A lot of my favourite stories and characters take a very basic, common idea and then go further with them than any reasonable person would. It’s something us Shield fans tend to like about that show – it takes the Mountain Dew XXX-treme aesthetic so popular at the time it premiered and then follows it to somewhere beautiful and weird and fascinating, and I like that it burns through all the obvious plots a cop show would come up with until nothing else remains. A lot of us like to describe it as finding out what’s past the genre. Not every show gets there through drama; I enjoy Hannibal as an exaggeration of the basic conceits of the network cop procedural that were inspired by the very works that it acts as a prequel to; a veneer of forensics (both chemical and psychological) that acts as a gateway to surreal horror at the pain people can inflict upon each other, except Hannibal abandons any pretence of realism in favour of both macabre and beautiful imagery. It feels like this is what CSI or Criminal Minds would be if they didn’t bother kidding themselves.

It’s something that ends up a part of a lot of stories I like. Futurama has a classic comedy structure, but it relies on you knowing all the classic bits and then zigging when you expect it to zag; I feel that Oppenheimer uses a lot of classic biopic cliches and then deploys them faster or more frequently than you’d expect. I’m thinking particularly of the flashes of scientific process, something we’d see in any biopic but thrown at us almost randomly and inn the middle of conversations, showing how they are always on Oppie’s mind.

What are stories that you feel push basic or common ideas until they break?