Mysteries At The Museum is a fun show. But egads, the production company needs to do some research. In a segment about WWI, I saw M1 Carbines and M1 Garands from WWII, an M-14 from Korea and later, and in one shot of soldiers in a trench… a flintlock rifle. It’s as if the filmmakers are like, ‘It’s a gun, and it has wood on it.’ OK, MatM is shown with woo shows; so the audience probably doesn’t know the difference. But it’s really not that hard to find the right props. They should hire me as the propmaster/technical adviser. I’d get paid, and they’d have more accurate depictions.
Or they could go way overboard and hire Ian McCollum.
Most often it’s uniforms that are completely wrong. “Oh, hell, just take some Army surplus stuff and stick insignia on it, who’s gonna know the difference?”
Actually, I don’t find uniform discrepancies that bad because uniforms can be rather fiddly. But firearms? Those are really obvious.
Aside: The uniform errors that strike me are the ones for law enforcement in very-low budget films.
To you, errors in firearms are obvious but to someone familiar with uniforms, errors there may be obvious. And to a doctor or other medical professional, errors in a medical drama are obvious.
They could have ‘Gun Jesus’ just break into the middle of the scene and explain why a weapon is anachronistic, when it was originally produced, where it would have been used, and then tear it down and explain the working mechanisms, and then explain what would have been a better choice for the movie and scene.
Stranger
Both bug me. I’ve seen reenactments in documentaries where it looked like the rifles came from Mattel instead of Springfield. And the stars on a US general’s blouse go on his epaulets, not his lapels How hard is it to get details like these right?
Using historical stock footage to illustrate a point but they pick the wrong battle/war/equipment is what really gets me, mainly because it means the production company didn’t put any effort into looking through more than the very basic stock footage already out there.
A very common thing is aircraft combat footage over the Pacific being used for Europe and vice-versa. Now suddenly F4U Corsairs are engaging Japanese aircraft with suspiciously bent wings and flying over green neatly squared off fields with roads perfectly lined with trees.
… While American dive bombers (SBDs) attack Pearl Harbor.
Yeah, but we won’t hear “Over to Mae.”
Eh, every police force is going to have different uniforms, and if a show is set in Generic Anytown, USA, who’s to say that’s not what the local police uniforms look like?
@Dewey_Finn , I don’t know much about firearms, but I think that even I would recognize that a flintlock was out of place in WWI.
You underestimate how deep ignorance can go.
Not a documentary, but I laughed at the scene in The Four Musketeers where Faye Dunaway pulled a 19th century derringer on Raquel Welch.
Not even a flintlock; it had a nipple (tee-hee! 
) for a percussion cap!
Things can get really weird though,
John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar
The Internet Movie Firearms Database is a nifty place to look up this stuff. Thorough but not too nit-pickery, unlike the critics who just have to remind everyone that the Marines shouldn’t have had Krags in The Wind in the Lion
Mysteries at the Museum’s anachronisms are downright charming, like your kids putting on a history pageant in the garage with you in lawn chairs in the driveway. IIRC they did a story about how you could send children through the mail in the early 1900s, and one little girl had a 1960s Samsonite hard-sided suitcase.
As documentaries go, “Mysteries at the Museum” is pretty fluffy – to my mind, it’s entertainment that’s built around nuggets of true historical stories, but I don’t view it with the same lens as, say, a Ken Burns documentary.
And some of the “museums” are of the two-headed calf tourist trap variety. 
John Browning forbid.
I would totally accept that as part of the founding Gun Trinity, John Browning the Father, R. Lee Ermey the Son, so who should be the Holy Ghost?