TV Tropes
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50 free TV Tropes trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Once you learn to spot a trope, you see it everywhere: the minor crew member who will not survive the mission, the season that turns out to be a dream, the stunt that tells you a sitcom has run out of ideas. Many of these devices have nicknames, and most of the nicknames have a story behind them, often a single episode, film or comic that did it so memorably the label stuck. This quiz covers the tropes themselves and where their names came from, the tricks of the television trade (cheap episodes, recycled footage, surprise recasts), the critics and fans who coined the terms, and the wiki that set out to catalogue them all. Most questions are about sitcoms and dramas, with detours into film, game shows and video games. It is written for anyone who has fallen down a trope rabbit hole at two in the morning, and for viewers who simply like knowing why things are called what they are. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up a story or two even when you guess.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sitcom's Fonzie water-skied over a shark in 1977, inspiring a phrase for shows past their best?
Happy Days
Happy Days built the stunt around Henry Winkler's real water-skiing skills. Radio host Jon Hein and his college roommate coined 'jumping the shark' in 1985.
Q 02Which director popularised the term MacGuffin for the object everyone chases, starting with The 39 Steps?
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock said the MacGuffin is what the spies are after but the audience doesn't care about. The word itself came from English screenwriter Angus MacPhail.
Q 03Which Russian playwright advised that a rifle seen on stage in act one must later go off?
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov gave the advice in several letters to young playwrights. His own play The Cherry Orchard breaks it, with two loaded guns that are never fired.
Q 04Which nickname for a doomed minor character comes from the uniforms of Star Trek's security officers?
Redshirt
Redshirt security guards kept dying on landing parties beside the heroes in the 1960s series. The comedy spin-off Lower Decks has junior officers adopt the nickname for their club.
Q 05Which prime-time soap erased a whole season by revealing Bobby Ewing alive in the shower?
Dallas
Dallas explained Patrick Duffy's return by making all of season nine a dream of Pam's. Spin-off Knots Landing ignored the twist, and Bobby was never mentioned there again.
Q 06Fans of which 1990s sci-fi series called themselves 'relationshippers', giving fandom the verb 'to ship'?
The X-Files
The X-Files fans who wanted Mulder and Scully to become a couple took the name around 1995. It shrank to 'shipper', and the verb followed within a few years.
Q 07Which measure, born in a 1985 comic strip, asks if two women in a story discuss anything but a man?
Bechdel test
Bechdel test rules first appeared in Alison Bechdel's strip Dykes to Watch Out For. She credits the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and prefers the name Bechdel–Wallace test.
Q 08Which Star Trek character's bearded double in 'Mirror, Mirror' made the goatee shorthand for an evil twin?
Spock
Spock's mirror self is more ruthlessly logical than the original but far from evil. Even so, a goatee on a familiar face now reads as an instant clue to a wicked double.
Q 09Which film director narrates Arrested Development and later appears in it as a version of himself?
Ron Howard
Ron Howard recorded the voice-over for the first episode, and it suited the tone so well that he stayed. He was also an executive producer and had the original idea for the series.
Q 10Which 1993 Bill Murray comedy made its title a byword for being trapped in a time loop?
Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day never explains why weatherman Phil is stuck. Writer Danny Rubin felt that leaving out the cause made his plight easier to relate to.
Q 11Which term, coined on The Outer Limits, describes a cheap TV instalment using few actors and existing sets?
Bottle episode
Bottle episode comes from producer Leslie Stevens, who pictured pulling a show out of a bottle like a genie. Friends liked one so much that it then made at least one every season.
Q 12Which kind of episode, stitched from excerpts of earlier ones, did The Simpsons spoof with host Troy McClure?
Clip show
Clip shows are also known as cheaters in animation. The trick dates back to 1936, when a weather-delayed Republic film serial padded itself out with two recap chapters.
Q 13Which term names a scene shown before the title sequence, as Saturday Night Live has done since 1975?
Cold open
Q 21Which 1960s sitcom replaced Dick York with Dick Sargent as husband Darrin after five seasons?
Bewitched
Bewitched had to recast because a 1959 film-set accident left Dick York with a severe back condition; he collapsed during filming in January 1969. Dick Sargent was cast that same month.
Q 22Which Bruce Willis detective series fed the belief that uniting the romantic leads ruins a show?
Moonlighting
Moonlighting's ratings slide is popularly blamed on Maddie and David finally getting together in season three. The leads then spent most of season four apart, which hurt it further.
Q 23Frasier Crane was meant to last only a few episodes on which sitcom before earning a spin-off?
Cheers
Cold opens were rare on American TV in the early 1960s, and half-hour sitcoms almost never used them before 1965. In horror films the pre-credit scene often claims the first victim.
Q 14Which advertising phrase flagged a sitcom tackling a serious social issue, as Diff'rent Strokes did in the 1980s?
Very special episode
Very special episode promos peaked in the 1980s, but the format emerged in the 1970s with Norman Lear's socially conscious sitcoms and often opened with a viewer discretion warning.
Q 15Which term describes episodes of an existing show that launch a new one, as JAG did for NCIS?
Backdoor pilot
Backdoor pilot episodes 'Ice Queen' and 'Meltdown' introduced Gibbs, DiNozzo, Abby and Ducky on JAG in 2003. NCIS later used the same trick to launch its Los Angeles and New Orleans spin-offs.
Q 16Which word is often traced to silent serials such as 1914's The Perils of Pauline?
Cliffhanger
Cliffhanger may owe its name to episodes shot around the New Jersey Palisades. Despite the popular image, Pauline was never tied to the rails in the serial.
Q 17Which 1980s hospital drama ended by implying that all its events were imagined by a boy holding a snow globe?
St. Elsewhere
St. Elsewhere closed on autistic Tommy Westphall and a snow globe holding a model of the hospital. Its characters crossed into other shows, so fans argue much of television lives in his head.
Q 18Which mystery drama's third-season finale revealed that its apparent flashbacks were really flash-forwards?
Lost
Lost hid a clue to the twist in plain sight: the funeral parlour Jack visits is called Hoffs/Drawlar, an anagram of 'flashforward'.
Q 19Which sitcom added young Cousin Oliver for its last six episodes, a ratings ploy later named after him?
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch brought in eight-year-old Oliver because its own kids were all twelve or older by then. 'Cousin Oliver syndrome' now describes any fading sitcom that adds a cute child.
Q 20Which TV series was the original focus of the TV Tropes wiki, founded in 2004 by 'Fast Eddie'?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was its first subject, but the wiki now catalogues tropes in films, games, fan fiction and even history. Its pseudonymous founder sold it in 2014.
Cheers producers first offered the part to John Lithgow, who turned it down. Kelsey Grammer then impressed them so much that a brief guest role became a regular one.
Q 24What do characters break when they address the audience, a notion traced to an idea of Denis Diderot's?
The fourth wall
The fourth wall was simply a huge wall across the stage when Diderot described it in 1758; critic Leigh Hunt gave it its number in 1807. Ferris Bueller breaks it all through his day off.
Q 25M*A*S*H's creators persuaded CBS to drop which sitcom staple from scenes set in the operating room?
The laugh track
The laugh track stayed out of surgery as a compromise, because Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds wanted none at all. On BBC2 in Britain the series ran with no canned laughter.
Q 26Which 1950s sitcom was the first scripted show filmed on 35 mm before a studio audience, using three cameras?
I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy hired cinematographer Karl Freund, who had shot Metropolis and Dracula, to make it work. Lucille Ball wanted a live crowd for the comic energy she had found on radio.
Q 27Which TV detective's cases show the murderer at the start, a format nicknamed the 'howcatchem'?
Columbo
Columbo popularised the inverted detective story, where the puzzle is how a known killer gets caught. His wife is another running device: often described in detail, never once seen.
Q 28Which 1990s sitcom's makers worked under a rule that its characters would never hug or learn anything?
Seinfeld
Seinfeld co-creator Larry David wrote George Costanza as his own alter ego. The rule kept upbeat endings rare, except when they came at somebody else's expense.
Q 29The no-lose 'Xanatos Gambit' is named after the scheming billionaire of which 1990s Disney cartoon?
Gargoyles
Gargoyles villain David Xanatos plans so that a setback in one part still wins him another goal. He also never takes defeat personally and regards revenge as foolish.
Q 30Which name for an impossibly perfect character comes from Paula Smith's 1973 Star Trek fan-fiction parody?
Mary Sue
Mary Sue was the heroine of 'A Trekkie's Tale', written to mock the idealised female characters who filled fan stories of the day. It ran in the fanzine Menagerie.