Sick, Sad Subculture of the Week: Difference between revisions

** This also gets annoying when Sweets (the psychiatrist) "analyzes" the subculture in question, and ends up pretty much generalizing the entire subculture and assuming everyone who's a part of it thinks and acts exactly the same.

* This trope would be incomplete without mentioning "Next Stop, Nowhere," a.k.a, "the punk rock episode of ''[[Quincy]]''." In the 80's hardcore punk subculture, the episode spawned the slur "[[The Quincy Punk|Quincy Punk]]," applied to scene members and bands who personified the sloppy, antisocial, mohawked stereotype. This was at a time when hardcore was about dressing normal, playing tight, and maintaining a positive or at least thoughtful attitude.

* One ''[[Pushing Daisies]]'' episode focuses on a murder at a rent-a-friend agency. The actual customers are portrayed sympathetically, but Ned eventually decries the whole enterprise as useless, because while the patrons may enjoy it for a time, "deep down they never stop thinking of themselves as weirdos who need to be fixed".

* Most crime shows can attest to having had a vampire-related episode at some point of time. ''[[Criminal Minds]]'' even did some namedropping by referencing ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]''.

** ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' also did an episode about vampire wannabes. It starts off as a funny [[Take That]] against ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'', but, this being Supernatural, suddenly gets a lot darker, {{spoiler|when Dean discovers the vampire themselves are pushing the recent vampire obsession, to get more willing victims for a vampire army}}...

* An episode of ''[[The Mentalist]]'' featured a young Wiccan (a new-age form of witchcraft) who naturally came under suspicion when one of her peers was killed in a ritualistic fashion. An especially aggravating case as half the facts spouted about Wicca [[Did Not Do the Research|were blatantly wrong]]. Neopagan religions often appear in shows like this, and rarely do the writing staff seem to feel any compulsion to actually research them first.

* The [[The Sixties|late-60's]] revival of ''[[Dragnet]]'' used the hippie counterculture as recurring freaks-of-the-week in a number of poorly researched episodes. The most infamous of these is the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0zgIzqgxFU "Blue Boy" episode], for its [[So Bad It's Good|spectacularly]] [[Narm|narm-y]] take on LSD. Joe Friday references in dialogue the notorious urban myth about teenagers tripping on acid blinding themselves by staring at the Sun.

** Special Victim's Unit seems to have a particularly strange deficiency in this area. As well as the example above, the cops who are supposed experts in this field often seem ludicriously ill informed about even the most general sexual behaviour and cultures. In one episode, several of them express incredulity over the theory cited by a colleague that a man might be gay even though he has a wife. And in another episode the idea that someone could be bi-sexual rather than straight out gay seems to be bizarrely unheard of, sparking more astonishment from the characters.

* Arguably the whole point of the [[MTV]] reality show ''[[True Life]]'' is to subvert this, they visit the lives of people involved in various subcultures regularly.

** More often than not, it winds up as a double-subversion.

 

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