Here’s the deal: thanks to a fantastic stroke of good luck, you are going to change careers. And your mission will be to remedy one minor thing that drives you nuts about TV shows and movies. Pick carefully, you can’t change your mind once you decide what you’ll repair.
To give you an example of the type of problem you can fix:
I myself will be a consultant whose sole duty is to work with props people to help them fix an issue that really bugs me: the size discrepancy between human infant actors and prop stand-ins. I understand perfectly well why they use dolls - wee actors are extremely limited on how much time they can be on set - and there’s no good reason to burn through screen time when they’re just holding the baby, but there’s no excuse for using a doll that’s 1/2 the size of the real baby. Under my direction the prop dolls will be of an appropriate size to match the young actors so it’s far less obvious when the adult actors are holding a fake baby. Given that the doll’s face is rarely if ever seen, we don’t need expensive dolls, just ones much closer to the real babies’ sizes.
For TV: get rid of all laugh tracks. I can’t stand them. They detract from the actual show and insult my intelligence, or sense of humour. Or something.
This might be a bit out of scope to what you had in mind, but i would be the ultimate arbiter of what was crap and rejected and what goes out to the world.
I’m sure I would quickly be fired or the studio would go bankrupt.
I want to get rid of characters who do not understand the priority of safety first when reuniting with loved ones in the middle of a dangerous combat zone or zombie attack.
You got reunited with your loved one(s?) Great! How about getting to a place of safety first, rather than having a 3-minute long hug and kiss and let’s-talk-about-our-prior-misunderstandings conversation when standing in the midst of flying bullets and zombies and monsters???
When you’re showing someone playing a musical instrument, hire someone who actually knows how to play it, even if the actual sound has to be dubbed. If you’ve never played the instrument, there’s no way to make it look convincing.
And enough already with the fucking venetian blind shadows on walls, regardless of the time of day or direction of the window.
In a similar vein, if people are playing a game, (poker, chess, football whatever), make sure that the film i)knows the rules of the game, and if the players are for some reason playing outside the rules make it explicit in some way and ii) the players play the game with the level of skill that the narrative is implying they have. No quality chess player will be surprised by an immediate checkmate, good poker players don’t go all in on intermediate hands and potting a few simple balls does not make you a pool god.
you will have full systems that at least will look like their hooked up and sound effects will be taken from a real game on that system
No more kids holding a x box 360 controller with a ps2 box that’s running some free/public domain flash game while using the sound effects from Atari pac man …
Breaking the rules of the OP here, but I thought of another one I’d do instead. Don’t hire 2 people with very similar faces, hair styling and build for the same movie and dress them similarly. Make one of them dye their hair, cut it differently or have them have different clothing styles. I don’t want to spend the first hour of the film thinking “wait isn’t that the guy who…”