Elevators, babies and my eventual cultural relevance
Posted by Dan June 25th, 2008 at 12:14pm In All Things TV
I can’t really say that I’m very accomplished. This grows more and more clear as I near 30 and find myself dreading my college’s alumni magazine (where they show the various weddings, higher education degrees and career accomplishments made by my peers). It’s not that I don’t want my friends to be successful, I just don’t want them to be more successful, more quickly than me.
But whatever, man. I’ve got a blog that’s read by… well, more people than can fit in a phone booth. I can pretend that I wield media influence. After all, this isn’t a Livejournal or a Blogspot– this is a dot com. We’ve got our own URL, suckers.
Anyways, I want to make my mark on society by creating a phrase that can be incorporated into the pop culture lexicon. This is something I can put in my obituary. So, this entry is the beginning of a series (I’ve just decided that — like now) where I throw out terms I made up and see if people unexpectedly start using them.
My first one is thus…
Elevator baby (noun, adjective) – a catch-all term for a time-worn plot device that has been repeated time and time again.
Sitcoms have used the device of having hapless men deliver babies in elevators for years. It’s been on Doogie Howser, M.D., Saved by the Bell — heck — even that God-awful Private Practice (although they’re doctors — they should know how to do this). I want the term “elevator baby” to refer to an uninspired, phoned-in plotline.
Often these elevator baby devices involve confined spaces (being caught in a storage facility/walk-in freezer), but the term can apply to anything. The replacement of a dead hamster to fool a child, etc.
Here it is in a sentence:
It was a generally strong season, but a few episodes suffered from elevator baby plotlines.
Another:
Two and a Half Men is the worst. Every episode seems to be an elevator baby.
So, there you have it. This is the key to my fame.
8 Comments Add your own
1. Joan | June 25th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I want to try to jump on board with this one.
I love Ugly Betty, but it is becoming an odd dichotomy of completely far-fetched twists and elevator baby predictability.
2.
sara | June 26th, 2008 at 11:03 am
7th Heaven also had a literal elevator baby. And the hapless man delivering it was the delivering woman’s brother. Ewww.
3. Michael Rebain | June 26th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
I don’t recall if we had an “Elevator Baby”, but a friend and I had an ongoing discussion about the sitcom we were going to pitch. We would star as ourselves it had a generic title like “Out of Control”, and each episode would be one of the great sitcom cliches. We’d have the episode where the out of town relative would think that one of us was some important bigshot and we’d have to try and make it appear if that was the reality. We’d have the bowling alley episode and the one about the misheard medical diagnosis. We had the trivial argument that spirals into a case in court and the Halloween party where everybody is in a professionally made costume (and no two costumes are the same!). I know we came up with a season’s worth of episodes (and I mean 26+). We even had two Christmas episodes: the “Scrooge” AND the “It’s a Wonderful Life”, although I can’t recall which of us was which.
4. the TV addict » Blo&hellip | June 29th, 2008 at 8:42 am
[...] Remember that episode about the helpless dude who delivered the baby in the elevator? Oh yeah, that was every series ever. By that token, Dan decided to coin the term “elevator baby” and cement his role in pop culture history. (TiFaux) [...]
5. This Week in TV Blog Bant&hellip | June 30th, 2008 at 9:17 am
[...] Remember that episode about the helpless dude who delivered the baby in the elevator? Oh yeah, that was every series ever. By that token, Dan decided to coin the term “elevator baby” and cement his role in pop culture history. (TiFaux) [...]
6. TV Blog Coalition: June 2&hellip | June 30th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
[...] Remember that episode about the helpless dude who delivered the baby in the elevator? Oh yeah, that was every series ever. By that token, Dan decided to coin the term “elevator baby” and cement his role in pop culture history. (TiFaux) [...]
7. BillC | June 30th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Oh, I really LIKE your “elevator baby” nomenclature. The “elevator baby” episode history goes back at least as far as the old “All in the Family”/”Archie Bunker’s Place” shows in the 70s.
It usually comes after the “An ‘Old Flame’ returns” and “Mistaken for Gay” episodes.
8. TV Blog Coalition: June 2&hellip | July 1st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[...] Remember that episode about the helpless dude who delivered the baby in the elevator? Oh yeah, that was every series ever. By that token, Dan decided to coin the term “elevator baby” and cement his role in pop culture history. (TiFaux) [...]
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