A headline is the (hopefully catchy...) text that entices you to read the entirety of the article that accompanies it.
Headlines are meant to be colorful and attention-getting, and have traditionally been featured in printed newspapers, though they have been adopted by the Internet, as well.
Headlines -- from newspapers to tabloids to web periodicals -- have appeared frequently throughout cult-television history, and for good reason.
A headline blared on screen at the right moment is a good and economical way to reveal a plot point of great importance, without actually having to depict the event under discussion. A headline is enough to suggest an event of global and dramatic importance.
The televised Superman mythos, in particular, has often relied on headlines to help describe and reveal the achievements of the Man of Steel.
Since Clark Kent and Lois Lane work for The Daily Planet, it is entirely appropriate that many stories end with headlines revealing a criminal has been caught or captured, or that Superman has saved the day.
This trope was revised somewhat in Smallville (2001 - 2011), when Chloe edited the high school paper, the Torch, and maintained a "Wall of Weird." That wall featured every strange headline featured in the small town's papers since the meteor strike of the late 1980s. But Chloe also maintained an online version of the Torch, a sign of how much the world had changed since The Adventures of Superman (1951 - 1958) decades earlier.
In the 1980s, Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) discovered that he had been tricked by the Visitor leader Diana (Jane Badler) in V: The Series, in an episode titled "The Deception." There, a headline about Elizabeth, the Star Child, had a picture of her as a child, when -- as only Donovan knew -- she had actually transformed into an adult.
Tabloid journalism came fully into its own, it seems, in the decade of the 1990s, and in the era of Bill Clinton, Lorena Bobbit, and O.J. Simpson. Accordingly, The X-Files (1993 - 2002) often featured mock-up "tabloid" covers in its many episodes.
The fourth season episode "Small Potatoes," for instance, featured a tabloid story about "monkey babies" invading a small town. Another episode saw the fluke-man from the second season story "The Host" grace the same tabloid's cover.
Oddly enough, even the Star Trek franchise has hinged its futuristic universe on a good headline or two. In Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever," the headline "Social Worker Killed" was of crucial importance, because it suggested that the time line giving rise to the United Federation of Planets would not be destroyed by Dr. McCoy's alteration of the 20th century past.
Similarly, a column headlined "I'm Ready to Die: How About You?" threatened to have drastic repercussions throughout the Q-Continuum in the Star Trek: Voyager (1995 - 2001) second season tale, "Death Wish."
Recently, tabloid headlines have appeared regularly on the serial killer series, Hannibal (2013 - ). Written by gossip-hound Freddie Lounds, these headlines mock the F.B.I. investigation of the Minnesota Shrike, but also help to reveal a copycat killer.
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