Cop finds a baggie of white powder, dips a pinky nail into it, tastes it and pronounces it to be cocaine. Seriously, it could be something incredibly toxic. No cop is going to taste an unknown substance. There are test kits for that sort of thing.
I don’t know what shows you are watching. Seinfeld had episodes where Kramer got stopped up because he couldn’t find a bathroom in time and had to take an enema, and one about George peeing in the shower at the health club. There’s an episode of Six Feet Under in which one of the character’s peeing in an alley is a major plot point. In Big Bang Theory, Howard’s major claim to fame is inventing a space toilet, and his mother’s bathroom habits are frequently referred to. In comedies, characters going to the bathroom is pretty frequent.
It’s true that characters are not seen in the actual act of peeing or pooping, but you rarely observe other people doing that in real life either. (Or at least, I don’t.)
When your breath smell 'zackly like your ass.
Which is why I’ve never seen a TV cop do that in probably 30 years. last one I saw was IIRC Tenspeed and Brownshoe, where Brownshoe did just that and got comically messed up for his trouble.
In Westerns, somebody will go up to the bar, buy one drink, and pay with a silver dollar (no change). Adjusted for inflation, that’s in the $30-$40 range.
It was a fairly regular occurrence on Friends, and used for the same thing-- to break off a small group from the larger group for a private conversation, or one person from the group for a chance encounter. Secondarily, it might be done to give the non-bathroomed person of a pair a chance to either hide something, or snoop.
It got referenced on TBBT a lot, in regard to Sheldon’s schedule, but considering how much it was discussed, it didn’t happen that much.
As far as “not that long ago they wouldn’t show one,” on One Day at a Time, the bathroom was shown a lot, because there was a running joke that there was so little privacy in the apartment, people needed to go there to have a private conversation. There was also lots of bathing and showering on the show, and reference to flushing insofar as it was Schneider’s job to keep the toilet working, but little reference to people using the toilet for what it was designed for.
But they did show it. It might even be the first show to have a standing bathroom set with a toilet.
Didn’t Beaver hide Larry Mundelow’s alligator in the toilet tank? Maybe they just showed the tank, and nothing scandalous. What a stupid memory 
Yes!
They ordered the alligator from an ad in a comic book. Larry, to his credit, wasn’t involved. 
Back in the late 70s I got to see a live blasting at a quarry. It was a rock canyon with sheer walls, and we were on the opposite side of the canyon several hundred feet across with the quarry operator.
I was surprised at how unlike it was compared to what I thought it would be. The first thing I noticed was that the whole cliff wall seemed like it was rubber and just kinda’ rippled in waves ( in the slight delay that it took the sound to travel ) followed by a rumble lasting a few seconds…almost exactly like thunder, and a shit ton of dust and debris and the other side of the canyon was a hundred feet(?) farther away from us. If there was a shock wave, I didn’t feel it. There was no sudden massive BOOM and and fireball like I expected.
When I was a midshipman, the C4 demonstration at Camp Pendleton ended in a giant fireball…
…although I guess that might’ve had something to do with lashing the C4 to a 55 gallon oil drum with det cord…
Never watched Seinfeld. Couldn’t stand the show nor the comedian.
Never watched Six Feet Under.
Must have missed Howard’s space toilet.
Every rom-com where the hero manages to stop her flight from taking off and doesn’t go to prison.
No wonder you haven’t seen any bathroom references since All In the Family. 
Those were just a few examples off the top of my head. I’m sure there are literally thousands of examples since Married With Children made bathroom humor standard sit-com material.
You know, after detonating copious amounts of high explosive in my time-now-past, I think this is a pretty accurate description that never occurred to me. Granted, by yours, you were well away from the shot, but that’s pretty accurate. There are shockwaves the closer you get, and. . .
While a Hollywood pyrotechnic shot won’t knock the hero off your feet, a legit high-explosive one will (or liquefy your internals if you’re close enough).
I’d done a disposal shot that incorporated some captured petroleum (to deny their use to anyone) and it was kinda Hollywood like you described. But yep, I’m afraid to tell you–you got “silver screened.”
Tripler
You should see a doctor. 
If they’re asking the barkeep to “leave the bottle” that might actually make sense…
Someone mentioned serial killers. I’m so tired of the hunt for a serial killer being the basis of a series. There are serial killers, to be sure, but there aren’t that many of them!
And this is a little off track, since it applies more to movies than TV shows: the obligatory peeing scene. People do this in real life, of course, but why does it show up in every other movie you see? Just why? There’s never any real purpose to it.
Someone knocks on the door and there’s always somebody in, and they always answer right away.
This weekend, I’ve been watching a few episodes of The Office (American version, circa 2010) and they have a lot of bits centered around and even set in the office bathrooms. In fact, I saw one episode where two of the characters were visiting a potential day care and the husband opened the door of the class bathroom and saw (as did the audience) the manager on the toilet with his pants down. I wouldn’t expect any sitcom to go farther than that.
On a second note, I’m surprised no one has made the (almost obligatory) MythBusters references to action movie tropes. From diving underwater to escape bullets and explosions to hanging by the tips of your fingers from a building to running away from an explosion, they’ve done demonstrations of feasibility. Most confirm the idea that they can’t exist in the real world, but their are a few that are, surprisingly plausible. As I recall, diving underwater to escape bullets could possibly work and I was most impressed by their demonstration that a Breaking Bad “Rube Goldberg” St. Valentines Day style massacre was plausible.
Hard to do, but yeah:
Say 10 cents for a drink of whiskey, 5 cents for a beer. Nickel beer with a “free lunch” was common for decades.