Plot/storytelling device i am so sick of: Back from the dead. A staple of soaps that's worked its way into primetime dramas. Fans of television shows have gotten so used to it that when a character dies, the fans always note if the death took place onscreen or not or if anyone ever saw a body.
Even Farscape had just about every character "die" and come back. Sometimes it was cliched but other times they at least appoached it with some creativity or twist (with scifi, you can get away with that a little more). In the show's fourth episode, there was a character who was able to breathe life back into Rygel (no mention of this creature or race was ever made in the saga again) but doing that so early in the series just kind of took away the impact of mortality knowing it was possible for a creature like that to undo death.
As much as the cliche gets overdone, what will work my last nerve is when writers feel "it's a cliche so no one will mind" is when a character who's been shown to actually be dead beyond doubt is brought back. That's the laziest kind of storytelling and it insults the audience. It says "don't bother investing in our stories because we can set the reset button anytime and anything we've done in the past doesn't matter". Farscape did this a couple times with Scorpius and didn't even try to explain how he managed to survive a situation and it was a particular letdown from a show with normally such smart writing.
Many of you know, ever since One Life to Live became the subject of cancellation rumors in September (and the daytime drama genre dying), i've been actively involved with fan movements to keep it going before any actual announcements or official decisions. While i do feel their current head writer is one of the show's all-time best and that OLTL is one of the best-written shows on television in any genre, at the same time i'd be trying to spread the word about how well-written it was, Ron Carlivati did some uncharacteristicly lazy and sloppy writing choices including bringing back one of the show's most notorious villains, Mitch Laurence, back from the dead. While his current presence is a goldmine of story possibilities, it's also a turn-off to fans who actually care about plausible continuity and storytelling - since this is his second return from the dead. The first time he was dead, it was firmly established that he was indeed dead - having been shown crossed over to the afterlife! Last time he died, Todd Manning did so many things to his dead body to be sure he "stayed dead this time" that it was as if the writing regime at that time was saying to the viewers "yeah, we know we abused the storyteller/audience faith with his return but now we're making up for it by showing that this time we MEAN it!" But now that he's back again, it's beyond insulting to the viewers.
It didn't help that at about the same time, they abused another sacred trust. Television children in pretty much all genres - dramas and comedies - are often rapidly aged (there's an actual term for this: SORAS - Sudden Overnight Rapidly Aging Syndrome - when a young character suddenly is a couple months or years older). This happens so often that fans generally accept it as long as it's done within reason - you don't make a baby a full grown adult overnight and you keep all the other ages of the other characters relative...a younger sibling doesn't become the older of the two for example. OLTL did a major disregard of this with what fans have taken to calling "The Seven Year Old Teenager" - Todd finds out he has a child from when he was stuck on an island seven years ago where he ended up due to a plot to kidnap his two children he lost custody of went awry. But when they revealed his island child (despite many recent mentions of being "seven years ago") the child in question was not only a teenager...but OLDER than one of the children Todd tried to kidnap leading to the events surrounding her birth!
Two blatent disregard of the viewers' intelligence and devotion to following the stories - i was personally furious as i was trying to defend and promote the writing of a show that was temporarily engaging in the worst kind of story ruination. Thankfully the show got back on track and has since returned to its high quality writing, but those two major missteps happening at the same time did insult a lot of its longtime fanbase and caused people to tune out hurting its ratings further.
When television writers do Back From the Dead stories with a character that has been shown to actually be dead and not just presumed so - or engages in any other massive rewrite that disrupts the continuity of everything that's been previously established, it insults the viewers and gets people to turn against them. Any short-term benefits outweight the long-term damage. Viewers will engage in a certain level of suspension of disbelief - but you have to still be plausible with what's been established in the story/universe you've set up.
When the new Melrose Place debuted with its main story showing a character that had died on camera in the previous series now alive...and killed off right away as the focus of its major first story arc - i knew MP 2.0 would be a trainwreck of a disaster. I was right.
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