Yes, I must admit when I was reading this thread I was thinking that it’s a good thing my wife and I are not actors in a TV show. Someone would be bound to post, “there’s no way someone who looks like Lord Mondegreen would end up with someone as good looking as Lady Mondegreen.”
I disagree with this, I can look at my gym and see lots of hot women with fat slobs and it works the other way. I see a lot of buffed out guys, with big old fat women.
I had a professor in college who was similar to Jim Belushi in looks and one day his wife stopped by and he said “Oh yes, I’d like to introduce you all to my wife and I know you’re all thinking, ‘How on earth does a guy who looks like me wind up with someone that looks like her’.”
I’d say most TV families are living well beyond what they should be, whether its a house or flat or the expenses they have.
As long as something is plausable you can put up with it. But there were a few examples, like Ted Baxer on “the Mary Tyler Moore Show.” If he was that bad and screwed up as much as he did and the station was always last, why was he there? On several occasions it was shown Gordie, the weatherman could easily take over and do a better job and probably cheaper too.
I knew a warder at a prison downstate in Illinois and asked him if it was like on TV. He told me it wasn’t. He said mostly the inmates try to find ways to get stoned out of their head. Then he said, they weren’t exactly out to stop them as if they sat around stoned they didn’t cause trouble.
Fiction <> reality. It’s as simple as that.
If you insist they are equal, you are only limiting yourself to your (limited) experience about what is “real” and are turning off your imagination. That’s very sad.
Pretty much any medical show / drama where the patient flat-lines (no pulse) and they drag out the paddles and shock the poor slob.
The device is a defilibrator people - it will shock a heart that is out of rythym back into rythym. You crank that baby up to max on a flatliner and all you’re going to get is whiff of burnt chest hairs. If the concrete carresser has a weak or irregular pulse - go ahead and shock.
A stopped heart needs open chest massage or chest compressions to get going again. Open chest cavities are not common on the street and it’s not recommended to hack in yourself to get squeezing.
Raise your hands if ignorance was fought. I know mine was.
Well, yeah. There are some situations where I go 
but it isn’t bad enough for me to give up on the show. I’d just like to say that there is, however, a limit, at least for me.
When that limit is exceeded, then I will call foul. For instance, I have no problem with a series set in Manhattan to have the characters walk down a street with a name that doesn’t really exist there. And, I can deal with an average Joe having a smoking hot wife. But if they walk past the Eiffel Tower, they lose me.
Depending on the genre, of course; I can enjoy Steve Martin playing the son of a poor black sharecropper and not realizing that he is adopted. If I were watching something like Roots, though, I could not accept that premise.
Just because a show is fiction doesn’t mean that I don’t expect an honest effort by the writer in portraying things in a realistic manner somewhat consistent with that particular genre.
Currently, my favorite TV show is about a 900-year-old man who travels through time and space in a little blue box, so I have no problem with fiction that doesn’t correspond 100-percent to reality as we know it. That doesn’t mean I have to accept every lame plot device the writers throw at me.
Take Star Trek: The Next Generation for example. In one of the few episodes I’ve seen, Worf suffered a spinal injury. Much of the suspense and drama of how a character that valued physical strength and action so greatly would cope with the possibility of never walking again. At the end it was resolved by the heretofore unknown fact that Klingons have two central nervous systems, whatever that means.
Now, I can accept transporters, replicators, holodecks, warp drive, and interplanetary hybrids, but I could not accept that the ship’s doctor would not have been aware of a basic feature of one of the crew member’s anatomy, one that he shared with all members of a species that the Federation would have been studying for decades. But apparently Worf was unaware also, as he had seriously considered both suicide and an extremely risky surgery. If it had been a series I liked I would have shrugged it off and moved on. Given that I had been bored by previous episodes and found the characters uninteresting and unlikable, it was enough to put me off the rest of the series.
As to the “According To Jim, King of Queens, etc.” complaints, I would like it noted for the record that a) I am a fat schlub, and b) I have a smoking hot wife. Looks aren’t everything, you know.
I used to hate CSI until I decided to treat it as a science fiction show that takes place in an alternate universe where a moderate-sized city would in fact have a police department that had the incredible scientific equipment that the Las Vegas of the show has and which spent so much time analyzing a crime scene.
Similarly, Bones takes place in a future version of our world where holographic imaging for forensics purposes is mundane.
They were to you, apparently. 
I’m just now watching Gilmore Girls on DVD and am stunned that the two main characters don’t constantly suffer from illness, especially constipation, given that their diet consists mostly of processed foods, junk, candy, popcorn, whipped cream, and almost no fruits or vegetables.
Forget illness – why aren’t they both fat as goddamn pigs?
twickster, for whom 2009 was the year in which she watched Gilmore Girls start to finish
Well yeah, but he is, as you say, a schlub. He isn’t that smart, he isn’t that charming, and/or other things that women would usually find attractive.
I just started watching Bones and they have some cool tech - it would be cool if it were real.
Let’s consider the case of one Jessica Fletcher , who no matter where she goes gets involved in a case of murder.
They aren’t fat because they (and everyone else in their world) speak at 150 MPH. They talk quickly. They reply to questions within milliseconds of hearing them. No one ever pauses for anything. It talkes a tremendous amount of energy to remain at the heightened state of alertness required to pull that off.
It all makes sense now – thanks!
Obviously, she’s a serial killer with an incredible talent for framing innocent people for her crimes. She even gets THEM to believe they did it and blurt out a confession in front of the authorities!
Luke comments on the improbability of his girlfriend maintaining her figure with no exercise and eating as she does. She replies that it’s the Lorelai gene.
I don’t think that was a joke. It’s likely that Lorelai the elder is a mutant possessing the ability to break down any organic substance into its constituent elements and reconstitute it into nutrition. I expect she has super-strength too but doesn’t bandy it about. And, obviously, Lorelai the younger (i.e., Rory) inherited her ability to gain nutrition from whatever the hell she wants.
It’s conceivable, I suppose, that the mutation originated with Emily, who, like her daughter, maintains a trim figure with no apparent exercise.
Scolding maids burns a lot of calories.
So you’re rich. 
TWDuke nailed it. Internal fictional consistency is fine. It’s when they go outside the bounds that strains suspension of disbelief and forces the viewer to recalibrate. So while a viewer will accept Chuck learning kung-fu via the intercept, Emmitt still had to die when shot.