Ever see a fictional work that takes place in the real world and has an element so implausible it makes you wonder if the writer is from another planet?
I’m not talking about Hollywood physics in an action film or things that are openly sci fi/fantasy.
There was an episode of The Drew Carrey Show back in the mid 90s where Drew’s boss a British citizen is going to be deported, so to prevent this him and Drew enter into a fraudulent gay marriage. They apparently have no trouble getting married, and USA immigration doesn’t bat an eye, however they do send an agent to spy on them who then confronts them in their home and demands they kiss to prove they are a real couple.
W…T…F…?
Even in 2012 USA immigration does not allow permanent residency petitions for same sex married couples, and back when the show was made was there a single state in the USA that allowed same sex marriage? Much less Ohio where the show was set.
Not to mention getting married to a USA citizen while already in deportation proceedings is more likely to get you a charge for immigration fraud than to allow you to change status to permanent residency.
It’s been a while since I saw that episode (or episodes) but I think it was stated that they went to Vermont to get a civil union - this was right around the time that Vermont made big news by being one of the first states to allow this for same-sex couples.
But you’re right, the whole thing still doesn’t make sense.
MASH using that story about the guy who organized blood-types later dying from not receiving blood at a hospital because he was black is always my ultimate “they didn’t do their research” example.
Maybe it’s a Swedish thing? but I saw the American Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and there’s a bit where they have a list of names including Sara and Magda, IIRC, and they say “Oh, these are Old Testament names, these girls must have been Jewish.”
Wait, what?
(By the way, the characters saying this are Swedishized Michael and Elizabeth.)
I thought the MASH story was about the guy who figured out how to store the separated blood components? I’ll do some research on that.
My gripe of “what planet?” is about the show “Jail Break.” The intermingling of the general population in prison with death row inmates on the exercise yard was beyond ridiculous. Add to that the main character’s claim to “fake Diabetes”–I can’t even do an eyeroll for that one, because my eyeballs would pop out of my head.
~VOW
Yeah, the OP is missing something hugely fundamental to his or her experience of television/film. It’s not about, and never has been about, trying to reproduce reality in any sort of remotely faithful manner. It’s theater. It’s primary and sole purpose is to entertain. Any implied or perceived basis in reality is purely coincidental.
Can you elaborate on what the mistake was in this episode? I of course know of the show, but have never seen an episode. Someone dies from not getting a needed blood transfusion - what needed to be debunked about that?
It was this. It was referred to, but I don’t think it was an actual plotline on the show.
When** MASH** was on the air, the story had not been debunked (and you couldn’t just look it up on the Internet). Many sources repeated the story; the writers were using that information.
That 70s Show. The one where the guys go to Canada to buy beer, but the Canadian Mounties won’t let them back into the US because Fez didn’t have his green card:
Mounties don’t staff customs and immigration checkpoints.
There are no exit checkpoints or controls when leaving Canada.
Even if there were, a US green card would only be of interest to US customs and immigration officials, not Canadian ones.
Computers must just be these things that writers use to make Word documents. As a result you get scenes like this, in which it’s clear that no one, at any stage of the writing process, filming process, no one on the set, no one anywhere near the camera, no one within a few miles, knew anything about what they were filming.
To expand - there was a patient who needed transfusions, and asked Hawkeye to make sure he didn’t get the “wrong color” blood. To teach him a lesson, they would paint him slightly darker every night, and finally, one of the black nurses told him there must have been a mixup, and he was “one of us” now. When he complained again to Hawkeye & Trapper, they told him the Charles Drew death story.
In one “Here’s Lucy” ep, Lucy saves the live of a Chinese chap, played by Keye Luke. As is the Oriental custom, for that, he is foverever grateful, and will be by her side forever to help protect her, as payback for having saved his life.
Lucy gets tired of him tagging along with her, so she decides how she’ll get rid of him: She will set him up to “save” her live in some contrived scenario. Thus, their mutual “savings” will cancel each other out.
Seems to me as though they’d both be indebted to each other for life.
I didn’t watch The Drew Carrey Show very often, but it was my impression that it was pretty openly not a realistic show. I mean, they weren’t in outer space or anything and some episodes were more firmly rooted in reality than others, but it seemed like there was often wacky stuff going on. IIRC one of the characters was living in a dwarf-sized house at one point.
There are a couple of even more obvious problems with this episode. First, there isn’t anyplace in Wisconsin that’s particularly close to the Canadian border. That '70s Show was set in a fictional town that usually seemed to be located somewhere in southeastern Wisconsin (near Kenosha). In the very same episode the girls go back and forth to Sheboygan (central eastern Wisconsin) twice in one day. So the guys were driving a long way to buy beer, which is not in and of itself implausible…
…except that the legal age for purchasing beer in Wisconsin was 18 throughout the '70s. By the time the show was set, 18 year olds could also legally purchase hard liquor. The Wisconsin drinking age wasn’t raised to 21 until the mid '80s. Time passed slowly on this show so it’s hard to say exactly how old the characters were at this point, but even if none of them were 18 yet all they needed was the cooperation of a slightly older acquaintance to get basically any kind of booze they wanted without leaving town. ETA: And if none of them were 18 I’m not sure how they’d be able to legally purchase beer in Canada anyway.