The Brady Bunch did a lot of jokes about how much time kids spend on the phone. There’s even a whole episode where Mike puts a pay phone in the house to discourage excessive phone use. There are a few gags about Carol on the phone, and Alice has a lot of one-sided conversations as well. In fact, I’ll bet there’s at least one phone call every episode.
MAS*H gave Radar an awful lot of time on his field phone, wheeling and dealing.
Then, Comedy Central had a whole show that consisted of puppets making crank calls.
It’s one of the few shows that shows how people actually use their phones in day-to-day life.
Sherlock mocks people by group text.
The killer text Sherlock.
At one point Sherlock desperately needs someone to remember something they saw on a wall. Sherlock yells in high dudgeon and the persons says, “Calm down. I took a picture on my mobile.”
A key factor in another episode is that a phone is passcode protected and they need to break it.
And so on and so forth. The characters always communicate that way, text and voice and for once it’s a convincing portrait of the way having these little personal computers in our pockets has altered our behavior.
But Sherlock is a very well done show all around, really.
If I heard correctly on the radio this a.m., there is a new movie coming out called Searching in which ALL of the action takes place on smartphone and computer screens with NO external camera. :smack:
How about The Wire? It’s so much about the ongoing battle between police and criminals trying to detect/conceal their communications, that they named the show after it. Detailed discussions of the technologies involved are a major theme, and it shows how people on both sides can be both brilliant and stupid. And the evolution of phone technology over time is also a major factor.
It seemed that a lot of Dallas episodes hinged on an important phone call, ringing in the house at South Fork while JR or Bobby is driving down the driveway, unaware that the important business deal/plane crash/paternity test call just got missed. Lots of that show goes away if they had cell phones back then.
Nowadays, that’s true of just about every show. I’m amazed when I think that most episodes of Seinfeld would go away if they had had cell phones, and that was as recently as the '90s!
The first show I can think of that hinged on a cell phone is an episode of Columbo in which William Shatner was the murderer, and that was also filmed in the early '90s. (There was another right around the same time in which a fax machine was prominent. ***Columbo ***really played up the modern communications angle.)
I may be misremembering, but I believe cellphones appeared during the run of BTVS. Tho they still had plenty of occasion to frantically run hither and yon!
The episode of ***Columbo ***with Shatner was aired in 1994. The first episode of ***Buffy ***came three years later. ***Seinfeld ***ran from 1989 to 1998.
In 1991, I worked for a company in Minneapolis whose boss had a cell phone. It was the size of the proverbial brick and was part of larger device. When I moved to Moscow in 1992, all of the American yuppies who had flocked there to cash in on the collapse of the USSR had one too. I used to sit in the lobbies of hotels and watch them traipsing back and forth carrying the clunky things with their chargers, or whatever those boxes were. They were quite the status symbol.
I got my first cell phone (or “mobile”) from my ex as a Christmas present in 2003, mainly because she wanted to be able to contact me in case of an emergency. It was, of course, much smaller. It was a very basic grey Siemens model, kind of like what the Wehrmacht might have issued in 1941 if they had had the technology.
I hate the damned things. Nowadays, I use mine (a 2006 or 2007 Nokia model) mainly to keep track of my bank balance. I do not wish to be on call to anyone 24/7.
There was more than one Columbo in which fax machines figured prominently. One was with George Hamilton, where he poisoned a guy with nicotine. That was in 1991. There was another in which Anthony Andrews was a “psychic”/con man. It aired in early 1989. I *think *cell phones were also part of his scam, though they may have been using walkie-talkies instead. I’d have to see the episode again to make sure.
If they do, then the obvious winner is Dialing for Dollars. Of course, now that pretty much everybody has an unlisted cellphone number, and nobody shows old movies on TV in the afternoons any more, I doubt that the show will be making a comeback any time soon.
In terms of modern, scripted shows, the one that pretty much has to have at least one phone call in every episode is 9-1-1.
As for “prominently,” I was going to say Get Smart!, but I second Batman.
On the other hand, the one show where you would expect there to be a lot of phones never had any - anyone else remember Telephone Auction? (If you never saw it, it was a 60-minute commercial for selling things like knockoff jewelry (“a genuine quarter-point (i.e. 1/400 of a carat) diamond surrounded by Diamelles with fiery ruby-red crystals, direct from Carter & Van Peel”), disguised as an auction.)
They may have for some reason chose the larger phones back then, but that wasn’t the other option. I had this phone in 1991. It cost $0.01 with a service contract.
A lot of “dramatic moments” on Million Dollar Listing involve mixed in person and cell phone calls (A and B are talking, then A calls C while B texts D). The ladies of the Real Housewives series also spend a lot of time on their phones.
On the opposite end of the spectrum was Seinfeld. Jerry took calls on his landline, but they rarely used cell phones, even though mobile phones had become fairly common by the show’s end.
Sorry if I was unclear. I wasn’t averring that cellphones did not exist at the time Buffy was filmed. My recollection, however, is that the characters did not widely use them in the first couple of seasons.
As someone said upthread - in the 90-00s, there were a number of shows where characters would act as tho there was NO WAY to reach someone, and so many viewers would have to be thinking, don’t any of these folk have cellphones?
Yeah - I thought it quite contrived and not terribly entertaining. Of course, that does not distinguish it from most eps of that show these past several yrs.
I’ve never seen an episode of Buffy, but weren’t the main characters all high school students? At that time, I don’t recall teenagers having cell phones all that much; they were mostly yuppie status symbols (my ex *loved *showing hers off when she got it; it meant she was now an executive at Coca-Cola).
I suggested buying a mobile for my daughter when she was still in school, but her mother said “Oh, she’ll just lose it.”
At what age and in what year did most people get their first cell phone? And, in terms of both technology and affordability, how early would it have been for them to start turning up regularly in TV series (or movies)?
