Inspired by discussions of how unrealistic some TV shows are because of the way the storytelling aspects interfere with the realism (e.g. if you don’t let the ADAs question suspects, your cast will become bloated; if the CSIs were limited to real life technology, the show’s pace would slow to a crawl; if the law professor didn’t let first year students work on cases, there wouldn’t BE a show, not the way the writers and producers want to tell it).
What would you think if someone argued, well, then don’t make the show to begin with if you can’t portray the world/profession in which it takes place without making the real professionals roll on the ground laughing? Find a more creative approach, a more creative premise, a more creative setting. Don’t insult the viewer’s intelligence and give them a distorted view of the world (e.g. the so-called “CSI effect”)!
Sounds like a recipe for boredom to me. I’ve practiced law a long time. If you made a movie or TV series about what lawyers really do most of the time, it would cure insomnia if anybody ever watched it. Here’s Oak, sitting at his desk, frowning over some legal document. OH…here he is, still at his desk, typing something. Now he’s talking on the phone. Wait a minute…he’s…checking a citation on the internet. Typing again. Now talking to someone seated across a table. Now he’s writing a check for a filing fee!
Even the courtroom stuff just isn’t nearly as exciting as it looks on TV.
I agree with Oakminster, above, and would additionally note that there are some things it’s good that TV gets deliberately wrong- would you want police shows to show every trick they have to catch criminals, and thus identify glaring weaknesses for potential real-life crimes? I’ll admit that sometimes an inaccuracy can be immersion-weakening (I recall one crime show where a cop went undercover as a truck driver, and after pulling in to a parking spot, opened the door and hopped out, in exactly the way a real truck driver wouldn’t), but it’s overall a worthwhile tradeoff.
I suppose, but after reading all sorts of complaints from professionals about how TV twists their jobs (and how sometimes it has real world impact, as I mentioned), I have to wonder if those professionals would PREFER boredom (or at least that TV leave their particular profession alone!).
I think they’d just prefer that messages glamorizing what they do not be sent out to everybody. But in order for that to work to universal appeal, you’d need to only focus on jobs that don’t exist anymore in places that don’t exist anymore in situations that don’t exist anymore.
Coming this fall, the adventures of an elevator operator and sundial repairman in the seedy underbelly of the city of Troy, as they fight to stop an evil passenger pigeon hunter from enslaving all the Chinese laborers and making them to build a railroad through a mountain so he won’t miss the Cubs world series game!
This is a pet peeve of mine: people who insist that “realism”* is the be-all and end-all of drama. No, it’s not. That’s documentary (and documentaries edit out all the dull parts). You want to see “realism”? Watch news coverage of a hostage situation: The police standing around, the reporters trying to fill the time with no real information. Heck, the best-known example of a live car chase – O.J. and the Bronco – is awfully dull television.
Fiction is fiction, and its rules are more important than realism. I remember hearing Ron (Bull Durham) Shelton talk about writing the script for Cobb. He based all of it on real events and tried to be as accurate as possible. In both, Smitty took copious hidden notes about Cobb. In reality, Cobb never saw them, but Shelton said that, in a dramatic sense, Cobb has to see the notes. And he was absolutely right.
It’s called “dramatic license,” and every writer uses it in order to make the story work. If you object to it, you’re better off staying away from fiction.
*Which often means their own unrealistic view of things.
I remember quite a few years ago now a magazine television show doing an exerpt on this. They asked police officers which fictional tv police show portrayed their job least realistically. Their answer, Columbo. Just goes to show that realism does not equal quality. Some of the other cop shows they picked over Columbo were downright awful.
We could compromise and edit the shows as follows: investigator determines some test is needed … fade to black … show text block that says “two months pass” … fade to next scene when test results suggest some other test be conducted as well … fade to black … show text block that says “six weeks pass” … etc.
Most of the show would be made up of text blocks defining the passage of time between one event and the next.
Also, in many cases the characters would need to visually age before the ultimate outcome.
I remember back in 2000 they cam out with a show called “Boston Public” that took place in a fictional Boston high school. After the first couple of episodes someone asked me what I thought about it, and I offered the opinion that, while I’m sure all of the events portrayed on the show happened in a public high school in the US, they didn’t happen at the same school, to the same people, on the same day. Each event, individually, would be a career-defining moment - the kind of thing you bore people with at parties for the rest of your life. The characters on the show have a dozen of those moments each season. And, like lawyers, a real show about teachers would have to include endless hours of grading, even more endless hours of meaningless meetings, and countless encounters with smart students with happy parents (no drama there!).
If I’m recalling the same article, the police officers rated Barney Miller as the most accurate portrayal of the way a real police department operated.
Unfortunately, some people have been too close for too long and they have lost all clue as to what actually is entertaining.
Example: Fear Factor. WAY back in the day, a cute concept, good for a couple seasons back when Reality TV was at its height. Eventually, making people eat worms and rat hair for a prize reverted back to the disgusting
low-class spectacle that it had always been. (Touching the cheese in Diary of a Wimpy Kid worked for One movie. After one, it just becomes an exercise in fetish or mental illness.)
That said, trying to steal that kind of plot line and jam it into a detective show to try to be “original” has been been done (just how many “Silence of the Lambs” cheap copy-plots can You name?) to death.
Even with that said, some stupid isn’t just to the edge of the cliff, its 15 steps past the edge.
Holding a woman in a pit to carve off her skin to make a woman suit: incredibly creepy. Having her capture the monsters dog to make it stop? Very empowering.
But… agents on alert because a serial killer is driving around with an 18 wheeler full of cockroaches (Maybe its a McDonald’s truck?) and is kidnapping people, sealing them in buried coffins/pipes full of roaches? Huh? Really???
Who green lights these things and Do They Need A Tax Loss That Badly???
“I’m out of ideas… you got anything?”
“Nothing, and I’m hungry. How come we don’t get sandwiches brought in?”
“Because , we’re young & edgy. And because we can’t allow food within grabbing distance of any meeting room the talent attends. Its part of the “Thin-Wins” initiative, didn’t you see the flyers?”
“You have to read them fast; they cut the TP budget again.” groans
“Look, come up with something & then you can hit the Roach-Coach.”
“Roach-Coach… thats it. Thats my idea. Now, which way is the f-cking food…?”
Later, in a conference room that Actually Has food
“I’m not so sure about this…are you sure this will get viewers?”
“…have I ever steered you wrong…?” :smack:
This “unrealistic” theme goes even further back than “Columbo”. Growing up, our neighbor was a cop, and he used to love, but gripe about “Adam-12”: “They never show them doing all the paperwork cops have to do !!!” He said it was like 20% “activity” on a case, and 80% paperwork.
The real Las Vegas crime lab boss that Wiliam Petersen based his own character on in*** CSI *** once said of the show, “Well, we really CAN do almost everything they show. What’s unrealistic is the time element. It would take us 6 or 8 months to do some tests they show us doing in 5 minutes.”
I’m sure that’s true. But I also know a TV crime show can’t take 6 or 8 months to wrap up a story. To that extent, a show like CSI can’t be realistic! And even that Vegas crime lab boss reqdily acknowledged that.
Realism is overrated. TV dramas and comedies aren’t supposed to be documentaries; they’re supposed to be entertaining. And people who believe anything in a TV crime drama accurately reflects the way the criminal justice system are stupid, and denied the CSI respect will simply be stupid in a different way.
But there is a line, and although it is different for different people, some stuff is just too far.
For example, on the TV show Ed, there was an episode where a crime was committed before 7 am, the case went to court by 9, the trial stopped for lunch, where clues were found, then the case was resolved and the trial was over by the end of the day. Nothing moves that fast! Not even in an R A Lafferty story.
There was also a different episode of Ed, where during the trial the *defense *presented first!
In both cases, it’s hard to be entertained when the show is so far away from reality that it is on another planet. You might as well have people with elbows for ears or spoons for hands. CSI has nothing on those errors.
At least on L&O, the chung chung transitions show the passing of time, and if you pay attention to them, a lot of time (though perhaps not a realistic amount, considering real life murder trails can take years to get to court) does pass between scenes.
Truck drivers never get out of their trucks? They don’t “hop” out? They don’t open the door first?