Hey. I have a question to all of the professionals out there: lawyers, doctors, detectives, FBI, CIA, accountants, blah blah blah. You know who you are.
Has there ever been a moment in a TV show or movie where a character playing one from your own profession committed a laughably erroneous mistake?
And, if so, what is the most horrendous one that you can remember?
I’m not really a professional but I do know quite a bit about computers and virtually every movie or show that involves them has huge mistakes and lots of technical nonsense. I can’t really recall a particularly bad one offhand though, but it does seem tons of important info is small enough to fit on a floppy disk. :rolleyes:
I’m into computers as well, and I always laugh at how computer experts are portrayed in shows and movies. It makes people think that anyone can sit down and starting hacking all over the place. Hackity hack hack. I’m hacking here, oh wait, now I’m hacking over there. If you look at me wrong, I’m gonna hack you (Swordfish). I can understand where the general uninformed public gets their paranoia at, by watching these shows. It lends creedance to the, “The Government is looking at me through my monitor.” craziness.
While I know that it is just there as eye candy, to keep the attention of short attention span people, some of the applications that crime shows use (CSI) are laughably advanced. They make it seem that applications like these actually exist right now, while the whole purpose for them in the show is as a plot vehicle. Keep the plot moving.
This may be a little off topic, I’m not a professional, but I do have an interest in bondage, which is so badly done in mainstream media that I set up a website called The Loosie Awards to mock how badly done they are in many instances:
The Bad Bondage Hall of Fame
The page I’m linking to is work safe and all, but many of the reviews contained therein are not, or have ads on them that are not. So go forth with caution.
Point is, anybody who had expertise is gonna find mistakes.
I write fiction professionally, and I get very amused at the cliched and inaccurate portrayal of writers in the media. [ul]
[li]They are always rich.[/li][li]They have problems with writers block. Luckily, some aspiring writer hands them a manuscript they can steal. Of course, he’d have to be murdered later.[/li][li]They are rarely shown actually writing.[/li][/ul]
What doubly amusing about these mistakes is that they are promulgated by writers themselves.
Mrs. Kunilou is a teacher of the handicapped, so she gets to go ballistic at portrayals of teachers AND of the handicapped.
And yes, she’s seen many bad ones.
Here’s something that applies to all professions shown in movies and on TV. I think of it as the The Law of Universal Competence, which runs as follows: any expert in a field is invariably an expert on everything in that entire field. It is impossible for an expert in a movie or TV show to say, “I don’t know: you’ll have to ask someone else.*”
Thus a historian at the local college can instantly answer any historical question, whether it’s on peasant supersitions in eastern Europe during the Middle Ages, or the location of sunken treasure ships in the Caribbean, or the symbolism of Roman Art, or who lived at thus-and-such an address 150 years ago.
Any biologist can be counted on for authoritative opinions on subjects ranging from the ecology of ants to the anatomy of aliens to how to instantly disable a person by pinching a nerve just there.
Any lawyer can jump from family law to criminal law to contract law to Admiralty law without missing a beat.
Any physician can, in a pinch, perform brain surgery with a Swiss Army knife and a spoon.
The extreme example of this syndrome would be the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, who could build anything from a lounge chair to a taxi to a nuclear reactor out of coconuts.
(*There are two exceptions to this law. First: if something is about to explode, it will invariably transpire that the only person who knows how to disarm the explosive will be dead, on vacation, or conveniently knocked unconscious; thus it will fall to Our Hero to disarm the device by using nothing but a piece of chewing gum and a sledgehammer. Second: an expert is allowed to plead ignorance and refer Our Hero to another source if the second source turns out to be a) the sexy love interest, b) the murderer, or c) both.)
I have no idea what equipment is actually out there in CSI land, but I’ve heard names on the Miami show that sound rather dubious. Something like:
“We ran it through the ‘3D thermal imaging radial spectrometer’…”
Yeah, good thing that, I’m sure it is a perfectly cromulent device.
I am a high school teacher and practically every minute of the t.v. show Boston Public was laughable. But especially the scene where the teacher pulls out a handgun and fires off several shots in the classroom. Only afterward did he reveal they were blanks. In real life, he would have lost his job, his teaching license, and almost certainly would have faced criminal charges. On the show, he was just verbally reprimanded. :rolleyes:
Professional pilot here.
Far too many instances to bother commenting on them.
My father was a paramedic and my sister in a psychiatric nurse. I can’t think of any particular examples, but it can be either really annoying or really funny watching a show or movie with them.
My father can be especially verbal, and would have a hard time enjoying most of the fictional hospital shows. He sticks to the real-life shows on A&E and TLC, etc. But he still studies everything they do.
My sister can let things slide if a show is interesting enough, but she can easily be taken out of the viewing experience with one well-placed, unrealistic depiction. I’m glad I’m not a professional.
I work in a genetics lab, and pretty much every lab scene I’ve ever seen on TV or in the movies has made me laugh, roll my eyes, or both.
Everything always works the first time, massive amounts of information can be acquired from even the smallest sample within minutes, and, of course, the lab is decorated in “ultramodern high-tech neon.”
Thank you, RotorHead for mentioning this. If it’s a TV show or movie (other than the Discovery/Discovery Wings/History Channel) then they’ve got it wrong. Even The Right Stuff has moments that make me cringe.
I am a trained Radcon tech. Anytime I see any kind of portrayal of radiological controls of risks in visual fiction I cringe. I’m especially amused by the popular use of steam close approach suits (those funky metallic suits you always see associated with radcon clean up in movies/TV shows.) as some kind of uberprotection against radiation and contamination.
I’m always impressed by the forensic pathologists on Law and Order and its spinoffs. Even before the victim’s blood has dried, they have the ID, the DNA results, the toxicology and all of the other specialized studies that would take days to weeks to complete in the real world. Nothing ever gets lost, no tests are ever inconclusive - very impressive and unreal.
Well, I do recall him saying once that he had seven degrees.
a friend of the family is an OBGYN, and I remember all of us watching a real life medical show, and him pointing at the tv going, “Whoo! They messed that one up!” and “Wow, they covered that well.”
On an episode of Ally McBeal once, Georgia was unhappy because Ling wanted to retain the firm to sue her sister’s plastic surgeon for a less-than-ideal breast augmentation. Quoth Georgia “I got into law to do smoe good and now I’m expected to bring a case for a poor boob job under the Uniform Commercial Code?” (or words to that effect). I immediately shouted “Ha! The Uniform Commercial Code applies only to sales of goods, not services!”
–Cliffy
My mother was the first female certified latent fingerprint examiner in the state of Georgia. She worked in the ident (now CSI) department for police stations in Georgia and in Texas, has published a book for Writers Digest about the methodology of doing crime scene investigation for writers, etc. My sister and I talked her into watching one episode of CSI, because we were curious as to how accurate/inaccurate their procedures may have been. She shot us back a very long e-mail detailing everything they were doing incorrectly. The only thing I specifically remember is that she was appalled at how they were using a particular fingerprint brush. Anyway, she refuses to watch the show because her level of expertise prohibits her ability to suspend disbelief.
I’m glad that I don’t have that level of expertise, because I love CSI.
Me too and me too. I was just watching some Special Features on a CSI DVD last night. Although the producer admitted that some things happen at hyperspeed, such as the time it takes to get DNA and other lab results, IIRC he said that they don’t use any equipment or technology that is not actually available. If that’s true, that’s much better and more admirable than making up a “flux capacitor” or something at their convenience.