I don't mean misleading covers/titles, like Dragons in the Waters or The Young Unicorns, neither of which feature dragons or unicorns but which never suggest that they will in the book itself. I mean when the book promises to be about something, and then never really engages with or features it.
Right, exactly! It's not a failure of the book if the title/cover is clearly metaphorical, and if some offhand reference to something the author never meant to be important sounds more interesting to me than the entire rest of the book, it's probably just that I'm a poor fit as a reader.
But Wiseguy is such a good example of a show that never fails to use its premise to the fullest. If there is ANY opportunity for Vinnie and Frank to pretend not to know each other, or for characters sneaking around in which each of them has about 1/3 of the relevant information, or for Vinnie's ordinary life to collide headlong with his undercover life, they are gonna ride that as far as it'll go. The writers clearly love undercover tropes, and mafia tropes, and you never get the impression that they've pulled back from something interesting that might otherwise have happened.
As opposed to, say, that Mrs. Pollifax book where she hides out in a carnival and they joke about having her go undercover as a fortune-teller and then everyone's like "haha, but of course we wouldn't do that" and she goes and does something way less interesting instead. WHY DO YOU TORMENT US, DOROTHY GILMAN.
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Right, exactly! It's not a failure of the book if the title/cover is clearly metaphorical, and if some offhand reference to something the author never meant to be important sounds more interesting to me than the entire rest of the book, it's probably just that I'm a poor fit as a reader.
But Wiseguy is such a good example of a show that never fails to use its premise to the fullest. If there is ANY opportunity for Vinnie and Frank to pretend not to know each other, or for characters sneaking around in which each of them has about 1/3 of the relevant information, or for Vinnie's ordinary life to collide headlong with his undercover life, they are gonna ride that as far as it'll go. The writers clearly love undercover tropes, and mafia tropes, and you never get the impression that they've pulled back from something interesting that might otherwise have happened.
As opposed to, say, that Mrs. Pollifax book where she hides out in a carnival and they joke about having her go undercover as a fortune-teller and then everyone's like "haha, but of course we wouldn't do that" and she goes and does something way less interesting instead. WHY DO YOU TORMENT US, DOROTHY GILMAN.