Things that are extremely common in TV shows/movies that you've rarely seen in real life

Yeah. Like in Family Ties when Alex’s “best friend” gets killed off. Though I guess they couldn’t very well kill off Skippy.

Oh, though in Family Ties, there was an episode where Skippy dealt with an issue! He found out he was adopted. They handled that one pretty well.

I’m pretty sure her “bedroom” was really the laundry room.

Not a big deal, but…on TV any time a main character has a cousin visiting or is talking about a relative, that relative always has the same last name as the main character. It’s like all TV writers have never heard of maternal relatives, let alone people who change their last name.

It’s sort of like one I noticed in a couple episodes of Battlestar Galactica, where they needed a crewmember to be doing nefarious things (but get caught by the end of the episode), and in both cases the culprits were folks who never showed up in any episode before, but who were suddenly inexplicably in positions of importance where you’d think you’d have noticed them earlier.

For that matter, in TV and movieland, the internet has only 10 sites on it, and you immediately get the exact page you were looking for by typing a single vague word in a search engine.

I think the most laughably egregious example of this was in Gothika, where the police investigator finds the identity of a rapist/killer by looking on the internet for devil tattoos. Cause those are like, rare and unusual, man.

This actually happened to me. Well, not the gun part. I was making a left hand turn on a 2 lane road and a stranger just got in the passenger seat. I floored the gas, psychotically staring at him the entire time as I aimed for a telephone pole at the end of the block. My line of thinking was “I need to wreck this car and wreck his shit up before he can get his seat belt on or we’re all dead”. Luckily he started bawling and crying that he thought I’d stopped to give him a ride and begged to be let out.

Did I mention I was dropping my kids’ off at the babysitters? Fun times.

So last friday I was slightly involved in a case where there was a pedestrian hit by a car. Today, I was driving along, and an ad came on the radio, so I hit the scan button. Here’s roughly what happened:
szckkckcss…and the pedestrian John Doe, who was hit by a car on friday on main street remains in hospital. The driver of the car, Richard Roe was questioned by police at the scene, and police request addtional witnesses to come forward…

So I guess this sort of thing can happen, at least once in a while. Would have been better if it had any real relevance, that is, if I were a key witness, or the real driver or something.