(I scanned through all of TV Potluck and didn't find a topic that covers this topic.)

How many absolutely horrible TV show episode descriptions have you seen in TV Guide or other places? Or conversely, great and spot-on episode descriptions?

For example, the Army Wives description in TV Guide for yesterday said "Roxy learns a secret about Marilyn", or the more expanded version also included "Pamela gets bad news about Chase". Now, I realize how hard it is to come up with 6-word descriptions (or 12-word descriptions) about ensemble shows with multiple storylines, but please, at least highlight the main storyline(s) instead of minor plot points or the B-level storylines.

There was that Lost episode where Sawyer gets a haircut, where ABC's release made sure to point out that Jack gets jealous about it. That was a five second silent part of a montage in the episode.

I remember the series finale of Perfect Strangers had an episode description like, "Larry and Balki go for a hot air balloon ride," but the real plot was their girlfriends/wives giving birth (I think Balki was trying to induce labor by putting his lady in a hot air balloon).

In my newspaper, the TV critic described the Smallville's finale for season six as "Clark finds out why Lana married Lex". No mention of the Martian Manhunter, Lionel, or Chloe. That told me how much he cared about this show. LOL!

I like the ones for Trading Spaces. "A living room and a bedroom get updated." No! Really!

I remember when TV Guide actually gave paragraph descriptions of TV shows, before it was all spoilers and gossip.
Best description I ever saw was in the TV Week supplement of my Sunday paper for a showing of one of the Friday the 13th sequels: "Jason goes after another batch of slow-moving teens at Crystal Lake."

From last Friday's episode of Hollyoaks, I think in London Lite (Spoiler barred for US viewers):
Clare suddenly wakes up from her coma.
It's the word "suddenly" that does it for me.


Heh. The best I've ever seen was ages ago in the paper's brief reviews of the week's films. There'd be a short sentence about the plot and then a one or two word statement about the quality. Then there was the one for a cable film and it just said: "Increasingly painful."

When I was in elementary school, every Thursday morning before I'd go off to school I'd look at mom's TV Guide to see what that night's Simpsons was going to be about. I read:

"Martin gets a maid...."

as one night's episode description. I remember for a split second thinking that Bart's classmate Martin Prince got a maid and that was going to be the episode. Turns out I had accidentally read the description for that night's Martin.

Over the credits of the previous show, TNT used to have a short description of the episode coming up, but the ones for Law and Order were sometimes extremely vague. "A murderer fights to stay out of jail." "McCoy tries to convict a killer." "Detectives pursue a man who killed his wife."

Regarding L&O: Mothership, while I've stopped watching it, it used to be a case where all you needed to know what what was in the local news. For example, when people trying to cash in on insurance "faked" their deaths in 9/11, you just knew Dick Wolf would throw together a story about it. And he did. He's also done an hour on sports figure who kills a family member. I could go on and on.

One episode of Good Eats had the summary: "A look at the gyro." Scintillating!

Way back in 1995, for ER episode "Love's Labor Lost"

"Ross has a date"

Um, no, he did NOT. That was not the plotline (primary, secondary, tertiary, last minute filler) of that episode in any way, shape, or form.

Perhaps scenes were filmed that were later cut, but as someone who has seen that episode a million times (along with the rest of us), I have no idea how that kind of an episode description was sent to the TV guide people.

My all-time favorite was for a show on VH1 a few years ago featuring the rapper Nelly, who was looking for a spokesmodel for his new line of "Apple Bottom" jeans. If you can't guess what type of woman Nelly was looking for, the description on the DIRECTV guide certainly helped:

"Nelly and company search for a girl with an irregular waist-to-bum ratio"

For Star Trek: The Next Generation:

The Enterprise encounters a fascinating new lifeform.


Well, that narrows it down.

I'm not understanding what's wrong with "suddenly"? Is it because you think it is unnecessary/redundant, because waking from a coma is always sudden?

Well, actually, I've read that the way they depict it on TV with people going from completely in a coma to completely awake all at once is not how it happens in real life. In RL, coma patients awaken slowly and gradually.

So "suddenly" is a meaningful adjective in this case and I'm not sure what your objection is?

Perhaps the thought of someone "suddenly" going from in-a-coma to fully-alert is funny precisely because it is, as you point out, completely unrealistic.

I work for one of the largest providers of television listings, although I don't write the listings themselves. There is a word limit on descriptions, and as more TV listings books move to the grid format, those limits have gotten smaller.

The listings are written from press materials provided by the networks, and some are more detailed than others . Fox, CBS and CW show descriptions are very thorough. NBC's are less so, and most of ABC's, for scripted shows anyway, are very bare-bones -- not much longer than what would go into a grid. Generally the people who write the episode descriptions our people work from haven't seen the episode, especially if it's new. It's not always discernible to our writers or to the press release writers which plotline in an episode is the most compelling.

BTW, I remember a Mad magazine bit from the late 1960s or early '70s in which TV show descriptions were illustrated literally. Example: "The Lawrence Welk Show": Lawrence salutes composer Cy Coleman with a collection of his hit tunes. Illustration was Coleman holding an armload of record albums (collection of his hit tunes) and Welk saluting, military-style.

Hmm, well, maybe it would be better for someone who knew something about the episode to write the description of it?

Yes, sorry, this is what I meant. I didn't express myself well. It just kind of conjoured mental picture of someone going from completely comotose to sitting up and asking for a cup of tea. I dunno, might just have been me.

The New York Times has some great descriptions of shows and movies in its tv guide. The movies are usually better than the TV shows and it is obvious that the person has seen and not liked the films. From today's paper:

Dead before Dawn: I faked my death for the FBI
Eight Below: Orgy of canine cuteness
Dirty Dancing: Coming of age one 60's summer in the Catskills. Sweetly seething, like Swayze's samba

My all-time favorite was from the extremely small t.v. grid in the daily paper, for an episode of The X-Files: "Conspiracy." You don't say!

I've got one for the "Oh REALLY?!"/"You don't say!!" column: A few years ago, when TV Land started showing The Andy Griffith Show, they had the following description for *each episode* on the DirecTV grid...

"A widowed sheriff raises his son in a small town."

The powers that be at the Simpsons have complained that the Fox marketing people will always try to market an episode that's being aired as a Homer episode or a Bart episode, even if those characters only play a small part in it. (Apparently Homer and Bart are the two most popular major characters.)

In the DVD commentary for the fifth season episode Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy, they describe what had to be the worst example. That episode is an attack on dolls that give young girls the impression that being beautiful is the only thing that matters, and the plot involves Lisa taking on the Malibu Stacy company when they invent a new "Talking Malibu Stacy" doll that says things like "Thinking causes wrinkles!" and "Don't ask me, I'm just a girl!" It's probably the most earnestly feminist episode in the show's history.

The Fox marketing people, assuming that a story about Lisa and the existence of a sexist doll wouldn't appeal to the public, created an ad that described the episode by saying "A new sexy doll arrives in Springfield!" and the visual alongside it was Bart looking up a Malibu Stacy doll's skirt. Even though Bart has only a couple of lines in the entire episode.

On my digital cable description for a Reba episode today, it says that Van and Cheyenne's bickering at work has the boss sending them to an "occupational therapist." Unless Van and Cheyenne are bickering over their problems with fine motor skills, I doubt that's the type of therapist they would be going to.

On the other hand, there's a description for an episode of the long-gone The Brady Brides that, I suspect, encapsulated the episode exactly by saying, "Jan brings home a stuffed bear that roars when its nose is pressed." All you can do with that kind of lameness is tell people, so I think that annotation is stealth genius. It doesn't even need a subsequent "No. Really."

A few years ago, I saw a listing for Top Gun on the Preview Channel which went something like "Air Force cadets compete for a spot on a precision flying squad".
On the one hand, I can understand why someone who only dimly remembered the movie would describe it like that. (They're actually Navy, and not cadets, and they're going through a training course vs. auditioning for the Thunderbirds. ) But don't movies come with standard blurbs? ("Navy pilots compete at an advanced flight school.") Why would the Preview Channel have to rewrite it?
Not a huge deal with a movie like Top Gun, which everyone knows, but it makes me wonder about possible mistakes in descriptions of movies I haven't seen. What if I accidentally wind up watching "Riding the Bus with My Sister" because "Two sisters learn about life while traveling by bus" sounds kinda interesting? ;)

Amazing Race blurbs are usually uninformative:
"A racer makes a wrong turn." That usually means that someone went the wrong way for one minute before turning around.
"Tempers rise during a roadblock." One racer snapped at another, then went on with life.
"A detour pits teams against each other." Doesn't it usually?
I've come to the conclusion that if I saw it in a TAR blurb, it WON'T affect the outcome of the race. :)

Back when I was still watching The Simpsons, what I noticed FOX would often do with their promos was the first time an episode was shown they'd do a full promo all about some aspect of the story, perhaps the main "A" story, perhaps not, but then later in the season when the ep. was rerun, they'd run an entirely different promo all about a completely different aspect of the ep, either a "B" story, or the A story they neglected to mention last time, or they'd do a whole promo revolving around the one quick one-joke cameo scene Moe had that week, and they were always careful to never come anywhere near anything they mentioned in the promo for the previous airing of the episode, all clearly designed to obscure the fact that this was a rerun.

Anyway, my favorite ep. description was the one for the S3 Doctor Who episode "Gridlock" which came up when I hit the "info" button for it on my DVR, which read thusly:



I suppose that could be a reasonable accurate description of the first five minutes, if by "sinister pharmacists" they mean cheery, happy-go-lucky, loveable street vendor drug dealers, and by "rule the streets" they mean sit inside kiosks and cheerily hawk their wares like 19th century paperboys. After those bizarre opening moment, the rest of the episode concerned itself with Martha being kidnapped, shoved in a van, and taken onto an expressway where they're imediately swallowed up by a massive traffic jam full of cars & people that have been stuck motionless on that road for 24 years, with no way to get back off

...OK, maybe "sinister pharmacists" sounds a little more exciting than "Martha gets stuck in traffic" (although did I mention that they're all flying cars stuck on an expressway in the sky like in The Fifth Eleement? Yeah, I know, it's still pretty dumb.) The point is, they took one quick throwaway (if preachy) gag at the begining of the episode which shouldn't even make it into any press release about the ep. and made the whole show about that.

I gave up on The X Files when I realize that EVERY SINGLE episode had one of the following descriptions:

(1) Mulder and Scully find proof of alien existence
(2) Mulder might find out what happened to his missing sister
(3)Scully might find out what happened when she was abducted.

Took 30 episodes in a row of this for me to realize I HATED it.

How about this favorite from ER?

A (a)________________ at a (b) __________________floods the ER with patients.

Place any type of event in space (a)---flood, riot, fire, explosion, shootout.
Place any type of location in space (b)---nursing home, concert, school.

Congratulations, you've just written/described your first ER episode! Bonus points is you can throw in © ____________struggles with personal demons.

Put any character in space ©.

BondGirl, I do believe you can throw in:

(d) _________________ struggles with family issues when his/her ___________ (mother, father, sister, brother, child, grandparent, cousin) goes to the ER.

LMAO. I was just coming here to post about L&O. Once they were running an SVU marathon, and the summaries were all lined up as follows:

Detectives investigate a beating/rape.
Detectives investigate a rape/murder.

One thing I have noticed on the digital cable "info" option is that if they don't receive a detailed summary, they will have a back-up description of the show itself. For The Young and the Restless, for example, they will offer the episode title ("Nikki goes back to Stripping") followed by a few plot points (of which one will typically, annoyingly be "Nikki goes back to stripping"). If they don't receive it, they will automatically insert "The number one soap for the last twelve years and running, this soap is set in Genoa City" or something like that. The more annoying thing is that this description was written many, many years ago. Y&R's been #1 for eighteen years!



The silliest thing I recall about the old TV Guide descriptions was how you could always figure out who the killer was on Murder, She Wrote because he/she would always be the first actor listed in the "Guest Credits".

This always bugged me since it reveals the entire plot...

Little House on the Prairie's "May We Make Them Proud" aka (BBR episodes): A fire at the blind school claims the lives of Mary's baby and Jonathan's wife. Now grant it, that episode is one of the most fun to make fun of (I've done it on mulitple occassions) but when reading a episode description, I hate it when they tell you the entire plot in one sentence.

Yeesh. Doesn't anyone have CONSENSUAL sex anymore?

Something else about L&O:

"Ripped from the headlines"

Yes, we know. THe show has been on for 50 years, we know this is how you get the stories.

Soon to be followed by some variation on "the L&O twist".

I can't remember the last time the completely innocent looking/acting person or the special guest star wasn't the guilty party,

I am in love with this description and am sad that it's not really true. Kinda makes me wish blurb writers could just come up with any odd idea that struck their fancy, and the writers had to create the episode from there.

Personally I've stopped reading blurbs unless the show is a rerun. Spoiler free all the way! Shows are generally written to unfold gradually, build suspense. But if you know - for example - that the villain on this week's Supernatural is vampires, then 15 minutes of subtle inferences about sexualized/predatory club kids feel like a waste of time until you get to the good stuff. Which, sometimes it is. But for a good show the buildup is a rewarding as the action. So my policy with TiVo is to look for the little ( R ) at the end of the description before reading the rest of the text.

My cable once described the movie "I'll be home for Christmas" as being about "a doctor is asked by the mayor to work at a rundown clinic." Which it totally isn't. Like, there aren't any doctors or clinics or mayors in the entire damn movie. It's just completely and utterly incorrect.

There might be another, probably older, movie with that same title, and when this new movie came along some computer program just went back, found the description of the older movie, and automatically slaped it onto the new one.

That happens frequently on my cable system, and it'll actually confuse episode titles and movies occasionally.

Just Monday, TCM listed "Flesh and The Devil" with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. But they were showing "The World, The Flesh and The Devil" with Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer. Pretty clearly a software glitch that grabbed the first title that almost matched the keywords.

iMdb lists three movies called "I'll Be Home For Christmas":

• 1988: Courtney Cox, Peter Gallagher, Hal Holbrook -- Small town, WWII, family, bittersweet, but warm fuzzies.
• 1997: Ann Jillian Robert Hays and Jack Palance -- the mayor and the town council look for a doctor willing to run the town's clinic.
• 1998: Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Jessica Biel -- A college student experiences difficulty in getting home for Christmas.

So someone keyed in the wrong year and it grabbed the wrong synopsis, or they didn't give it a year and it took the first one it found.

Oh, okay. I've only heard of the '98 one, which was also the one that was airing.

A couple weeks ago the Knoxville TN CBS affiliate preempted NCIS to show a special called "Inside the Orange". I checked the descriptions given in tvguide.com, the Comcast guide, and the TiVo guide, and they all said something like "an inside look at the Syracuse football and basketball programs". Now why the heck would they think Knoxville people would be interested in Syracuse sports? I was curious and watched the first few minutes of the show. It turned out to be a local show about Tennessee basketball. I guess they borrowed the title of the Syracuse show (orange IS big here) and forgot to change the description.

DishNetwork's DVR episode descriptions strike again. Even though I have it set to record only new episodes, my DVR recorded a rerun of a recent episode of Life On Mars this afternoon. Checking to see which one it was, the description read:



Two minor problems there; Maya, the girlfriend, is in 2006, not 2007 (there's a time travel element to this show), and slightly more significant, *Sam* is the main character who battles bigotied reactions from other detectives and receives messages from his girlfriend in the future, "Gene" is the Neanderthal 1973 detective who leads the charge in the bigoted reactions and racism that Sam has to battle against.

This isn't an EPISODE description per se, but I think this is a good thread to bring it up...

My dad got all incensed just yesterday at our onscreen guide. ESPN classic often shows classic boxing matches. However, rather than just putting the year and the fighters in the description, they say who beats who and the EXACT time in the fight that the KO happens (i.e. "with 1:37 left in the ninth...") What's the point of even watching the match? Crazy cable company.

On the Family Guy Vol. 1 DVD for the episode "Fifteen Minutes of Shame," it says that when the Griffins star in their own reality show and Meg gets kicked off, she "becomes a nanny for children like the Von Trapps." Yes, the show has referenced the Sound of Music but that did not happen in the episode.

Edited because capitalizing movie titles is good.

"BloodMonkey," on Sci-Fi. I don't care what the description is. It's called BloodMonkey. With the M capitalized, mid-word.

This thread is hilarious.

One of my favorites was for House:

"House tries to cure a patient who has a secret."

Virtually every episode of the show. Seriously.

I saw this one the other day:

"Monk must catch a killer."

Well, that narrows it down.

I think this would make an excellent premise for a new reality show.

Kind of like how they write the punchlines first, then develop the jokes. I nominate “Beep beep ribby ribby” for the first one.

From the TV supplement in my local paper:


Short on space? Severe ADD? We'll never know.

The episode title is better than most episode descriptions.