In TV writing it's called a "Gilligan" when a character is like, "There's no way I would ever do [X] thing," and then it cuts to a shot of them doing it.

Molly Lambert and Chuck Klosterman discuss the upcoming and final season of Entourage. My favorite paragraph, from Klosterman, delves into the fundamental appeal of TV:

I think people are constantly trying to understand their own life and constantly trying to find meaning within that reality; this is an extremely difficult process, mostly because we're all shackled by a fixed perspective. We can only experience life through our own eyes and our own memory. But TV is not like this. When we watch TV, we are watching (a depiction of) life from a detached, outside perspective, and we're able to understand multiple experiences simultaneously: We can see Turtle's life as Turtle sees it, but we can also see how people view Turtle and how accurate Turtle's personal worldview is, and everything else that's happening in Turtle's world that Turtle is oblivious to. We are also watching something that was written with a definite beginning, an action-heavy middle, and a definite end (so a clear metaphorical meaning can always be deduced). It's almost like watching escapist TV is a way to unconsciously simulate our own hopeless attempts at understanding ourselves, except with all the answers outlined at the back of the textbook. The static predictability of Entourage suggests that it's somehow possible to understand actual life, and this feels good to people.