Hickey focused on her as she leaned out across the parapet, looking at Sullivan like a moonstruck girl hanging from a balcony in some cheap melodrama.

It makes me sound like a stock character in a cheap melodrama.

The mechanics of cheap melodrama!

Another note says that if the scene "smacks of cheap melodrama and that's too much for you to bear, skip a few pages ahead.

Federal and state officials all over the country are trotting out welfare fraud cases like cheap melodramas to prove changes are necessary.

But like any idea, it gets simplistic when carried too far, and late in Boogie Nights it explodes into cheap melodrama.

At his worst, he becomes a lazy, perfunctory writer of potboilers, allowing his natural inventiveness to devolve into cheap melodrama and cliches.

But Rufo is as full of dire forebodings as a cheap melodrama.

Such cheap melodrama is forbidden by Protectorate codes.

We're actually in England circa the late 1950s and the '60s, when a studio called Hammer Films was churning out cheap but ritzy-looking Gothic melodramas.