Ah yes, Michael Landon was one of the worst offenders. His hairstyle belonged in Little Blow-Dryer on the Prairie.
And of course, they use fake ice cubes. Real ones melt, cause the glass to sweat, etc.
They ain’t cheap, though.
For the whiskey photograph above, I used a single irregular shaped acrylic ice cube from the small collection of cubes I purchased from Trengove Studios in New York for the bargain price of $40 each. These cubes are made by hand and are simply lovely. Beautiful shape, beautiful clarity, and they make a simple whiskey shot like this one really shine. I wish I had fifty of these bad boys.
Checking the Trengrove site reveals they have ones made of synthetic rubber that float.
That’s a good, especially the first one. I bet that 20 years from now, people will be saying, “Did people in the 2020s really think that men never shaved in the past?”
There are three things I notice about movies and TV shows. The first is that no-one draws their blinds or curtains at night. I get that this permits exterior night-time shots looking in through the windows, showing the actors handily illuminated by the interior lighting. But why don’t the characters realise that, if they don’t draw their curtains, everyone can see them?
Second, when someone on foot is being chased by a car along a road with trees along each side, why does the person on foot run down the middle of the road? This practice seems also something that is done for the sake of a dramatic shot. It would make much more sense for them to run off the road. This would permit them to hide behind a decent-size tree. Also, if the trees are closely planted, the car wouldn’t be able to drive between them. So the driver would then have to pursue them on foot, making the chase a much more equal affair.
Third, when two characters are making a date to have lunch, no-one seems to feel the need to specify a time. It’s just “Do you want to grab lunch Tuesday?” (or words to that effect). Is it so obvious what time everyone has lunch? In practice I find lunch is quite a movable feast, as it were, occurring any time from 12 noon to 1.30 pm.
With this one, at least, one can assume these days that they hash out the details later on via text message.
That was one of the few plausible things in Die Hard With a Vengeance. The gold heist used a fleet of dump trucks to haul it all.
No answer for the clock bit, but one could make clear drink vessels have contents by one of a couple of ideas - if they don’t need to be moved around and drunk out of [so the fluid would shift] one could simply pour the right color clear or opaque acrylic/whatever chemical combination solidifies up and looks like red wine, white wine, milk, whatever beverage [has the advantage of adding ‘fruit’ to sangrias or those fruity girly champagne based drinks [really, do I want a freaking strawberry bouncing around in my drink?] If it needs to shift, something in clear plastic so the plastic would shift/jiggle as the cup is moved.
And yes, an opaque mug can be given weight, though honestly I would find something the actor will drink cold and put it in the cup. Tech can top off the beverage vessel to match continuity. One could do this with clear glasses of booze too - cranberry and grape can be blended to match the type of red wine needed, ginger ale for champagne or apple juice for white wines, and various liquids for mixed drinks works. They have to hire continuity techs anyway, so why not make things look right in the first place.
Surely being blown out of a manhole via extreme water pressure, thrown dozens of feet through the air, and landing safely (and uninjured) some distance away is one of the other plausible elements of that film?
For a long time what fractured my suspension of disbelief in TV was the lighting: living rooms, bedrooms, and pretty much every other indoor space has bright, even light. No floor lamps or desk lamps or celing fixtures providing pools of light here and there with darker corners, just even, shawdow-free lighting that’s quite unrealistic. Some shows (Downton Abbey) avoid this but many do not. However, I do know people who live in houses with “can” lighting recessed into the celing which provide a very bright, even (and, to me, unwelcoming) light – much like a sitcom set.
Of course, when a character magically switches a clothing accessory like a hair clip or a tie in the same scene then poof! I’m out.
Or when an entire garment changes in the blink of an eye, like Kirk’s wraparound tunic in “Charlie X,” another thing it’s impossible to unsee.
(What did he do, stop on the way to the Bridge to change and, uhm, show Charlie his quarters? 
)
Recently we were binging a show, and 2 characters were in a bar. I stopped the scene to ask my wife what was wrong. She didn’t immediately catch that the ice was sitting at the bottom of the one character’s glass. I asked, “Is that Ice-9?” 
Re: smoking - recently I’ve been really bugged by TV smokers consistently lighting a cig and then tossing it down after 2-3 puffs. I NEVER encountered a smoker IRL who would so cavalierly waste 2/3 of each smoke.
Watching old shows like Mission: Impossible, it’s revolting to me (as a nonsmoker) how casually the cast lights up at the drop of a hat. Even Danno on Hawaii Five-O smoked in the early episodes.
That pregnancy test that you just took / found in the waste basket is covered in urine. Why are you waving it around / touching it? Blecccccch.
The one that bothers me the most is poorly matched fake TV/movie babies. Look, we all know that babies and toddlers are only allowed to be on screen for a very short amount of time a day by law, so non-critical scenes will involve some fakery. That’s ok. What isn’t ok is making no effort to match the prop baby’s size to the actual baby.
You can’t use a 12" doll wrapped in a blanket as a sub for the 26" tall 9-month-old baby you’ve already showed us 5 times. Dolls, even inexpensive ones, come in a huge range of sizes, so get one that matches your actor’s size.
Have you seen this video on the subject of empty cups?
Always!
That way you automatically know they’ve been grocery shopping.
How about when they show “newborns” that are almost ready for kindergarten?
Like when someone enters a room and responds to a conversation that was ongoing while they would have been outside of earshot.
I sometimes wonder if “in canon” the character was waiting outside the door listening in in order to find a spot to interject a quip.
Yes. But then other people have a private conversation by moving 10 feet away and talking at normal volume.
Yeah. I was actually startled when on “Glee” someone shouted something in a school hallway and other people actually took notice (since so often on TV such an outburst would mysteriously not be heard).