power but capable of usurping them, are rendered as the enemy. The teenager has to be shown as an impetuous brat willing to call insurrection without warning if the adults so much as suggest anything to them. They must put themselves in jeopardy (they can never be depicted as right), and the adults must swoop on in and heroically rescue them from their own undoing. They usually finish out with a talk as if the teen has learned some valuable lesson in self-reliance. Such a thing is there to please the adult's conscience--it's really just a cover for the fact that the teen has come full circle and is now in complete deference to the adult's authority. The curtain closes. This is the only way these events can unfold on television, never in reverse.

Watching adult-centered fictional television is literally like watching one age group's self-serving skewed view of reality. All the other perspectives--the perspective of the runaround dunces and the perspective of the impetuous no-nothing brats are not considered. At the end of the day, only the adults must be satisfied, and the children, just satisfied that the adults are satisfied.

It is similar to the old television trope where each character is called upon to give an account of something, and we get to see each character's skewed recollection of events that cast them as the heroes and everyone else as the villains. In this case, adults love to cast themselves as the heroes, even as misunderstood heroes, and everyone younger than them (or older as the case may be) as the "enemy." Adult television, and all of it's assorted tropes, are propaganda for the 25 to 50-year-old demographic, and more importantly, their inflated opinion of themselves. To be egotistical is to be human. Adults just have the means to televise theirs non-stop, 24/7.