I know there have been several variations of generic complaints about TV shows, but just felt the need to add another.
I am so tired of almost ever drama/mystery series that has a “name” guest star being the murderer/bad guy. I realize these are “juicy” roles for the actors, but it ruins the show when you know 95% of the time that “name” actor is the villain, simply because they are the “name” actor guest star!
Lazy writers who want to speed the plot and thus the detective/cop will walk into a room and find the key evidence in less than 2 seconds - hell, I can’t even find my car keys in my own house in less than 3 minutes, let alone find a 24 year old Polaroid photo of the murder victim hugging the suspect that is tucked away in one of 38 photo albums in the attic, hidden under the floorboards beneath a 500 pound antique chest of drawers.
has there ever, in the history of television, been a pool scene without 100% perfect bodies (male and female) in skimpy bathing suits walking by in the background? I mean, seriously - have you ever been to a pool without a single fat bald guy or chubby woman wearing a bizarre swimming cap? Let me know where that pool is - and hey, I live in Vegas but still…
jumping from one roof top building to the next, the distance of an alleyway…sure, that happens all the time. Who amongst us cannot long jump 50 feet, 40 stories high?
Have you ever driven down an alley?
Dumpsters on each side, plus plenty of room for a garbage truck - uh, perhaps 50 feet is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Far more than I can leap.
So you’d much rather spend twenty minutes watching the people search the room throughly, going through old books, desk drawers, the refrigerator, the kitchen cabinets, the pantry, the linen closet, the desk, the attic, the old desk in the attic, the pockets of the coats in the closet, the pockets of the pants in the closet, the pockets of the shirts in the closet, the half dozen pocketbooks, the dresser, the bookcase, the first loose floorboard, the second loose floorboad, the third loose floorboard, the fourth loose floorboard, the fifth loose floorboard, the sixth loose floorboard, the second closet, the jackets in the second closet, the shirts in the second closet, the pants in the second closet, the closet in the guest room, all followed by the line you evidently think is the most fascinating in the history of TV: “Not here.”
With some decent editing it ought to be quite possible to convey the impression of a lengthy search in no more than a few seconds of screen time.
Perhaps the question should have been Has there ever been a pool scene in an American show without 100% perfect bodies?" In general, British TV is much more tolerant of non-beautiful people than American TV is.
::wanders into the room while my wife is watching a rerun of Law & Order:SVU::
“Is that Luke Perry?”
“Yes.”
“Ah…so he did it then?”
“Not always. Law & Order has gotten pretty good about mixing this thing up so the guest star isn’t always the one that commits the crime.”
They do. If you actually paid attention, there are others searching the premises in the background. And you don’t see ever single second of the search – just the parts that fuel the plot. Anything found quickly is usually in plain sight anyway. In addition, they will have one person finding something in one room and another finding it in another. All the dull parts of the search are happening people in Room A when the camera is watching Room B discovering other things. Or the discoveries are clearly not happening at the same time and might be a half hour apart – but they cut to another scene during that half hour.
So it’s merely a matter of you not paying attention to what’s going on.
I loved the spoof that Police Squad did on that trope: in the credits for every one of their six episodes, they had a special guest star that was a pretty big name actor…and every single one of them was murdered during the credit sequence.
I get tired of detective shows where the detective just happens to have some off-hand knowledge of a tiny detail that helps them solve the crime.
“Seems like this dead guy was a surfer…”
“I just saw a flyer for a surfing contest three towns over. I bet we can find his name there.”
“Where would someone go to sell something like this clown statue?”
“My wife is going to a clown statue auction tonight!”
I was actually impressed with last week’s CSI because they had to do some work to find out that a mangled body was related to a stage show in town.
The body appeared to have been bitten by a HUGE beast. The team was baffled for a while until one of the lab techs traced a bag found at the scene to an Australian company that made props for a “living dinosaur” show, and that show was in Vegas at the moment.
It was much much better than someone saying “Hey I just went to the Living Dinosaur show last night, I bet that is what bit this guy!”
Computer magic is like TV magic. When you turn on a TV set, the news event you need to see is airing at that very moment.
As for magic search engines. I like how the nerdy sidekick can access in a matter of seconds the blueprints for top secret government buildings, with the labyrinthine, but ever so handy, air ducts mapped out.
Man the databases the FBI must have. My wife is a big Criminal Minds fan and I always get a big laugh from all the info Garcia is able to pull off.
“OK, Garcia, we have narrowed the profile down to males, age 40-45, who live within 5 miles of the victims, who have ever worked at a Burger King, and get Chinese takeout at least twice a month.”
Two second later. “I have got five names for you”
“Also, based on evidence left at the scene, we believe he smokes Marlboros”
I’ll never forget the Eastenders episode where they went on a vacation to sunny Spain - and there are our homely, pasty white, heroes, taking in the sun on beach chairs - fully clothed like usual.
I don’t get anorectic 20-something women, dressed to kill, tottering around, with killer jobs, positions of authority, and brainier than any ten men. IRL they would be interns or maybe office workers, but no! They’re all detectives, brilliant doctors and lawyers, nuclear physicists! I know TV is all for the eye candy and you have to suspend your disbelief, but sometimes it’s hard to do…
I hate how the computers in crime shows work. When comparing a fingerprint to 10,000,000 other fingerprints, it would be an absolute waste of CPU cycles to display every single comparison being made.
And then we move on to the sounds computers make. How does anyone get anything done when their computer is beeping at them all the time? Plus, making the computer beep at each comparison would result in a long SQUEEEEE sound, similar to the sound of a flat-line on a heart monitor, instead of nicely regulated beeps. Since what we hear on TV is a series of beep, beep, beeps, it is clear the software is beeping every 100,000 comparisons or so. So I guess it is like a progress indicator. (But then, we already have the flashing fingerprints, which would like a progress indicator, so at least one of these items is not necessary.)
Finally, the software they use in crime shows have the biggest fonts ever. Any time something is displayed on the screen, the software can display only 3 or 4 lines. Come on, developers … make the fonts 12-point, and you can put a whole bunch of information on the screen.
I know, I know … everything in this posting make for bad television. However, this just isn’t the way computers or software work in the real world.
I’m always amused when people start crawling through the air ducts.
They’re air ducts. For the moving of air. Even if you were able to find one that was for some reason big enough for a person to get inside of, they would never hold a person’s weight.
This was amusingly subverted in The Brothers Bloom. While Rachel Weisz’s character is hiding from the bad guys by crawling through the air ducts, you see the bad guys standing underneath the same air ducts, following the clangs and booms she is making. And of course she comes crashing down.
