# Stupidest recent moment in television **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 24, 2013, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271 "2013-01-24T23:41:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Defensive\_Indifference](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/defensive_indifference/32/6502_2.png) [@Defensive\_Indifference](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Defensive_Indifference)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/81 "2013-01-29T14:49:06Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I usually don’t have a problem with absurd “science” on television, but I do draw the line at computer forensic analysis things. > > For example, when they get the hard drives of several people on NCIS (or CSI or whatever) and in the span of a couple hours, they’ve not only scanned the drive, but indexed it and analyzed it and found everything useful there is to find on it. > > It just doesn’t work that way- it takes a LONG time to do that kind of thing. As in, they’d be coming back a day or two later to hear that indexing was done and they were starting to search but hadn’t found anything yet. Yeah. I mentioned this in another thread. I am a computer forensic examiner, and it does take days to do an examination. I can, with effort, look the other way when TV compresses an examination into a shorter time period. But I get wound up when the forensic examiner does their work _on the killer’s machine_. No, no, no! You take an image of the drive and work from a copy. Every time you do something directly on the subject machine, you’re changing it, which is destroying evidence. > [@](#): > > I’d like for once to see the writers of TV cop/detective shows actually build dramatic tension through mundane stuff- like Gibbs and DiNozzo getting stuck in traffic, or Abby having to wait on a long boring process, or McGee having to grind out hours of effort to get no results on hacking, and have the clock ticking in the background while the killer/terrorist/etc… is on the loose. Didn’t they do something like this in the 80’s movie _No Way Out_ with Kevin Costner? I have a vague memory of Costner waiting for something like half a day for the results of some database search to print out on a dot-matrix printer. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/82 "2013-01-29T14:54:15Z")
> [@Bayard](#): > > Didn’t they do something like this in the 80’s movie _No Way Out_ with Kevin Costner? I have a vague memory of Costner waiting for something like half a day for the results of some database search to print out on a dot-matrix printer. Costner’s face is the one that’s going to print out; our hero’s tension-filled challenge is to wrap the case up before the slow computer produces that lead. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/83 "2013-01-29T15:01:59Z")
Numb3rs is just ludicrous. Apart from the fact that in any dangerous situation everyone is wearing helmets except the leads, who are too pretty to cover up, the plot machinations required to drag dubious mathematical analysis into play are too stupid to gloss over. One of the less stupid ones I can recall involve them trying to fathom the connection between several insurance companies. I said to the wife, “Bet they’ve all got the same reinsurer.” They said, “We need to do some deep pattern analysis involving this specialist we happen to have on this week.” Which somehow revealed that they all had the same reinsurer. Amazing! i must be a math genius! Also, I was a music major and even I know that MATH DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. You can’t just write some formulas on a board and know precisely where someone is. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/84 "2013-01-29T15:47:38Z")
> [@Sister\_Vigilante](#): > > And I don’t like the retcon of Mom suddenly showing up. They’d obviously set it up so that the girl got her red hair from her grandmother, then someone walked in who looked exactly like an older version of the girl and ran with it. And they made her such a sweet person. So where the hell has she been all this time? The thing about the redheaded gene is that you need it from both sides. Plus, Castle was raised by a flighty, red-haired actress; of course he’d marry a flighty-red-haired actress. The reason she wasn’t around was established way back in Season 1 or 2 - she loved Castle a lot, but she had a budding acting career, and she felt that she wasn’t built for full-time motherhood. Since being a full-time parent is Castle’s raison d’être, neither of them had a real problem with her leaving. ---
**Author:** ![Sister\_Vigilante](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Sister\_Vigilante](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sister_Vigilante)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/85 "2013-01-29T16:09:36Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > The thing about the redheaded gene is that you need it from both sides. Plus, Castle was raised by a flighty, red-haired actress; of course he’d marry a flighty-red-haired actress. > > The reason she wasn’t around was established way back in Season 1 or 2 - she loved Castle a lot, but she had a budding acting career, and she felt that she wasn’t built for full-time motherhood. Since being a full-time parent is Castle’s raison d’être, neither of them had a real problem with her leaving. Thanks, I must have missed those establishing moments, including her appearance in season 1. It still seems to me she missed some rather important things, like her daughter graduating and going off to college. Unless I missed that too. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/86 "2013-01-29T16:35:26Z")
Damn, Ninjaed to the NCIS keyboard scene. That one’s so ridiculous, it makes it hard to think of any others. > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > When some Briton laughs at the stupidity of American television, I like to point out that when Americans had a choice of what to import from British television, they chose _Downton Abbey_ and _Monty Python_ and _Doctor Who_. When Britons had a choice of what to import from American television, they chose _Baywatch_ and _Friends_ and _Dallas_. So who really has the bad taste? Baywatch, etc, are all from a rather long time ago. Of late we’ve imported pretty much every crime scene show, every fantasy show, every medical show, every comedy… Just about the only American shows we don’t import are the news and talk shows, though some channels have tried the latter (always failing) and CNN is available here. ---
**Author:** ![Flyer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/flyer/32/7298_2.png) [@Flyer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flyer)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/87 "2013-01-29T16:36:36Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > _Bones_ a couple weeks ago had a skeleton found in a quarry that was heavily coated with jewels. > > Supposedly, the minerals from the quarry water formed “crystals” on the skeleton. But they were clearly prop department fake jewels, not crystals. And they were different color. Mostly whitish but some green, red, etc. All from the same quarry water. > > That’s not the really stupid part. The mega-stupidity was that the flesh rotted away and the crystals formed within a matter of something like 6 days. > > This made the next corpse-of-the-week, found completely covered by caterpillar webbing, plausible by comparison. So water can contain only one mineral at a time? How fascinating. You obviously weren’t paying attention, or you would have noticed that they determined that the flesh didn’t rot away–it was eaten away. Furthermore, crystals can form much more quickly than you seem to think. “Crystals should begin to grow within 24 hours.” > **[How to Make Sugar Crystals Fast](https://www.leaf.tv/articles/how-to-make-sugar-crystals-fast/)** > > Fast water evaporation is the key to make sugar crystals faster. Use warmth and moving air to stimulate your sugar solution to crystalize faster than normal. In some cases, up to 50% faster! And this experiment–albeit with very small crystals–takes only 30 minutes. > **[Joint Earth Science Education Initiative](https://geohubliverpool.org.uk/jesei/index.htm)** > > Resources to help biology, chemistry and physics teachers with the teaching of earth sciences ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/88 "2013-01-29T16:37:40Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > _Glee_ IS more out there than the average TV comedy, but even there some of the elements I’ve seen criticized as “unrealistic” are things that I’ve actually experienced. Although to be fair, more than once I’ve thought “Oh come ON!” while watching _Glee_ only to realize a moment later “Wait, that pretty much happened to me.” For instance, “Oh come ON, no high school in America is going to do a production of _The Rocky Horror Show_” … “Wait, I was IN a high school production of _The Rocky Horror Show_.” (I was the Criminologist.) We didn’t actually do the whole thing, just Brad and Janet’s arrival at the castle/“Time Warp” through “Sweet Transvestite” as part of a variety show. But this was an official school production overseen by the theater teacher and performed for the whole school, not something put together by a student-run club or anything. Things may have changed in the last 3 years, but when my wife was teaching high school drama I was looking at some of her play catalogs, and noticed that Rocky Horror Show performance rights were only available to professional theaters. No community theaters, no colleges, and high schools were right out. It’s not unusual for plays to have restrictions on who can perform them, or even exclusive arrangements such as if a professional dinner theater is doing a play, there might be a clause that no one else within a certain range can do that play until the dinner theater’s run is finished. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/89 "2013-01-29T18:11:49Z")
> [@Flyer](#): > > So water can contain only one mineral at a time? How fascinating. > You obviously weren’t paying attention, or you would have noticed that they determined that the flesh didn’t rot away–it was eaten away. > > Furthermore, crystals can form much more quickly than you seem to think. > > “Crystals should begin to grow within 24 hours.” > [How to Make Sugar Crystals Fast | LEAFtv](http://www.ehow.com/way_5898522_directions-quick_forming-crystals.html) > > And this experiment–albeit with very small crystals–takes only 30 minutes. > [http://www.rsc.org/Education/Teachers/Resources/jesei/cooling/teachers.pdf](http://www.rsc.org/Education/Teachers/Resources/jesei/cooling/teachers.pdf) 1. But the minerals magically aggregate themselves into large separate crystals within days. 2. _Begin_ to grow. You can grow really nice lattices of salt crystals within a very short period of time (use a charcoal briquette). These feathery creations fall apart at the slightest touch. The crystals in _Bones_ were so hard and attached so well that removing them was a major subplot. That doesn’t happen in real life. Even rock candy takes a week with ideal conditions: perfectly saturated still water. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/90 "2013-01-29T18:50:40Z")
> [@Sister\_Vigilante](#): > > Thanks, I must have missed those establishing moments, including her appearance in season 1. It still seems to me she missed some rather important things, like her daughter graduating and going off to college. Unless I missed that too. Her mother missing her first day of college, and how it made her feel, was a major subplot earlier this system. Really, the detective stories on the show are largely blah, but the family stuff is solid. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/91 "2013-01-29T18:57:41Z")
> [@Bayard](#): > > … Didn’t they do something like this in the 80’s movie _No Way Out_ with Kevin Costner? I have a vague memory of Costner waiting for something like half a day for the results of some database search to print out on a dot-matrix printer. > > > [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > > > Costner’s face is the one that’s going to print out; our hero’s tension-filled challenge is to wrap the case up before the slow computer produces that lead. Costner’s character was waiting on a printout of a list of registered gifts[spoiler]that included one that proved there was a relationship between the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) and Susan Atwell (Sean Young) > [@](#): > > Farrell pleads with systems analyst and old friend Sam Hesselman to slow down the processing, and tells him about Susan and Brice. Meanwhile, Farrell sets about proving Brice was involved with Susan by searching computer files for evidence that Brice gave Susan a government-registered gift he had previously received from Morocco.[[RIGHT]CITE[/RIGHT]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Way_Out_%281987_film%29#Plot) [/spoiler]CMC ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/92 "2013-01-29T19:09:34Z")
> [@Bayard](#): > > Yeah. I mentioned this in another thread. I am a computer forensic examiner, and it does take days to do an examination. I can, with effort, look the other way when TV compresses an examination into a shorter time period. But I get wound up when the forensic examiner does their work _on the killer’s machine_. No, no, no! You take an image of the drive and work from a copy. Every time you do something directly on the subject machine, you’re changing it, which is destroying evidence. It always looks so clean, sterile and high-tech, when at least in my experience, there were usually a series of cables running to the writeblocker and then to the original drive, and depending on how we did it, we might have had a separate external for the image to be placed on. Lots of cables and widgets and barcodes. Plus, enCase and FTK aren’t nearly so sexy as whatever they show on TV. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/93 "2013-01-29T20:27:45Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > Costner’s character was waiting on a printout of a list of registered gifts Well, yeah; he’s waiting on that one, too. It’s a race to see which hours-long computation will finish up first, the red herring or the smoking gun! ---
**Author:** ![Enderw24](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ba9def/32.png) [@Enderw24](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enderw24)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2013, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/94 "2013-01-29T23:06:45Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > Counting her money. Her name is Count de Monet. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2013, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/95 "2013-01-30T00:21:52Z")
> [@Enderw24](#): > > Her name is Count de Monet. _Countess_ de Monet. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2013, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/96 "2013-01-30T16:03:43Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > I have never seen that program, and have no idea what the acronym stands for. > > I’m not proud, I’m just sayin’. “Crime Scene Investigation” is the official name of the show. “Crime Scene Investigator” is the job/personnel title, as in “CSI [Officer] Grissom.” ---
**Author:** ![FrankJBN](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f0a364/32.png) [@FrankJBN](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FrankJBN)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2013, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/97 "2013-01-30T17:48:33Z")
To me the premise complained of by the OP doesn’t seem all that stupid. They have a writing in code, they have a key to that code, they decipher the code. Certainly no more stupid than searching for a “secretarial college” [Is there such a thing] or seeking out someone else to ask. This third option is partly internet based I think and SDMB is a part of it. So often today people think that asking some stranger with unknown qualifications is a legitimate research method. ---
**Author:** ![handsomeharry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9c0ed/32.png) [@handsomeharry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handsomeharry)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2013, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/98 "2013-01-31T04:56:23Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > Benny Hill. OK, one exception… ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2013, 5:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271/99 "2013-01-31T05:55:47Z")
> [@handsomeharry](#): > > OK, one exception… Hell, Benny Hill is _high brow sophisticated entertainment_ compared to some overseas shows. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupidest-recent-moment-in-television/648271.md?page=4)