Not even “Homeland”? 
What I want to see is a TV show or movie about a Special Education student and his parents.
They sign the kid up for school, and agree that he requires Special Education services from the school district… and that is the last thing they ever agree upon with the teacher, the administration, the district, and God Almighty Himself.
Endless meetings are scheduled and held, with much screaming and drama from said parents, but no actual progress, as their requests, demands, and pipe dreams exceed the power of reality itself to provide, much less a mob of underpaid underfunded public servants. Yet, they have RIGHTS, and they fight on, threatening litigation, bad Yelp reviews, viral social media campaigns, and assaults on the school board elections!
I’d love to see that. I’ve seen in in real life more than once, but to see it portrayed by actors on the screen? It might or might not be successful, but I’m sure no one would think it realistic.
Retired air traffic controller checking in … just confirming that the depiction of ATC in Die Hard 2 is almost as hilariously off-base as that in *Airplane! *But I would say Pushing Tin got a lot of the daily aspects of the job mostly right. Although my facility was not such a focus of bed-hopping as in that movie (although we did have a recently remarried supervisor who bid on and was hired for a job four states away, all without mentioning it to his wife. He moved to his new job while she was out of town, and when she returned home, puzzled to not find him there, she ended up calling the facility to ask if we knew where he was. So that was a fun story …)
As a historian, I find Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan books and films pretty much get it right:cool:
I worked in IT as a programmer, primarily. And no movie or TV show came close to reality. As above, it would be boring as hell.
“Hacker” isn’t actually my job, but as a software engineer I will give Mr. Robot credit for at least showing realistic looking SSH terminals and Linux command line interfaces rather than the obviously fake user interfaces usually shown in movies and TV. I don’t know enough about hacking to know if the actual exploits they show are realistic, but I kind of doubt real hackers give scripts filenames like "exploit.py’.
I work from home 20 years now as a software engineer (“Senior Computer Scientist 2”), for the same company since 2002. Any portrayal of a guy on his ass in front of a computer in his home office would be accurate for me. Well, if the home office was up on a hillside near the beach with a great view of just treetops.
I’m a forklift driver in a warehouse. Haven’t seen many realistic depictions of my job. Recently I watched the latest (available) season of Better Call Saul on Netflix. There’s a couple sequences where Mike is doing rogue inspections on Madrigal warehouses that looked awfully familiar but Mike’s concern for safety and going “by the book” was (intentionally) not very realistic. There was an episode of The Office where Michael hops on a forklift, thinking anyone can work one of these, with disastrous results. Seen it in real life. I don’t remember the movie very well but in The Woodsman Kyra Sedgwick’s character was a forklift operator and I remember thinking at the time that there was something authentic about it.
Wildabeast beat me to the Mr. Robot nomination. At to that, Halt and Catch Fire didn’t take too many liberties with the early days of computers. Considering that it was intended to be a pseudo-documentary I’ll say they did well enough.
As an alarm technician I find every scene where someone is bypassing an alarm amusing. I don’t have some specialized electronic equipment, but I can bypass anything with a screwdriver, a meter and a handful of jumpers with an alligator clip on each end. AKA clippie jumpers
Silicon Valley is about half an inch away from being a documentary.
I’ve heard a lot of medical professionals say Scrubs is one of the best depictions of what it’s really like to be a doctor or nurse in a hospital.
Halt and Catch Fire was awesome, and some of the scenes in the later seasons reminded me of past workplaces.
The Dilbert comic strip is basically a documentary about my job at a large, bureaucratic financial institution.
I periodically go to YouTube to watch the scene of Marisa Tomei testifying about tire marks and positraction (“The defense is WRO-AHNG!”). Quite a few lawyers in the comments mention law school professors showing My Cousin Vinny in class, especially when teaching trial procedure and examining witnesses. Apparently, one of the producers was a trial attorney, and he made sure the courtroom scenes were as accurate as the needs of the story allowed. (One commented that Tomei’s testimony about positraction and independent rear suspension was also spot on.)
I remember being in a tent and opening one of his books. The chapter was labeled “Manning Mountain, Fort Hood.” That was about a grid square away from where I was.
It’s hard to come up with an accurate cop portrayal. They are usually heroically saving the world every second of the day or complete pieces of shit. In reality most are just trying to get through the day. For detectives Lenny Briscoe felt right. The Wire got aspects right that other shows never did but it’s also unrealistic in others. Southland did a pretty decent job.
Nothing has portrayed the hardest part of the job, being confronted with a unique situation and combing through statutes and case law in your brain while people are screaming at you knowing that whatever you decide is going to be picked apart by lawyers who have months to decide what you did wrong.
I came in to comment on this exact sequence. I run a pharmaceutical warehouse, and I was actually impressed by how accurate it seemed: Mike went overboard compared to any auditor I’ve ever seemed by rifling through the trash for pick orders and incoming BoLs, but the general reactions of the warehouse employees (including the rolling eyes at the work shutdown while that team lead went for obviously unnecessary lift belts) seemed about right, as did the set-up of the warehouse and the loading bays. The only real issues I had with any of those sequences was that Mike and the warehouse supervisor used flashlights to peer into one of the trucks when there was a dock floodlight right next to the door controls that anyone familiar with loading docks would have used instead.
Remove the humor from the IT Crowd and it’s pretty close.
Waiting is like a documentary of working in a restaurant. With much better looking people.
In culinary school a chef assigned us to watch Ratatouille because they actually show the cooks using proper techniques.
Telemarketer, so some of us got mileage out of quoting Glengarry Glenn Ross, especially when another guy won some steak knives.
I saw Boiler Room a couple years before I became a broker and little did I know it’s pretty close to a documentary.