Detective Drama Tropes you Wish they'd skip

[Kreepture]

Been watching all the Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, Frost..etc series on ITV x recently, and i've spotted a few tropes they like to use, but there's a couple i'm really fed up of.

1. The new love interest turning out to be the killer/bad guy

2. Families of the dead refusing to answer perfectly reasonable questions/being hostile.

Feckin annoying teenage son/daughter who adds nothing to the plot except to show how harrassed and stressed and “torn between duty and family” the main female detective is. Irritating teenager then shoehorned into the plot at precisely the wrong time to create some pointless jeopardy for harrassed female detective. And at no point does female detective shout “ I AM AT WORK!!!” when whinging teenager is going off on one.

Annoying teenager adding nothing to the plot is my current irritation - ruined The Jackel for me!

The rapidly declining person in their nursing home bed will snuff it halfway through telling the detective something terribly important.

The lead detective has a relative who was murdered. Can't stand the episodes where it's personal.

The ending is usually the arrest rather than the conviction.

Drawing pins with bits of string connecting all the Important Data on the detectives' bulletin board.

Or, in more style-orientated shows, detectives fiercely writing the Important Data on glass partitions, presumably using special glass-partition markers. (Was this just a 90s thing? Don't see so much of it now. Prob all done on spreadsheets.)

Has the sexual tension between the two leads been mentioned? The moment they get it on you know the shows going to be cancelled

Endeavour did a corker on that one.. it was a murder hotel, on a dark and snowy night!

I don’t know who their phone provider is but given how dreadful their signal is I don’t want to use them!

Police are so rude hostile and mean to their colleagues.

Also when visiting witnesses etc on opening the door they often sigh and say “you’d better come in then” with a boot faced expression. Surely no one would be that rude to someone’s face?

There's also the protagonist in the Grace series, at least in the good marriage stakes - though he has a complicated background concerning his ex.

Or one of them will be dead before the end of the show.

I haven't seen Grace!

When there's an emergency like stopping their suspect before he gets on a plane, they always have to do an incredibly stressful drive to the airport. They can't possible text a photo and details to the airport police and leave it to them.

I'm old skool and still love 'MURDER' in a Scottish accent 🇬🇷

Also when someone phones the detective and tells them they've got something important to tell them which they can only say to them in person, then that individual will certainly die before the detective gets to meet them.

I recently watched a brilliant series on Netflix about cold cases.. Dept Q, and that was one of the annoying tropes in that!

It also had a divorced/troubled detective, but that was a massive undercurrent plot line to the whole thing so I let it slide

Fab show.. loved it, just so much cliche dotted through it!

Or the detective says something and the person says ‘oh, I need to go’ with a look of discovery and realisation on their face. They will of course be dead the next time we see them and the detective will say ‘you know, I think they may have known something’

Reminds me

lawyers always know stuff and are nefarious

The targets of stalkers/predators inevitably living in homes with HUGE uncurtained floor-to-ceiling windows, and leaving all their lights on while they wander about the house so the predator can watch them from the pitch-black garden

Most people who are spoken to are exceptionally arsey with the police and walk off to carry on doing whatever it was they were doing. Who behaves like this in real life? Well apart from those who have regular dealings with them I suppose.
I realise I have led a fairly sheltered life but if the police came to ask me questions I would probably be dribbling and too terrified to move off the settee.

When two detectives are interviewing someone in their home, one of the cops will always say they need the toilet. They do not go to the toilet, they creep upstairs, open a bedside table drawer and find a photo of the murder victim in a compromising pose.

Whenever they drive anywhere, they can always find a parking space right outside their destination. You never see them wasting 20 minutes desperately trying to find a vacant space.

Whenever you see a character digging, they will find a body. Ditto when you see them taking their dog out for a walk, particularly if they're walking through woodland or across lonely moors.

Sidekick always has a fucked up marriage due to the demands of the unreasonable and selfish lead character.

Oh, and Silent Witness taught me that forensic pathologists are much better at detecting than actual police.

Police cars never run out of petrol.

And the suspect will go to look and just as you think they’re going to be caught the detective pops up coming out the loo despite the fact it wasn’t physically possible to do so

This is amazing 😂

Yep and they are all the same brand, without any knocks or bases or sticky labels over the old labels😁