What are the most/least accurate shows about your profession?

What’s your profession? :eek:

I have never seen a show that portrays clinical psychology accurately. In Treatment (HBO show) came close at first, but then went off the rails with some of the clients (Laura, most notably).

I always wondered if there were any accurate shows about clinical psychologists. The Sopranos? Silence of the Lambs?

:smiley:

I work in animal research and been in a lot of research laboratories–I’ve yet to ever see a depiction in popular culture that even vaguely resembles a real lab where live vertebrates are involved, particularly when it comes to the caging and equipment used.

I was watching Rugrats once, years ago, when the kids were wandering loose around a television station. At one point they enter the Master Control room where you cue up the programs, make the programming switches (show to commercial and back, etc), adjust video/audio levels and generally monitor things to make sure the station is broadcasting smoothly.

Anyway, the kids enter and the Master Control engineer is reclining in his chair, feet on the switchboard, eating a pizza and telling his girlfriend over the phone that it’s all cool because nothing ever happens.

After having worked Master Control for a couple of years, that guy was dead to rights. The only thing he was missing was Cinemax on the pre-set monitors.

The movie ‘Teachers’ {starring Nick Nolte} was spot on in many ways. The only thing I’d change is the beginning scene where the woman he bedded that night found out he was a teacher and said ‘call me’…in reality she would have been pissed off and left in a huff.

{I used to teach}

I remember saying “Couldn’t they even find someone who knows how to solder!” at one point - they had a closeup of “Jobs” assembling boards in the garage. Such a simple, obvious error.

Skipping back a few jobs, when I started working in hotels in the 1980s, the Aaron Spelling soap series HOTEL was still being laughed at by those who work in them. We especially loved the desk clerks who never had a rush, could leave the desk anytime they liked, and made enough money to live in a very nice apartment with a view of San Francisco Bay. In reality it’s one of the “most stress for just over minimum wage” jobs available in most cities.

Office Space was a PERFECT send-up of the cube farms I worked at, especially the 22 reminders about the “TPS cover sheets”. What’s funny is that I actually used a “TPS report”- it stood for “Third Party Servicer”- and I’m pretty sure I was reminded about it at some point. And everybody knows a Milton and a “Yeah, that’d be great…” guy.

The beginning of Planes, Trains and Automobiles had a very accurate depiction of advertising: the head client sitting there, staring blankly at two choices for hours, while everyone waits for him to make up his freaking mind already, which he then never does. If they wanted to make it more realistic, the client would have been hemming and hawing over each line of text until 3am.

And in the other corner, Crazy People. I wouldn’t call it the worst, but while a writer who produced a full-size mock-up* of a joke idea would probably get his ass kicked for wasting time, and accidentally sending one out to client would cause a minor panic, if it turned out that the client actually liked it, we’d never need to resort to raiding an asylum for “honesty”. We routinely come up with ad ideas ten times blunter and more tasteless than anything the movie had, usually within the first ten minutes of brainstorming. Unless the client is in the room with us, at least half the initial ideas we come up with will be dark, sick humor.

Also, I don’t know of any firm with more than two people where the writing and design is done by the same person. Writers come up with design ideas and vice-versa, but for presenting work to a client, you let each specialist do what he’s good at.

I still crack up at the scene where the manager has a breakdown while he is in the kitchen trying to match tickets to plates because my managers do it too. Drives me up the freakin wall because we do so much better without their “help” when it comes to tickets and orders.

Click condensed the jobs of several people into one. Even the small architectural firms that I have worked at use the interns to do redlines and models. An architectural firm that is as large as the one in the movie would likely have groups of people handling most of his tasks.

Yeah, they always seem to have cages right out on the benches–at least at ours, the cages stay inside the animal facility.

Worst depiction of what geologists do would probably be a toss-up between Dallas and that godawful Steven Segal movie On Deadly Ground.

While the Science Channel’s Hot Rocks with Iain Stewart doesn’t address what we do in the petroleum industry, it does reflect and present a number of the things we may find of interest.

I was sort of impressed that in Monsters Inc., the control room where they do the child/bedroom simulation at the beginning of the movie looks pretty much like a real television control room.

I’m an engineer in aerospace, and the role of Alison’s husband in Medium is spot on accurate. Both his job details, and his weary and resigned approach to the constant juggling of integrity vs following orders is right on the money.

I think the characterizations and the family dynamic in that show are also about the most accurate I’ve ever seen on television. The constant flow back and forth from earnestly supportive to “this is crazy!” on Joe’s part and the conversations 'tween the girls and the girls and their parents and Joe and Allison…it all just rings absolutely true to me.

I caught a few minutes of some movie on a TV where there was a scene in a lab with one each of about eighteen different species of animals, all in inappropriate cages, and all out on the benches. :smack:

The movie *Wall Street *is nothing like the daily life of most people in the brokerage industry.

Although, next time my manager starts talking about The WOW factor, I’m going to start in with…“Greed…for a lack of a better word…is good…”

There has never been a TV show or movie accurately portraying the life of a hospital pathologist.

IRL no one in their right mind would consider making whoopee on a morgue table (St. Elsewhere). And while I sort of like the Evil Pathologist character in “The Fugitive”, he was far too nattily dressed to be real.

To be realistic, a TV show could have the audience share in the excitement of reading Pap tests, but you’d have half the viewers getting microscopy motion sickness and throwing up, and the other half would fall asleep.

You mean it’s not like on Quincy, ME?

I’m shocked - shocked, I say!

While I still haven’t thought of a movie that does portray journalism life accurately, I’ll make this obvious point: usually when TV news shows up in a movie it’s just to advance the plot. The result is the anchor/reporter character saying things journalists would never say, in a way they would never say them.