In the 1988 Parker Stevenson series “Probe” (one of those genius problem solver shows popular at the time) a mad supercomputer AI takes control and kills people by manipulating real world things, such as setting traffic lights so cars crashand kill the driver, and similar happy hooey. The AI would watch people by hijacking surveillance cameras.
Now in 1988 the world was not interconnected like that (and arguably, not even to that extent today). If you made this show today, yeah, at least it would be almost believable. But at the time? How stupid did they think audeinces were? A lot, I guess.
But the one thing the AI did, that made my eyes roll in the back of my head, was that it remotely turned on a TV and sent a message to Steveson’s character. How did it broadcast to just that tv? Would everyone watching Matlock have got the message, too? And more importantly, how did it remotely turn on a TV that has an actual pull out power switch??