Movieline's intrepid Stereotypes Dept. has returned after an extended Thanksgiving vacation to pinpoint some of the more clichéd character generalizations made on television this week to both great and grisly effect. One was a penny-pinching landlord, one a high school delinquent and the third, a melodramatic soap star. Can you guess to which shows they belonged?
Cruel Landlords (The Office)
Stringy landlords everywhere must have been tickled last night when The Office writers piled the "cruel landlord" generalization on Scranton's pedidexterous Poindexter, Dwight, who happens to own Dunder Mifflin's office building. Those same landlords -- likely watching a television bought with your security deposit -- must have been inspired to see some of Dwight's inventive cost-cutting methods, like separating two-ply toilet paper into one-ply ("Don't get me started on how coddled the modern anus is."), cutting the tampons in two, watering down the soap ("Why do you even need soap? Are you that bad at going to the bathroom?") affixing faulty motion detectors to the lights and selling the building as office space -- to a company that advertised itself with cockroach art.
Instead of accepting these conditions, Pam -- as the company's new office manager -- threatened to move the company to a new building. When her plan was foiled thanks to an inconvenient non-truth, Dwight's assistant Nate -- spurred on by a slightly sentimental Dwight -- sold out his slumlord boss by slipping Pam a book containing the building regulations. Violations for everyone! Now if only you, frustrated tenants whose hot water has not been working for months now, could get your frostbitten hands on the commonwealth building regulations -- of if you landlord had a soft-spot for dirty blondes -- you could be saved, too.
Bonus Office stereotype quote from this week's episode, "China:"
"He really does fit that old stereotype of the smug gay Mexican." -- Jim, explaining Oscar's holier-than-thou attitude)
High School Delinquents (Bones)
In this week's episode of Bones, Booth and Brennan found a melting skeleton in a truck and infiltrated a high school to question the victim's wife, a teacher. While Booth did the interrogating, Brennan cruised by detention to investigate the more troubled student body. She played it cool, asking the angsty set innocent questions like, "You work repairing motorcycles, don't you?" and validating their moodiness with lines like, "You've probably been menstruating for several years." It was a smooth strategy that kinda worked with the Breakfast Club-ers who were either pregnant, potheads ("If I want to smoke, it's not Big Brother's business"), goth kids, bullies or products of broken homes. I'm not assuming that the rest of the wayward students were the products of broken homes -- one actually said, "I'm from a broken home! It's gotta count for something!"
Anyway, Brennan was smart to zero in on the delinquents because as it turned out, Ms. Broken Home killed the melting skeleton victim.
Melodramatic Soap Stars (The Colbert Report)
In tribute to the Days of Our Lives cast -- who has now resorted to melodramatically shilling products like Chex and Cheerios on-air -- Stephen Colbert and his Strangers with Candy co-star Paul Dinello acted out a brilliant scene between Stephen Colbert: The Character and his evil brother this week. Spoiler alert: the segment involved an urn full of Fresh Step cat litter and a heroic box of cereal.