I’m a longtime fan of L&O but when they went to a judge and got a warrant to search a defense attorney’s office and files, my suspension of disbelief went right out the window. Not only couldn’t they have ever received such a warrant, almost anything that they discovered would have been declared inadmissible.
And the judge and the prosecutors would have all been sanctioned and looking for jobs if they allowed such a search to occur.
That, coupled with the cops being able to discover in apparently hours or days that someone owns a firearm, even with New York’s draconian firearms laws make it hard to watch L&O for realism and not for entertainment.
I remember an L.A. Law episode where the defense made its closing statement first. Presumably, it was done that way as one of the show’s main characters was prosecuting a rape case, so she could make the big speech at the end.
And, of course, science fiction has to bend the laws of currently known physics. Who wants to watch a show about interstellar travel if it takes decades to get there, or one where there’s no noise in space? (Hands up, those of you who watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and still expect to hear the explosion when the pod hatch is blown off so they can access HAL.)
I don’t know. Back when I was a student, I used to watch *ER *with two med students. They *loved *yelling at the TV about all the inaccuracies, and having huge satisfying bitching sessions about how it would never happen that way and what would actually happen. They got way more fun out of that show than they would have if it had been accurate.
The one I’m still in touch with says, like someone said upthread, that *Scrubs *is the most accurate hospital show he knows, specially when it comes to details that civilians probably don’t even notice.
My mother, a retired RN, used to laugh at hospial or doctor based shows, and how unrealistic they are/were. She said they never showed the long boring meetins staff had to sit through.
How many of you have ever held a job or worked in a setting that was a key plotline or setting in a TV series? Now, think of all the times in your life that something happened to you at work that was so interesting, so compelling, that your family and friends who did not also work in that field were actually interested in your story about it.
I have checked TV Guide’s synopses for all hour-long dramas starting at 8 pm, 9 pm and 10 pm (Eastern time) and airing on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC and for the life of me, I cannot figure out which show you’re talking about.
Wait, I take that back. Based on having been subjected to a couple of reruns of the show (in my defense, I was a guest in someone’s home and they wanted to watch it), I’m gonna go with…um…Criminal Minds on CBS. I like Thomas Gibson and Joe Mantegna, but I simply cannot willingly watch that show. The stupid…it burnssssss.
To see the fact that this is deliberate you only have to look one place: the way TV treats filming TV. You’ll note that this is completely different from the way TV is actually filmed. Scenes and episodes are filmed in order (so the audience can understand the plot), scripts never go through rewrites, there’s no union nonsense, people get roles in big productions without any real contracts. And so on.
In other words: people in the entertainment industry routinely butcher the entertainment industry in their own shows.
Admittedly, sometimes there are things that are less excusable. Sometimes they’ll try to pseudoscience their way into an explanation by abusing real, well studied theories like “evolution” instead of just making up technobabble. Sometimes using hacking incorrectly can make the audience paranoid even when things aren’t the way they’re portrayed. But by and large pretty much any industry absolutely needs to go through tons of creative license to be interesting, including the entertainment industry itself.
I think this was the premise of an episode of The Cosby Show. One of the children had to make a video for school, so they went to work with Clair because she must have such an exciting job (she didn’t).
Where did he say they aren’t? What he said was there is no union “nonsense”, i.e. the union saying things have to be done this way, or you can’t do such and such, or just delaying through the day, or whatever.
I’m pretty sure Jragon is saying that they ARE members. But when tv shows depict tv shows, there’s no mention or issue about SAG at all. Thus unrealistic.
Similarly, it’s very common for musicals (be they stage, film, or TV musicals) to be either about the production of a musical or about the lives of working singers/musicians. These often include a musical number that’s supposed to be a rehearsal, or sometimes a song that one of the characters has just written. But even if there are singers/dancers/musicians present who have supposedly never heard this song before, everyone will know their parts perfectly. Everyone involved must know this is unrealistic, but it probably wouldn’t be very entertaining to watch (or hear!) a musical number that really seems unrehearsed.
Even in a comedy like This is Spinal Tap where the band isn’t supposed to be particularly good, they are still competent performers. When things go disastrously/comically wrong onstage, it’s generally due to problems with their equipment or sets.
In science fiction you try to minimize the number of impossibilities, and try to explain them. Faster than light? Call it hyperspace, or inertialess drive, just don’t pretend that if you hit the gas pedal real hard you can go as fast as you want.
Want to save on special effects. Say there is artificial gravity. But if they are on a tiny asteroid, they had better be light.
You can get away with subtly wrong, not howlingly wrong.
I knew a couple of cops who said the same thing about Reno 911. I assumed that police officers would find it demeaning, but they said that most cops loved the show and considered it realistic (silliness aside).
There was an interview in Entertainment Weekly a few months ago in which the shows creators corroborated this:
…the movie Hot Fuzz made paperwork look awesome! (Done deliberately by Wright and Pegg from feedback from police officers that they never saw any paperwork getting done in the movies.)