Faux Life: Things That Happen On TV But Not In Reality

[merylinkid]

I can see a vow renewel if like Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa you eloped and now you wanted the big celebration with friends and family.   But honestly, its just became a thing and now Hollywood made it a big deal.   As for rewriting the vows, because you promised to obey, I don't think anyone thinks those are ironclad can only be changed through another ceremony kind of thing.  You just kinda adapt to what works in your marriage.   

[Ohiopirate02]

20 hours ago, DrSpaceman73 said:

Everybody Loves Raymond he'd taped over their wedding giants bills superbowl.  They did it again to re-record it. But then he forgets to have anyone videotape it. One of the better episodes of that mediocre show

This one cracks me up because the Barones are Catholic who married in the Church, and Catholics do not do stereotypical vow renewals especially ones done in another venue like the Barone's living room.  You can have a Mass in thanksgiving for X amount of years married and the priest will say a prayer over the couple that in essence is the couple renewing their vows, but there's no recitation of the original vows.  The RCC doesn't care that Ray taped over the wedding video because according to their records Ray and Debra are married.  But, Marie's lasagna is apparently that good that Father Hubley was willing to overlook this.  

[Bethany]

24 minutes ago, Ohiopirate02 said:

But, Marie's lasagna is apparently that good that Father Hubley was willing to overlook this.  

"I was told there would be lasagna." Best line from an episode that otherwise is a classic faux things that happen on tv but not in real life!  At least I hope so 😮.

[DrSpaceman73]

4 hours ago, Ohiopirate02 said:

This one cracks me up because the Barones are Catholic who married in the Church, and Catholics do not do stereotypical vow renewals especially ones done in another venue like the Barone's living room.  You can have a Mass in thanksgiving for X amount of years married and the priest will say a prayer over the couple that in essence is the couple renewing their vows, but there's no recitation of the original vows.  The RCC doesn't care that Ray taped over the wedding video because according to their records Ray and Debra are married.  But, Marie's lasagna is apparently that good that Father Hubley was willing to overlook this.  

Yes the catholic church wouldn't care about the renewal I didn't put any thought into that for this episode though. Or the priest being there for it. 

But it brings up another tv stereotype which is on tv they treat almost all generic clergy as 'catholic' wearing the collar and priest dress type Even though that's only catholics that do ii and the vast majority of Christians in this country aren't catholic but other Christian subtypes. 

[Ohiopirate02]

8 minutes ago, DrSpaceman73 said:

But it brings up another tv stereotype which is on tv they treat almost all generic clergy as 'catholic' wearing the collar and priest dress type Even though that's only catholics that do ii and the vast majority of Christians in this country aren't catholic but other Christian subtypes. 

Yes, us Catholics like our pageantry and dressing the part which in turn make it easier to spot our clergy.  Most Protestant clergy dress in ways that do not read as "clergy" in the way a plain black shirt with a white collar does.  And the same goes for Jews and Muslims in different ways.  Yarmulkes and hijabs telegraph the religious faith of a character for example.  

[Zella]

3 hours ago, DrSpaceman73 said:

Yes the catholic church wouldn't care about the renewal I didn't put any thought into that for this episode though. Or the priest being there for it. 

But it brings up another tv stereotype which is on tv they treat almost all generic clergy as 'catholic' wearing the collar and priest dress type Even though that's only catholics that do ii and the vast majority of Christians in this country aren't catholic but other Christian subtypes. 

Jesse in Preacher was Exhibit A for this. 

[crazycatlady58]

7 hours ago, DrSpaceman73 said:

Yes the catholic church wouldn't care about the renewal I didn't put any thought into that for this episode though. Or the priest being there for it. 

But it brings up another tv stereotype which is on tv they treat almost all generic clergy as 'catholic' wearing the collar and priest dress type Even though that's only catholics that do ii and the vast majority of Christians in this country aren't catholic but other Christian subtypes. 

Well also the Orthodox and. Episcopalian priests/ pastors also wear vestments. 

[Danielg342]

What bothers me most about cop shows these days- aside from the obvious points, which have been brought up and I won't repeat- is that, in this sea of grey cops who battle with how far they'll cross the line to catch the bad guy, you almost never get a criminal who is similarly grey. 99/100 the show portrays the criminal as someone who is unequivocally bad, without any room for error.

Which obscures reality and may hurt actual crime fighting just as much as the "hero cop" does. We can debate how prevalent it really is, but I always believe that 99.5% of people are at least good-intentioned- meaning they don't always mean to do something wrong but, invariably at times, they do. How many stories do we have of drug dealers forced into the trade because they needed to get money to feed their families? Or someone who had a moment of weakness and found themselves in a bar fight in a night they wish they could take back?

...and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, I'm not saying that there are not people out there who do bad because they want to do bad, or that people who commit crimes shouldn't face consequences for their actions, because they should.

What I'm saying is that we need to remember that it's not just the enforcement side of the law enforcement universe that is full of grey- so too is the world of those who break the laws. Not every criminal is some Snidely Whiplash twirling his moustache daring the cops to catch him- many criminals are people who simply made a bad choice, or were forced to make a bad choice because of circumstance beyond their control.

It's time TV starts realizing that.

[Anduin]

24 minutes ago, Danielg342 said:

Which obscures reality and may hurt actual crime fighting just as much as the "hero cop" does. We can debate how prevalent it really is, but I always believe that 99.5% of people are at least good-intentioned- meaning they don't always mean to do something wrong but, invariably at times, they do. How many stories do we have of drug dealers forced into the trade because they needed to get money to feed their families? Or someone who had a moment of weakness and found themselves in a bar fight in a night they wish they could take back?

So you want criminals to similarly be ends justify the means? I can see how that would be interesting, especially if causes some introspection/self-realisation on behalf of the police. However, I don't watch police shows these days.

[proserpina65]

On 6/8/2023 at 8:07 AM, merylinkid said:

I can see a vow renewel if like Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa you eloped and now you wanted the big celebration with friends and family. 

My aunt & uncle didn't elope, but their wedding was very low key for obvious reasons, and they wanted something bigger to impress their Baptist friends.  Whatever, at least I got free cake out of it.

[proserpina65]

3 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

but I always believe that 99.5% of people are at least good-intentioned- meaning they don't always mean to do something wrong but, invariably at times, they do.

I work in the court system, so my view on this is understandably skewed, but it's nowhere near 99.5%.  Maybe 50% of the criminals I see weren't ill-intentioned when they started committing crimes, but a lot of them were meaning to do something they knew was wrong, no matter what excuses they used to justify their crimes.

I actually think cop shows tend to make the criminals look overly sympathetic far too much of the time.

Edited June 9, 2023 by proserpina65

[Quof]

53 minutes ago, proserpina65 said:

wanted something bigger to impress their Baptist friends.  Whatever, at least I got free cake out of it

Oprah, when people ask why she doesn't get married:  "I can buy a new dress, and have a big party with all of my loved ones, any time. It doesn't have to be a wedding (see also Vow Renewal)."

[possibilities]

The show "Accused" has the premise that people who are accused (even when they are in fact guilty of what they are accused of) often have complex and confusing motives, and varying degrees of moral culpability. I think the execution of that show is extremely flawed (some episodes re great, others are utterly full of shit), but I think the way they focus on "how did they get here?" is much different than most shows which only walk into the crime scene at the moment of the crime, and not what happened before.

[Bastet]

2 hours ago, possibilities said:

but I think the way they focus on "how did they get here?" is much different than most shows which only walk into the crime scene at the moment of the crime, and not what happened before.

Cold Case did a good job of showing a lot of cases where someone made a terrible choice in a desperate moment, rather than just a string of premeditated crimes by irredeemable assholes.  And that series also showed what happened before -- these cases all took place years (sometimes decades) before, and had gone cold, and the episode opens with new evidence coming forward.  As they investigated, instead of just watching people answer questions about what happened back at the time of the murder, we'd actually see it as it had happened.

What that show did best was, via its montages that closed out each episode, show how many lives were forever altered by the killing -- obviously the victim's, but also their loved ones, the killer, the killer's loved ones, any witnesses, etc.  The police work was such that many of their cases would never result in conviction once the accused secured legal counsel, so that could be distracting, but those montages bringing home the widespread impact saved it for me.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

9 hours ago, proserpina65 said:

I actually think cop shows tend to make the criminals look overly sympathetic far too much of the time.

Only when they're hot, although that might be a separate conversation.

You could argue that both Tony Soprano and Walter White were forced into committing crimes, Tony by his upbringing and Walter by the disease that was going to kill him. But at least there was some self-awareness, the knowledge that they were the villains of the piece and not misunderstood men who wandered into the lives they ended up leading by accident. Where many shows fail is in stressing the 'I didn't have a choice' defense, where it might have started out as an accident or a mistake, but it eventually snowballed into something a lot worse.

[Ceindreadh]

7 hours ago, proserpina65 said:

My aunt & uncle didn't elope, but their wedding was very low key for obvious reasons, and they wanted something bigger to impress their Baptist friends.  Whatever, at least I got free cake out of it.

I think a lot of vow renewals are just an excuse to have a party, and if so, then good for them. 

[Zella]

4 hours ago, Cobalt Stargazer said:

Walter by the disease that was going to kill him.

What I always found interesting about Breaking Bad is the show is initially premised this way, but the more it unfolds, the more it's made clear that Walter's motivation for turning to crime is a lot murkier and more selfish than the somewhat noble and tragic sounding "have a terminal disease and need cash for the fam." 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Zella

[proserpina65]

45 minutes ago, Ceindreadh said:

I think a lot of vow renewals are just an excuse to have a party, and if so, then good for them. 

They were Baptists. Not much of a party. 

[possibilities]

2 hours ago, Ceindreadh said:

I think a lot of vow renewals are just an excuse to have a party, and if so, then good for them. 

Like an anniversary party but with more pressure to attend.

[Ohiopirate02]

2 hours ago, proserpina65 said:

They were Baptists. Not much of a party. 

The longtime secretary at one of the two Catholic churches was a Baptist. She loved being invited to weddings there because in her words the reception at a Baptist wedding was "a piece of cake, punch, and a cheese straw" and over in 30 minutes.

[DrSpaceman73]

12 hours ago, proserpina65 said:

My aunt & uncle didn't elope, but their wedding was very low key for obvious reasons, and they wanted something bigger to impress their Baptist friends.  Whatever, at least I got free cake out of it.

If there is free cake I'm there. 

4 hours ago, Zella said:

What I always found interesting about Breaking Bad is the show is initially premised this way, but the more it unfolds, the more it's made clear that Walter's motivation for turning to crime is a lot murkier and more selfish than the somewhat noble and tragic sounding "have a terminal disease and need cash for the fam." 

There were multiple complex reasons for what he did.   The cancer and needing cash was the most obvious but many others. 

I wrote a long post about it years ago in the breaking bad thread. 

[Irlandesa]

5 hours ago, Zella said:

What I always found interesting about Breaking Bad is the show is initially premised this way, but the more it unfolds, the more it's made clear that Walter's motivation for turning to crime is a lot murkier and more selfish than the somewhat noble and tragic sounding "have a terminal disease and need cash for the fam." 

I agree.  I think the show laid waste to the "forced" by episode 5.  Or heck, even in the first episode.  He wasn't forced and the people he allegedly did it for would never have approved it.  

[Danielg342]

13 hours ago, proserpina65 said:

I work in the court system, so my view on this is understandably skewed, but it's nowhere near 99.5%.  Maybe 50% of the criminals I see weren't ill-intentioned when they started committing crimes, but a lot of them were meaning to do something they knew was wrong, no matter what excuses they used to justify their crimes.

I'm not necessarily arguing that there aren't a lot of people who do wrong things and who are contemptible individuals. What I mean is that the vast majority of people don't necessarily see what they do as "bad". Meaning, when they do something wrong, they find a way to justify it, even if it really only makes sense to them.

16 hours ago, Anduin said:

So you want criminals to similarly be ends justify the means? I can see how that would be interesting, especially if causes some introspection/self-realisation on behalf of the police.

I'd like to have more crimes and criminals where the audience wonders if the police are, truly, arresting the "bad guys". I'm not talking about having criminals who are simply avenging their mother's death or are stealing to feed their kids.

I'd like to see more storylines like what S.W.A.T. tried to do with The Emancipators. They were a criminal gang of impoverished individuals who struck at politicians who supported policies that they felt would hurt the poor. Since The Emancipators felt betrayed by "the system" they felt the only way to correct the problem is to take out those who were corrupting it, with the hope that politicians more amenable to their cause would come in to replace them.

We can argue about whether or not The Emancipators really are sympathetic but that's not the point. You rarely have crime stories these days that take a critical look at the roles society, culture, politics, etc. play in creating criminals and the conditions for crime. You also rarely have criminals who are not cast as someone who is "different" from others in society, as if people are born criminals instead of being groomed that way because of their life experiences.

You also rarely ever see the mechanics of law enforcement fail on TV, unless it's a "very special episode" or the show decides on some one-dimensional bureaucrats who are simply there to place arbitrary barriers that our heroes have to overcome. Our heroes may struggle to find the clues but they almost always find them and arrest the culprit before they can do something "really bad", with everything working out in the end.

I don't need to waste a lot of pixels in talking about how untruthful that all is. Law enforcement agencies don't have enough resources and manpower to be able to solve every case that they get, so, like every other kind of "management" job (law enforcement pretty much is a management job), the LEOs have to prioritize the cases that they can solve and are most important to solve. If a case becomes increasingly difficult, they'll move on from it and focus on those that are easier, until that unresolved case becomes easier, if it ever does.

...and, while I'm sure there are lots of LEOs who are frustrated with the cases they don't solve, they don't tend to get too worked up about it. Just like every other job, there is only so much they can do so, once they've hit their limit, they're not afraid to move on.

Which is all something that TV doesn't pay enough attention to. I mean, I understand that it's easier on an audience to follow one case to its conclusion  than several all at once and I understand that it's just not interesting TV to see detectives doing little more than sitting around having their lunch (unless you're Barney Miller), but it makes people think law enforcement is easier than it looks.

While I would appreciate a dramatic version of Barney Miller, I do feel like that kind of show would be difficult to write, since it would require a lot of organization, attention to detail and discipline that you don't normally get out of Hollywood writing staffs.

So I'd like to have a crime show that, while still doing cases of the week, at least writes a few cases that the individual characters work on every now and then and don't solve until later in the season or maybe even several seasons later. Those cases don't even have to be exceptional cases with some madman causing chaos on the streets- they can be rather rudimentary cases, for which leads only crop up every now and then and the detective just needs to have the time and patience to finish the case.

It would still not be totally realistic but it would at least be closer to reality than what we do get.

[Kel Varnsen]

6 hours ago, Irlandesa said:

I agree.  I think the show laid waste to the "forced" by episode 5.  Or heck, even in the first episode.  He wasn't forced and the people he allegedly did it for would never have approved it.  

Yea the whole thing with Walt's former business partner offering to pay for all of Walt's medical expenses, but Walt refusing kind of removes the idea that he had no choice. I also thought it was interesting how when Walt was first diagnosed they said he only had 2 years to live. And he did end up living 2 years but cancer didn't kill him.

[merylinkid]

5 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

So I'd like to have a crime show that, while still doing cases of the week, at least writes a few cases that the individual characters work on every now and then and don't solve until later in the season or maybe even several seasons later. Those cases don't even have to be exceptional cases with some madman causing chaos on the streets- they can be rather rudimentary cases, for which leads only crop up every now and then and the detective just needs to have the time and patience to finish the case.

That would be interesting.   Because what we do get with recurring cases is some crazed serial killer out for revenge against our Intrepid Heroes.   It's never, wow, I would really like to solve the murder of that little girl so her family can get some peace.

[possibilities]

Will Trent is sort of like what you're describing. They have cases of the week but also an on-going situation or two. The on-going stuff is more related to the cops than the civilians, though, I'd say. 

Accused definitely looks at "how criminals are made" and how they see themselves.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

12 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

 I don't need to waste a lot of pixels in talking about how untruthful that all is. Law enforcement agencies don't have enough resources and manpower to be able to solve every case that they get, so, like every other kind of "management" job (law enforcement pretty much is a management job), the LEOs have to prioritize the cases that they can solve and are most important to solve. If a case becomes increasingly difficult, they'll move on from it and focus on those that are easier, until that unresolved case becomes easier, if it ever does.

In the premiere episode of The Rockford Files, which is from the same era as Barney Miller and that's why I remembered it, Jim's friend Dennis is going through some case files because his captain wanted him to dump or put aside the ones that were proving to be difficult. One of them turns out to be the murder of the week, and obviously Rockford gets to the bottom of it, but the premise of that show was that he only got involved with cases that had gone cold. Mostly so he wouldn't have issue with law enforcement since he had a record, but that's beside the point.

Could a show like that work now, a detective who just deals with things the police have put aside? Hard to say, since so much relies on casting and writing. I know that the Mothership of Law & Order had police consultants to give advice on how real cops would behave, which reflects in the unwillingness to use guns in every instance. There's a reason the original version still mostly holds up.

[Raja]

1 hour ago, Cobalt Stargazer said:

In the premiere episode of The Rockford Files, which is from the same era as Barney Miller and that's why I remembered it, Jim's friend Dennis is going through some case files because his captain wanted him to dump or put aside the ones that were proving to be difficult. One of them turns out to be the murder of the week, and obviously Rockford gets to the bottom of it, but the premise of that show was that he only got involved with cases that had gone cold. Mostly so he wouldn't have issue with law enforcement since he had a record, but that's beside the point.

Could a show like that work now, a detective who just deals with things the police have put aside? Hard to say, since so much relies on casting and writing. I know that the Mothership of Law & Order had police consultants to give advice on how real cops would behave, which reflects in the unwillingness to use guns in every instance. There's a reason the original version still mostly holds up.

If I remember Rockford correctly it was closed police cases

And since then there have been multiple cold case squad shows.

[Moose135]

12 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

while I'm sure there are lots of LEOs who are frustrated with the cases they don't solve, they don't tend to get too worked up about it. Just like every other job, there is only so much they can do so, once they've hit their limit, they're not afraid to move on.

But this time it's personal...

[Danielg342]

20 minutes ago, Moose135 said:

But this time it's personal...

I mean, sure, maybe some LEOs might try their luck at a cold case because they feel a personal connection to that case, but I can't imagine that, in doing so, they get so invested in the case that they feel their entire lives depend on solving it.

"I have to do it for that little girl!"

Yeah, OK...except that there are also many other little girls whose crimes are also unsolved, all over the world. Are you going to solve those cases too, or, as too often happens on TV, are you going to pretend those cases don't exist once your "personal" case is solved?

[Bastet]

14 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

So I'd like to have a crime show that, while still doing cases of the week, at least writes a few cases that the individual characters work on every now and then and don't solve until later in the season or maybe even several seasons later. Those cases don't even have to be exceptional cases with some madman causing chaos on the streets- they can be rather rudimentary cases, for which leads only crop up every now and then and the detective just needs to have the time and patience to finish the case.

Major Crimes had numerous refreshing touches for a cop show, and I thought that might be one of them, but it didn't pan out.  A man who'd been wrongfully convicted of murder was himself murdered (by the real killer) after his release, and his mother was quite sure the cops weren't going to expend any effort to find the killer, as her other two sons had also been killed and those cases both quickly went cold since the cops don't give a shit about neighborhoods like hers, chalking it up to one banger killing another and calling it a day.  After they solved the case, Julio told her was re-opening the other two, and sat down to interview her. 

I really thought there would at least be future reference to it (e.g. with a big cast, sometimes a squad member would be missing from a scene they'd normally be in, so there'd be a quick line to explain the absence, so I was hoping for an "He got a lead in one of those old Gomez cases, so he's running that down and will catch up with us later" in such a situation), because they were so good at doing little things that create a feel of realism, but it didn't happen.

9 hours ago, merylinkid said:

That would be interesting.   Because what we do get with recurring cases is some crazed serial killer out for revenge against our Intrepid Heroes.

Ugh, yes.  Now, as I've said, I watch far fewer cop shows than the average bear because I hate most of them for the reasons already stated.  So my exposure is limited.  But, within that small sample, there has never, ever been a recurring serial killer storyline I did not come to hate in very short order.  Rizzoli & Isles went there with their very first episode, which blew my mind.  Usually shows wait a while to resort to that.

[Zella]

Rockford also got dragged into cases that the police didn't want to touch for whatever reason, whether it was because the cops were being shady or just weren't particularly interested because it seemed like no big deal or it involved people who had a less-than-great relationship with the cops and didn't want to involve them. (Here's looking at you, Angel.) In general, the show seemed like one of the more realistic PI shows I've ever watched, case-wise, in that a lot of the cases seemed to make sense for him to take, and he clearly was experiencing some feast or famine with his work. 

[Blergh]

Yep, I liked how Rockford wasn't above his less-than-perfect choices netting him consequences that would occasionally come back to bite him. IMO, that just goes to show how the late James Garner had confidence that the audience would like his protagonist even when he was imperfect or got himself burned. This, in addition, to him having a healthy, supportive  bond with his aging father Rocky (who the audience knew had gone through a LOT in Jim's younger years and faked no illusions about his son yet still maintained the bond).

One could say that Rockford wound up being the anti-Magnum in many ways (yes, I said it)!

Edited June 11, 2023 by Blergh

[Danielg342]

11 hours ago, merylinkid said:

Because what we do get with recurring cases is some crazed serial killer out for revenge against our Intrepid Heroes.

Here's another "doesn't happen on TV but happens in real life" moment- when a "major" crime or a very notorious criminal appears, you don't have one investigator or a small team of investigators hunting after the culprit for weeks on end.

You usually have hundreds if not thousands of investigators all working on the same case and pouring through the evidence, usually with several agencies (both up and down the law enforcement food chain) getting involved.

Yes, there's usually someone in charge of the investigation as well as someone designated to run point with the media (they may even be the same person) but the truth is, on such an important and urgent case, you don't have just one person looking at it.

You have tons of people, because you need all those bodies to chase down every single lead you get.

Which is another thing cop shows don't do a great job portraying- just how enormous the amount of possible evidence that a typical case requires. It's amusing to see crime shows depicting the heroes needing mere seconds to collect the required evidence from a crime scene or in a file, because that would never happen in real life.

Yeah, I get it- it's not entertaining viewing to watch someone in a lab running several useless tests over many hours before they get to the one test that produces an actual shred of usable evidence.

Or someone pouring over thousands of pages of files before they come across an apparent "smoking gun", which is almost never as clear cut as it is depicted on TV.

However, that's reality. I didn't study law enforcement but I did study history, which requires collecting evidence (albeit for less, um, "dramatic" purposes). Many times you collect a lot of stuff and very little is actually usable. Often, nothing is of value. Historians routinely have to make educated inferences based on what they have, which isn't perfect and usually gets overruled by later evidence that comes to light- and that kind of stuff happens all the time.

Investigators have to go through the same thing, albeit with much higher stakes than "who built this grand castle deep in the Amazon jungle?" Which is why investigators like to take their time, because better evidence can come that leads to a better conclusion. It's also why the courts exist, because prosecutors may believe they have enough evidence for a conviction but the courts are there to make sure they actually do.

Maybe we need a cop show that's more about the detective's personal life than about solving crimes, because then you can get into the minutiae of police work without having to worry about solving a crime each week. It could be fun- seeing all the highs and lows, like how the detective handles impatient victims who wish they would solve the case faster, how the detective handles dropping everything to assist on a case his captain deems is an "urgent" case, how well the precinct handles "the feds" coming to town, etc.

Then there would be the detective's family life or, more likely, lack thereof. It wouldn't have to be a big part of the series but, since it's based on the detective's life, it would have to be a part of it.

I know there have been a few series that have explored elements of this stuff before (like The Wire) but I can't think of any that made an entire series about examining the actual day to day life of a detective. Perhaps that minutiae is too boring to explore because "nothing is happening", but perhaps it could be interesting as a countermeasure to all the "supercops" we do get.

Just throwing that all out there.

[Mabinogia]

40 minutes ago, Danielg342 said:

Yeah, I get it- it's not entertaining viewing to watch someone in a lab running several useless tests over many hours before they get to the one test that produces an actual shred of usable evidence.

My favorite is when the lab tech makes their breakthrough and rather than just telling the Lead Detective "here is the evidence you needed" they explain the steps they took and what it all means. I get that it is to fill the audience in, but I always laugh because I'm like, 1) the detective, unless they are new, probably already knows the procedural info you are giving for the audiences benefit and 2) they don't really have time to sit around and listen to you brag about how you found the answer, just give them the answer so they can go arrest the bad guy already. 

Tech: "hey, Detective, so I ran the spectrometer fancy pants analytic machiney and got nothing, so I did an ultraviolet dodad test and it came back with something really wild, so then I took that and read a book about sharks to learn that this bit of dust was actually a chip off a great white's tooth. So I called the guys down at SeaWorld and they said that there was no way that could be a bit of shark tooth so decided to check with Steven Speilberg, cause he made Jaws, and I found out that this chip is actually from Bruce, the shark they used for filming, and that means that it was someone from the crew that must have done it!" 

Cop: "you could have just said it was a synthetic shark's tooth from a movie set"

Tech: "Well, yeah, but this is the only screen time I get and, well, the audience likes all this techy nonsense, so..."

 

[Irlandesa]

20 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

So I'd like to have a crime show that, while still doing cases of the week, at least writes a few cases that the individual characters work on every now and then and don't solve until later in the season or maybe even several seasons later. Those cases don't even have to be exceptional cases with some madman causing chaos on the streets- they can be rather rudimentary cases, for which leads only crop up every now and then and the detective just needs to have the time and patience to finish the case.

It would still not be totally realistic but it would at least be closer to reality than what we do get.

Bosch is probably as close to realistic on this.  It's not a "case-per-episode" scenario but rather, there are multiple ongoing cases that the cops, and even Bosch, are working on.  From what I gather, that's pretty accurate in that cops have more than one case going on at a time.  In any episode, he (and/or his colleagues) can be working on one or two cases that will take a backseat in another episode.  They're typically resolved by the end of the season, although there have bee mysteries that go over multiple seasons.  Some take the whole season to wrap up and others are completed by ep. 7. 

I also have never checked the Law and Order dates but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are happening concurrently even if they're packaged by individual episodes.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Irlandesa

[Danielg342]

1 hour ago, Mabinogia said:

My favorite is when the lab tech makes their breakthrough and rather than just telling the Lead Detective "here is the evidence you needed" they explain the steps they took and what it all means.

Well, I could see someone like Criminal Minds' Spencer Reid doing that because it's in his character to show off just how much he knows and excitedly brag about how smart he is, but Reid's an outlier.

Gotham, at least, got it partly right. Harvey Bullock (played by the great Donal Logue) would always get annoyed with Ed Nygma when he didn't get to the point. Of course, Nygma wouldn't just recite technobabble and other stuff that's useless to the detectives- he'd also use riddles because...well, you know...

[Kel Varnsen]

21 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

So I'd like to have a crime show that, while still doing cases of the week, at least writes a few cases that the individual characters work on every now and then and don't solve until later in the season or maybe even several seasons later. Those cases don't even have to be exceptional cases with some madman causing chaos on the streets- they can be rather rudimentary cases, for which leads only crop up every now and then and the detective just needs to have the time and patience to finish the case.

It has been probably 15 years since I watched it but I remember Homicide Life on the Street, especially the early seasons, being kind of like that. A good mix of cases of the week, longer term ones, cases that never get solved and ones where the cops "solve" them but for whatever reason the prosecutor can't go to trial.

[possibilities]

In general, everything in real life is a lot slower and more boring than TV. 

[Bethany]

5 hours ago, possibilities said:

In general, everything in real life is a lot slower and more boring than TV. 

When my uncle was in hospice my father visited him and my uncle said "It takes a long time to die".  Heartbreaking but also truer than you'd expect if your only experience of watching someone die (of natural causes of course) is based on TV.  

[merylinkid]

12 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

My favorite is when the lab tech makes their breakthrough and rather than just telling the Lead Detective "here is the evidence you needed" they explain the steps they took and what it all means. I get that it is to fill the audience in, but I always laugh because I'm like, 1) the detective, unless they are new, probably already knows the procedural info you are giving for the audiences benefit and 2) they don't really have time to sit around and listen to you brag about how you found the answer, just give them the answer so they can go arrest the bad guy already. 

Tech: "hey, Detective, so I ran the spectrometer fancy pants analytic machiney and got nothing, so I did an ultraviolet dodad test and it came back with something really wild, so then I took that and read a book about sharks to learn that this bit of dust was actually a chip off a great white's tooth. So I called the guys down at SeaWorld and they said that there was no way that could be a bit of shark tooth so decided to check with Steven Speilberg, cause he made Jaws, and I found out that this chip is actually from Bruce, the shark they used for filming, and that means that it was someone from the crew that must have done it!" 

Cop: "you could have just said it was a synthetic shark's tooth from a movie set"

Tech: "Well, yeah, but this is the only screen time I get and, well, the audience likes all this techy nonsense, so..."

 

They also call the cop to say "hey I found something" and the cop has to come down to hear it in person.   They never just email the report.   Which  you need anyway.   but onscreen that would just be the detective hearing a ding, opening his email and scanning the report then saying - it's a sythentic shark's tooth from a movie set

[Bethany]

23 minutes ago, merylinkid said:

They also call the cop to say "hey I found something" and the cop has to come down to hear it in person. 

One of the biggest faux things of all - people having to come in person to tell you something they could easily phone or text.  Of course that would mean less screen time for various characters and no opportunity for snappy repartee.

[Mabinogia]

52 minutes ago, Bethany said:

Of course that would mean less screen time for various characters and no opportunity for snappy repartee.

I will admit that during lockdown I did miss my co-worker snappy repartee. It's not quite as snappy on Zoom or via instant message. 

[Cobalt Stargazer]

3 hours ago, Bethany said:

One of the biggest faux things of all - people having to come in person to tell you something they could easily phone or text.  Of course that would mean less screen time for various characters and no opportunity for snappy repartee.

Sitcoms are particularly guilty of this. It's not enough that no one ever locks the front door, so they have people wandering into their living room at all hours, they show up just to tell someone something that could have been handled with a phone call.

[Zella]

1 hour ago, Bethany said:

One of the biggest faux things of all - people having to come in person to tell you something they could easily phone or text.  Of course that would mean less screen time for various characters and no opportunity for snappy repartee.

I once worked at a job where people did this to me constantly. They'd come barge into my office to tell me things that they very easily could have emailed me or called about. When I pointed out to them that it was incredibly disruptive for them to do this to me, they just kept doing it. The most productive days I ever had there were days when I ended up working at home for whatever reason since they couldn't muscle their way through a door so far away. But then my not being physically present to interrupt pissed them off too. I made sure to quit during their busiest month purely out of spite. 👼

[Annber03]

There's an episode of the U.S. version of "Ghosts" where one of the characters, Sam, who works from home, keeps coming to the office where her boss works. She has a valid reason for being there (she has to be a go-between for a couple of ghosts) but of course, it's not a reason she can easily reveal to anyone. So anytime she's there and runs into her boss, she makes up some excuse about needing to tell him something relating to her work.

And he always responds with, "Yeah, this could've been said via e-mail." 

[Bastet]

4 hours ago, Bethany said:

One of the biggest faux things of all - people having to come in person to tell you something they could easily phone or text. 

Very true, but in this case I'll take it over the realism -- this trend of showing text messages on screen rather than having characters converse is hell on my terrible eyes.

[Mittengirl]

53 minutes ago, Bastet said:

-- this trend of showing text messages on screen rather than having characters converse is hell on my terrible eyes.

Especially when they only show the text message for 2 seconds - my old eyes cannot adjust that fast.  Just read the text in a voice over.

[merylinkid]

This is easily solved by having the person say "I just got a text message from [character] it says [X]."   But apparently they want us to read the script too.

[juno]

5 hours ago, Cobalt Stargazer said:

Sitcoms are particularly guilty of this. It's not enough that no one ever locks the front door, so they have people wandering into their living room at all hours, they show up just to tell someone something that could have been handled with a phone call.

So no Kramer then? You can tell him.