I am writing this during a (hopefully) once in a lifetime headaches, the kind that hurts everywhere. I can feel it in my stomach and behind my eyelids. A terrible movie is playing in the background and it has me wondering how much of what we see in film and TV is remotely original and how much of it corresponds to one version of a thing someone created and was successful and everyone else decided to copy for the sake of ease. The same is true of specific actors who become typecast, limiting what they are capable of doing to a fraction of what their actual skill allows.
I suppose the same can be said of writers.