I am usually pretty good at suspending my disbelief but this takes me right out of the show there was an example of it on TheMentalist last night.
You are a detective in a big city. You are following the clues and realize its a red herring. The killer is actually going after your partner/mother/girlfriend/client. So like any other intelligent crime fighter you race across town in order to save them in the nick of time. Does it ever occur to someone to pick up a phone or call on the radio? NYC has 40,000 cops. Chances are someone is closer than you.
For some reason thay bothers me more than someone out running an explosion.
I’m more amazed by the killer invariably going after MY partner/client/girlfriend etc. Dammit! (But it does give me an opportunity to clench my jaw and go all whupass because ‘this time, it’s personal!’)
Well, it’s Red John, you know, and everyone, everyone is an accomplice of Red John, so you can’t trust anyone, not even the police. Not even the Director of CBI, nor the Head of CBI’s internal affairs.
This Red John thing is overdone. They’d better find another plot thread, or end this show with a bang.
I’m often amazed at what it is that disturbs one person’s suspension of belief. I have my own list of items that take me out of shows. This, while annoying, doesn’t break mine. However, I’ve been watching Hawaii 5-0 (a current guilty pleasure), and when one of the 5-0 (usually Grace Park) makes this grand gesture to move an image from the table-top display to a big screen, it takes me out of the show.
Another item that often takes me out of shows are tiny women beating up large men. I understand that a skilled small fighter stands a good chance against an unskilled big fighter, but there is no way Maggie Q or Gabrielle Anwar, walking skeletons both, beat trained, bigger opponents on a regular basis. If you want a kick-ass woman, fine - just make her look kick-ass. I always though Angela Basset handled sexy and kick-ass simultaneously the best.
The primary purpose of these shows is (IMNSHO) to take us out of our mundane existences and transport us to some fictional reality. If that requires us to believe that skinny women can whip butt on big men, well that is going to attract a female audience, isn’t it? Women who enjoy seeing empowered women. Heck, some of us guys like that as well. As a man who was married to a judoist for almost 30 years, I kind of like it myself. My wife was a slim person. But she could kick some butt.
But, that is just me.
YMMV.
I’m with you there. Its funny seeing Gabrielle Anwar beating people up. I think I could comfortably drink a cup of tea and read the morning paper while she was hitting me. She can’t weigh more than 90 lbs. My 12 year old daughter could kick her ass.
I’m with you there. I thought they resoved it nicely. But wait, that wasn’t really him. They had an out and could have moved on but didn’t.
Among the many police TV/movie cliches that annoy me:
The serial killer is a GENIUS who knows the names and addresses of all the detectives who are investigating him, and has all kinds of diabolical ways of finding and killing the investigators’ families.
To put it mildly, serial killers are rarely brilliant! Most are downright stupid losers.
A cop’s wife, partner or best friend has been killed. It’s OBVIOUS he’s way too close to the case to be involved in the investigation. His commander removes him from the case. The cop insists, “But he was my FRIEND.” The commander immediately relents and lets him head the investigation.
That’s a good way of putting it. Spend 10 minutes reading the “goofs” sections of movies on IMDb and you’ll start to wonder how many of your fellow moviegoers are merely noting slightly anachronistic airplanes and counting gunshots.
Not looking for dull reality or even accuracy, but I require a bare minimum of basic logic. I have been a police officer and a detective for a while. If I needed accuracy I would never watch any police show.
And serial killers may not be smart in general but they are very hard to catch. Mostly because of their randomness.
The example in the OP bothers me so much because now, with cell phones, you can call it in AT THE SAME TIME as you are racing to the scene.
I could maybe almost understand it back in the day, when stopping to find a pay phone and make a call might seem overwhelming to someone caught up in the emotion of racing to save their loved one, even if not logical.
Now, now, sometimes they do call. Of course they never reach the other person because, unlike the other 99% of the time, that person’s phone or radio has been dropped, damaged, or left behind somewhere.
ETA: And of course they never try to relay the info through some colleagues who might be closer because…well, it would make too much sense.
And yet sometimes, the opposite is true. Half the United States was once looking for serial killer Ted Bundy. What got him caught? A traffic violation stop.
‘Son of Sam,’ David Berkowitz, was captured because of a parking ticket.
For me, it’s the lighting: according to TV, detectives and CSIs never think to turn on the overhead lights when investigating a crime scene, but when entering a dark building that’s sheltering a bad guy, LEOs always turn on their 3-gigalumen flashlights in order to make juicy targets of themselves.
