What are your thoughts on the “girl of the week” trope?

Then they would be like Coronation Street or Dr Who. Shows whose episodes were sequential often had a short catch-up at the start to help people who missed one.
Which used to happen all the time. Not everyone could afford a VCR, and not everyone bothered with them, and when we did they were far from reliable.

I would call "girl of the week" a format rather than a trope. It's ancient - collections of love poetry often had different poems addressed to different girls (e.g. Horace's Odes). + sensitivity: the format probably shouldn't be thought of as binary anymore
There are several subtly-different logics of composition: the OP probably isn't talking about collections where it just happens to be a different person so the name rhymes, or collections where the changes from poem-to-poem are structured in a way that imitates life, around an off-screen love-story.
This is where the person changes arbitrarily/regularly/artificially.

I'll try a structuralist perspective: it's so simple and bland that it can be executed in limitless different ways. So it could be made interesting. It's just repetition: we can do anything with repetition.

I can't think of stories where the love-interest changes from chapter to chapter - but there are those existential angst stories where the MC returns home and their partner is somebody different. Did American Psycho do something like that with the MC's victims being interchangeable anybodies?
Since the MeToo movement, I'd be suspicious of 'girl of the week' in 80s TV in case it was a way to line up a steady stream of victims for a Harvey Weinstein type figure in the background. Or more mundanely to prevent actors becoming established and commanding higher salaries.
Fortunately that type of concern doesn't come across into written stories. If MacGyver's portrayal of female characters was inherently problematic, repeating it weekly might have become nauseating. But I suppose its creators might argue the intended audience would have gone "uurggh" and flicked over to Transformers anyway - before lasting damage was done to their young minds. Some of the shows listed as examples wouldn't fall into "girl of the week", it was simply "crisis of the week" and a damsel-in-distress happened to be a common way of introducing crises. Still is.

Going back to Dr Who, it's not necessarily"girl" or "of the week" is it? The companions change over a longer timescale, and aren't love interests, and many of them were male (I think only 1 has been non-binary) - but it's the same phenomenon. One of the roles in the story is designed to be frequently-interchanged to allow it to adapt (and keep the pay down). I'm not a fan - I had a look at the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_(Doctor_Who) and there seem to have been some long periods where they were all female, but I think this is enough to show that "girl of the week" is really a subset of a larger and basically gender-neutral and non-problematic format. It might be argued we are offending ourselves by looking at "girls of the week" in isolation from "persons of the season".

 

Can you edit poll titles after submission in this forum?

 

I hope not. Just in case someone swaps “Are you in favour of improved healthcare?” to “Have you ever burned someone to death?”

 

Is the poll title different from the thread title? I think the only thing you can edit under Thread Tools is the thread title.

I see, the poll title is different. I don't know if you can edit that or not.

 

very true indeed, but there were just typos that I caught in the title I wanted to fix.

 

I accidentally wrote “girls on the week”, instead of “girls of the week.” I would like to have “on” fixed to “of”.

 

I kind of hate this format tbh. It gets stale pretty fast.