Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Examples of Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped in Live-Action TV include:

  • In the Charmed episode Morality Bites, the lesson the girls learn could easily be applied to any cop or soldier. Might does not equal right. Just because you have the power doesn't mean you get to judge what it is right and wrong, who gets to live and die. As Phoebe said: "The wrong thing done for the right reasons is still the wrong thing."
    • The episode "Sight Unseen" dropped a rather good one about stalkers. The possibility that Prue has a stalker is the episode's B-plot while the focus is on the Demon of the Week trying to steal the Book of Shadows. That plot gets resolved early on and then the stalker plot comes back to finish the episode off. The sisters are criticised for having barely any security at home (and allowing the stalker to easily get in) and of course the fact that a normal human was able to overpower a powerful witch shows how much threat a stalker can actually be. This was made even better by having the stalker turn out to be a recurring character on the show rather than one of Prue's men of the week. It also dropped an anvil when the stalker turned out to be a woman.
  • The 1977 ABC mini-series Roots. The biggest dropped anvil in the history of television.
  • The Stone/AIDS storyline on General Hospital. It took risks such as having a prominent character (Robin, who grew up on the show) get diagnosed with HIV. It was also very educational at a time when HIV/AIDS myths were still widespread. Myths such as "only gays get it", "HIV is a death sentence", "you can contract it from casual contact", and "failing an HIV test means you don't have it", just to name a few. It was also one of the most emotional, well-written, and well-acted storylines in television history.
  • The Masters of Horror episode Homecoming is a brick-through-plate-glass rant against needless wars, and government corruption and duplicity. It doesn't just drop an anvil on the viewers, it drops a railroad car full of pig iron—and it only works because the message isn't hidden. Unfortunately, it spawned a Misaimed Fandom that were screaming about how Ann Coulter wasn't eaten by zombies...[1]
    • They also have Karl Rove's ersatz having his eyes gouged out and his head repeatedly slammed on a metal table until he dies. This happens 10 minutes after he says,

Kurt Rand: The three of us sold a war, dammit! We sold a war based on nothing but horseshit and elbow grease! We are the best in the goddamn game!
David Murch: It's not a goddamn game, Kurt!

  • The basic premise of Scrubs means that Aesops are going to occur every episode, but that doesn't stop episodes like "My Old Lady", "His Story", "My Screw Up", "My Life in Four Cameras", "My Way Home", and "My Musical" from being widely loved.
  • The Twilight Zone is essentially a series of anvil drops, with some of the most didactic, moralistic writing you can imagine. And it almost always works. One of the best is "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street". Anvilicious? Yeah. Still amazing, though? Hell yes. Rod Serling's bit at the end is especially moving.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own; for the children, and the children yet unborn.

    • The episode "He's Alive!" - in which Adolf Hitler comes back from the dead to 'mentor' an American fascist - can seem like Narm by modern standards... but when it first aired, the episode promped more hate mail than any other episode - 4000 people wrote in protesting the show's depiction of Adolf Hitler as a villain. There's a reason Rod Serling called that episode the most important one he ever made.

Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive.

    • Rod Serling was especially worried about Nazism, and history's gone on to show that he had good reason. The Twilight Zone episode "Deaths-Head Revisited" not only gives a former concentration camp captain his just reward, but also ends with what seems like an Anvilicious closing statement - but the surge of Holocaust denials since then has proven that this anvil can't possibly be dropped too hard.

There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.

    • "The Eye of the Beholder". So many anvils—one of which is in the title itself.

Now the questions that come to mind. Where is this place and when is it? What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm? You want an answer? The answer is, it doesn't make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence, on this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned... in the Twilight Zone.

    • "A Passage for Trumpet". The main character learns that while life can be a bitch at times, it also has plenty of good moments, if only you know where to look.

Joey Crown, who makes music, and who discovered something about life; that it can be rich and rewarding and full of beauty, just like the music he played, if a person would only pause to look and to listen. Joey Crown, who got his clue in the Twilight Zone.

    • Pick pretty much any monologue from Rod Serling at the end of any Twilight Zone episode, and it usually has some important message.
  • In the classic Star Trek: TOS episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", Kirk and co. pick up the last two survivors of a wartorn planet. Bele is an extraterrestrial cop who has been pursuing Lokai for thousands of years. When a perplexed Kirk questions Bele for the reason of their intense racial hatred, Bele replies, "Isn't it obvious? Lokai is white on the right side. All his people are white on the right side." Not subtle at all, but in 1969, an anvil that needed to be dropped, and hard.

Kirk: Death... destruction... disease... horror... that's what war is all about, Anan. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. You've made it neat, and painless. So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it.

    • Similarly, there are only two usual reactions to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Who Watches The Watchers": You either love it or you hate it. No matter which side you choose, it will likely be because of the episode's morals: Religions should be disproven wherever possible. Controversial? Yes. But for those for whom it works, it only works because of the anvil.
      • Another possible interpretation tof that episode's moral is that you should rely on your own ingenuity, your own courage and your own strength to change and grow and learn, not rely on a god of any kind to come along and make things right for you. Religion itself is not nessecarily a bad thing, it's only when you start using it as a reason to kill people or pass judgement in any other way that you have a problem.
    • Also the episode Measure of A Man, which puts Data up in court to prove his rights as a sentient being. Having Whoopi Goldberg deliver the message as bartender Guinan makes this especially anvilicious. But extremely well done.

Guinan: Consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that nobody else wants to do because it's too difficult or too hazardous. And an army of Datas, all disposable... You don't have to think about their welfare, you don't think about how they feel... Whole generations of disposable people.
Capt. Picard: ...You're talking about slavery.
Guinan: I think that's a little harsh.
Capt. Picard: I don't think that's a little harsh, I think that's the truth. But that's a truth that we have obscured behind a... comfortable, easy euphemism: Property. But that's not the issue at all - is it?

    • "Muse" is basically a plea for understanding from the writers of the oft-criticized series Star Trek: Voyager, showing how they're pulled between the desire to create meaningful works of art, the need to satisfy those paying their wages, and the demands of the audience for action and romance - all told through the point-of-view of a struggling poet on a primitive world trying to create a play from the logs of a crashed Voyager shuttlecraft.
    • Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) said to Gene Roddenberry (creator), "Star Trek is just morality tales" and he replied, "Shhh, don't tell anyone".
      • Hell, Nichols entire character is an Anvil That Needed To Be Dropped, since it was so uncommon at the time for both women and black people to be portrayed on television in roles with authority. Her character inspired Whoopi Goldberg and LeVar Burton into acting.
  • M*A*S*H might have been a simple dark comedy/dramedy set in the Korean War if not for the fact that the show ran during the Vietnam War. Alan Alda and the other producers said that they never wanted the show to be a contemporary commentary, but they wanted it to be about all wars, how it is supposed to be a miserable experience. The Vietnam conflict only made the feelings stronger.
    • The first really big anvil came in the episode "Abysinnia, Henry": Anybody Can Die. And they didn't even rely on just the force of gravity to drop it, either.
    • The Introduction of Col. Sherman Potter dropped the "it's about all wars" anvil even harder. Potter has fought through WWI, WWII, and Korea, and often reminisces about his experiences. In one episode, he mourns some old comrades:

Here’s to you boys. To Ryan: who died in W-W-One; the war to end all wars. To Gianelli: who died in the war after that.

    • He drops one himself in an episode where a specialist is brought in to inform the gang of new weapons, and the usual Class Clown antics push him to the limit:

Col. Potter: Lemme ask you this, if they can invent new ways to mutilate the human body, why can't someone invent a way to end this... stupid war?!

  • The last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth dropped the same who-would-notice-if-you-were-mad-in-war-because-all-generals-are-equally-mad anvil as Catch 22, but because it dropped it on the entire cast, mere minutes after the last joke, it achieved an epic anti-war message with its famed Downer Ending.
  • Law and Order Special Victims Unit: Olivia Benson's speech in the episode "Babes" about why teenagers shouldn't have babies is as anvilicious as they come. However, since the plot was Ripped from the Headlines about a club of teen girls who all wanted to get pregnant together, some viewers thought it a desperately needed anvil. (This was less true after the revelation that those headlines were false, the "pregnancy club" never existed, and the whole thing was made up by an assistant principal with an overactive imagination.) But that doesn't excuse the fact that 20% of all teenage pregnancies are planned.
    • Very similarly, the first season Law and Order episode "Life Choice" in which ADA Ben Stone prosecutes religious pro-life zealot Rose Schwimmer for bombing an abortion clinic and killing several people—including Mary Donovan, a teenage girl seeking an abortion who unwittingly carried the bomb into the clinic (having been working with Schwimmer's pro-life group, Schwimmer saw Donovan as a perfect patsy after learning she wanted an abortion). After Schwimmer proclaims on the stand that she believes murder is wrong and that abortion is a form of murder, Stone counters her ranting and raving with a very powerful line: "If abortion is murder, then no matter how you feel about Mary Donovan, aren't you guilty of the murder of her unborn child?" Schwimmer's face goes from a confident smile to a look of pure "Oh, shit" as she realizes just how badly Stone owned her. It's one of the best episodes of the entire L&O franchise, one of the most controversial episodes, and show creator Dick Wolf's favorite episode out of the entire series.
    • Another good anvil was dropped in an SVU episode, "Doubt", where the entirety of the case is a he-said/she-said... the actual verdict was omitted (filled in by a poll conducted among viewers and made canon from that), to highlight just how tricky some cases really are - particularly sexual crimes where the victim and the accused have known each other for a long time.
  • Quatermass and The Pit. "We are the Martians. And if we do not learn how to live together, this will be their second dead world". In the FIFTIES!
  • Titus, like Christopher Titus's stand up material, works to make every episode have some sort of moral to it. But it is never a Happily Ever After ending, they don't make any disposition to paint the world as anything but a crapsack kind. But if everything is going wrong, sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh. And if you are so primed and ready to get upset over every little problem, then what has your life become? One of the best examples of that comes in "Deconstructing Erin", where Erin returned to her soul-sucking family because Titus returned to drinking. He quit drinking and tried to get her back, and she tore into him about how his behavior ruined her life. He snapped back that you can't blame someone else for your problems, and if the person you love screws up, you throw them in a sack and kidnap them. You don't let them become self-destructive and destroy you in the process.
    • Another is "Tommy's Not Gay", that dealt with gay bashers and hate crimes. They hit everything from peer pressure to Matthew Shepard to Stupid Sexy Flanders moments to the social ramifications of coming out of the closet. By the end, Titus was explaining that everyone's a racist and we'd all prefer if the people we feel uncomfortable around were separated into their own little groups, pointing out "over there and over there and over there", eventually mimicking the Nazi salute. "You see how this can get out of hand."
  • Judge John Deed's episode "Popular Appeal" is very little other than one giant middle finger aimed at Big Brother (and shows of its ilk) and the perennial media circus that surrounds it. The BBC frequently airs repeats of it up against the Big Brother finale. The final summing up is what makes the episode, in which the producers of a reality show called Dungeon are made to face manslaughter charges after a contestant is killed on-screen (it's made fairly clear that that was the the producers' hope - Dungeon seems to amount to a more calculated version of the Stanford Prison Experiment). They were found guilty.

Deed: Celebrity! The pursuit of the talentless, by the mindless. It's become a disease of the twenty-first century. It pollutes our society, and it diminishes all who seek it, and all who worship it. And you must bear some of the responsibility for foisting this empty nonsense onto a gullible public.

  • Extras took on the "celebrity is bad" Aesop as well, but in a different way. The finale special is pretty darn heavy-handed in telling us that being a celebrity isn't worth it, if you've betrayed the only people who cared about you, celebrity or not. Making fun of Big Brother and their ilk in the process? Just bonus.
  • Full House teaches us that any problem can be solved by talking it through, that your friends and family will be there for you no matter what, and that any situation can be improved by a hug.
  • Nearly every segment of Rescue 911 leaves the viewer with an Anvilicious message on how those accidents could've been prevented. But really, some of that advice can help you protect your friends and family from those similar scenarios. Nobody wants to learn the hard way on keeping medicine locked in cabinets or not driving drunk under any circumstances.
  • Two much-needed anvils are a constant theme in the Life After People series. One is the old "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" warning against human hubris, because nothing we're capable of creating is going to last forever. And the other is, do not look down on the millions of blue-collar workers who trim weeds and plug leaks and operate utilities, because they're the only thing keeping civilization's handiwork from turning to rubble.
  • Police, Camera, Action!, an ITV production, has done this, not once, twice, but four times - in the episodes:
    • Helicops (both the 1995 and 2007 episodes of the same title) - about why you should not play on railway lines. Anvils dropped HEAVILY.
    • Life in the Fast Lane (2002 series) - why speeding is bad.
    • Under Surveillance - Possibly the most Anvilicious episode of the series.
    • Deathwish Drivers - Dropping an anvil on viewers like a ton of bricks.
  • Glee: In "Grilled Cheesus", true Christians love their friends and support them. And non-theists may not embrace faith, but they can sure embrace loved ones and come to peace with others' faith.
    • In "Furt," the school system MUST deal with bullying seriously. Sue Sylvester sugarcoats nothing, knows its reality, and does use her bullying experience (as the victim) to make her stronger. Nothing is talked down, just the firm reality of it.
    • In "Theatricality", no matter how much one (gay) person is being annoying, homophobia is never justified. Also, please parents wake up because it is also your job not to let it slide, no matter what it costs you.
    • "On My Way" showed exactly what kinds of pain can drive somebody to suicide and how much it hurts everybody around them.
  • The Battlestar Galactica series is full of anvils. The similarities to the War on Terror are not subtle, but are all the better because of it. The reason is that, while the similarities are not subtle, they are ambiguous in their rightness or wrongness, which leads to some very thought-provoking moments.
  • Dragnet became more erratic in quality and heavy-handed in execution as the years went by, but it often had strong aesops worth recalling:
    • In the 1968 episode The Big Departure, Friday and Gannon deliver a grand speech to the young anarchists about just how much they have gotten from the society they grew up in, and how much it protects them, and how difficult it would be to recreate what they have from nothing.

Sergeant Joe Friday: I don't know, maybe part of it's the fact that you're in a hurry. You've grown up on instant orange juice. Flip a dial - instant entertainment. Dial seven digits - instant communication. Turn a key - push a pedal - instant transportation. Flash a card - instant money. Shove in a problem - push a few buttons - instant answers. But some problems you can't get quick answers for, no matter how much you want them. We took a little boy into Central Receiving Hospital yesterday; he's four years old. He weighs eight-and-a-half pounds. His parents just hadn't bothered to feed him. Now give me a fast answer to that one; one that'll stop that from ever happening again. And if you can't settle that one, how about the 55,000 Americans who'll die on the highway this year? That's nearly six or seven times the number that'll get killed in Vietnam. Why aren't you up in arms about that? Or is dying in a car somehow moral? Show me how to wipe out prejudice. I'll settle for the prejudices you have inside yourselves. Show me how to get rid of the unlimited capacity for human beings to make themselves believe they're somehow right - and justified - in stealing from somebody, or hurting somebody, and you'll just about put this place here out of business!
Officer Bill Gannon: Don't think we're telling you to lose your ideals or your sense of outrage. They're the only way things ever get done. And there's a lot more that still needs doing. And we hope you'll tackle it. You don't have to do anything dramatic like coming up with a better country. You can find enough to keep you busy right here. In the meantime, don't break things up in the name of progress or crack a placard stick over someone's head to make him see the light. Be careful of his rights. Because your property and your person and your rights aren't any better than his. And the next time you may be the one to get it. We remember a man who killed six million people, and called it social improvement.
Sergeant Joe Friday: Don't try to build a new country. Make this one work. It has for over four hundred years; and by the world's standards, that's hardly more than yesterday.

  • The Disney Channel movie Sixteen Wishes is about a teenage girl on her 16th birthday and wishing that she would be treated like an adult. This results in a Be Careful What You Wish For story where she actually becomes an adult and learns that adulthood is not all it's cracked up to be. In our modern society where kids are growing up too quickly, especially with what's popular on the Disney Channel of all things nowadays, this could not be a more important lesson for kids and "tweens" to take to heart.
  • The Wire is generally considered to be one of the best shows ever, and part of the reason is because of how well and honestly it dropped its anvils, showing the ridiculousness and futility of the War on Drugs, that drug dealers are usually just teenagers to trying to get by, the world is not Black and White, and probably the most effective is when it showed how screwed up the city school systems are and how they are actually preparing kids for lives on the corners. Teachers and superintendents are more worried about test scores than truly helping the students.
  • Degrassi the Next Generation is fond of these:
    • Marco, the friend Spinner initially rejected because he was gay, was the first friend to take him back after the paint and feathers incident.
    • The school shooting in general:
      • Rick, the shooter, dies. Also, even though he was redeemed for abusing Terri, he never was accepted by her friends.
      • Jimmy and Emma for initially bullying Rick. Hell, the whole school. Jimmy loses the use of his legs, and Emma acts out of character.
      • Spinner, Jay, and Alex. Alex is a bit of a Karma Houdini, but Jay and Spinner are expelled. Spinner is also rejected by Jimmy. Sean accepts that Jay did it, but doesn't like the other things Jay did.
      • Sean, one of the few innocent parties, is the one who stops the shooting by killing Rick. He doesn't react well. Toby also loses his friend, but JT and Manny come back to him.
    • Paige's rape. Because it took her months to come forward, Dean was found not guilty.
    • Manny's abortion. This was actually banned in America, and mentioning it on the-n.com was a quick way to get banned.
    • Darcy's rape. She thought Spinner was scum for not being a virgin, and then she gets raped. She also claims her teacher raped her, and he almost gets fired.
    • Riley: Being in the closet about your sexuality is not an excuse for acting like a homophobic Jerkass or even just sitting by while your teammates make gay jokes at your gay friend's expense.
  • Breaking Bad makes no attempt to gloss over the effects that drugs have on not only the people who use and develop them, but the effects it has on their friends and families. If the show pulled its punches, it wouldn't be anywhere near as gripping.
    • It also deconstructs the idea that easy money actually exists. Walter's plan to get quick money went wrong in many ways, and even when things begin to look good economically for him, Failure Is the Only Option.
  • Supernatural: Lying to your family about super-serious affairs or secret deals is no good, okay?
  • The Speculative Documentary Earth 2100 talks about the worst case scenario that could occur if we continue to pollute and waste resources. The Green Aesop basically says "The earth is our home, and we should not take it for granted."
  • The episode of Party of Five where Julia discovers she's pregnant has a very powerful line from Justin:

"You know, just once it would be nice if someone asked if I was okay. This is my baby we're talking about as well"

    • It's a given in any episode dealing with unplanned pregnancy that the mother-to-be will get a lot of drama but how often do you see the father's side? The father is normally either portrayed as a deadbeat or the one responsible for the whole mess, but how many examples are there where the Anvil gets dropped that the father is just a kid as well.
  • The Winds of War and War and Remembrance showed so much of The Holocaust in their scenes that you want to take a bath in Brain Bleach. The producers thought it would be irreverent to present it any other way, and probably many viewers would agree. But let's just say that if you watch it you will agree that Stephen King is a wuss.
  1. ↑ But she WAS.
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