Regardless of the geographical setting, if a movie or TV show requires trained elephants, then the Asiatic species is the only game in town. You can't train African elephants to do squat. It's a convention, like 28-year-old actors playing teenagers. And in every jungle movie you always hear the sound of the laughing kookaburra, no matter whether it's set in Africa, Asia or the Amazon rain forest. (Kookaburras, in case anyone doesn't know, are native to Australia.)
My wife is a bit of a student of historical clothing and hairstyles. She shakes her head at a lot of period shows and films when they get things wrong. One of her pet peeves is showing a woman wearing panty hose before it was invented.
Also in medical shows, all lab tests take a couple hours max. There's one episode of Stargate where they gate to a planet that's being sucked into a black hole. Okay, this premise requires they just make up a lot of science, that's expected, but the made up science should be consistent. For most of the episode, the closer you are to the gate, the slower time passes. Then at the very end when O'Neall is rapeling down toward the gate, the glass on the window breaks. The shards fall from his perspective in slow motion, then they speed up as they approach him. So in this shot, time passes slower FARTHER away from the gate.
I suspect most of us roll our eyes when we see our own professions portrayed on screen. Many years ago, David Letterman had a professional welder review FLASHDANCE. He was not impressed by Jennifer Beal's technique! And don't get me started on how publishing is portrayed on TV and movies . . ..
Yes, I heard about that. Professional welders keep sparks to a minimum for safety, but the director of Flashdance wanted to see lots of sparks. That's how the audience knows that Beals' character is welding and not just holding an oxyacetylene torch for shits and giggles.
I remember, when going back to college, a coupled movies came put that my professors were excited about. Less for accuracy and more for laughs: My geology professor was having fun with, I think it was, "The Core" and offers extra credit for a one-page essay discussing errors. My Classical Athens professor (god, what a cool lady and fantastic lecturer!) organized a meetup to watch "Alexander" and discuss things afterward. She DID like the elephant-and-horse-rearing scene, and showed us a picture of an ancient coiner that image. So errors and laziness an. Be fun and even educational! Lol.
My favorite was in Castle when they were in the morgue and Lanie was performing an autopsy. She took a blood sample and walked out of the room; Castle and Beckett had about a 30 second conversation and then Lanie came back in with the results.
And their portrayal of software engineers is totally unrealistic. I mean, they portray software engineers as going home at 5pm, and taking the weekend off! Ridiculous.
Likewise, I know a sheriff online who despises CSI. He's never known one that carries a gun, goes on raids, arrests people. His main comment was "keep those goddam lab geeks away from my crime scene until I'm done with my investigation!"
Oh, God, I remember that one. At least on CSI, it usually takes at least a commercial break to get the lab results back, allowing for the illusion that some time has passed, but, yeah, that moment on CASTLE was beyond ridiculous. I'm guessing the writers simply found themselves in a bind. They needed to get introduce that clue in a timely fashion and there was simply no convenient way to insert any lag time into the narrative.
Prosecutors HATE CSI, I'm told. Jurors believe that everything really is that cut and dried, that circumstantial evidence isn't valid, that things must be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt instead of reasonable doubt.
And I always thought most of what is on scripted TV is make believe, be it a Soap Opera or a Space Opera. As for circumstantial evidence in a trial, a Jury an choose to believe it, some of it or none of it.
I wonder how they feel about L&O. And if they hate CSI so much because of this, they must really hate Perry Mason. The prosecutor on that show (Hamilton Burger) is so incompetent that he never won a case!
Computer 'hacking' - NCIS is the worst. Routinely hacking the Pentagon, hammering away at keyboards like they've done something wrong - one episode the bad guy was hacking Abby's computer, Gibbs responded by destroying her monitor which somehow stopped the hack.
From what I understand, circumstantial evidence strengthens hard evidence but is not in and of itself enough for a conviction (Unless you happen to have a high enough melanin content in your skin). The presentation of offices in fiction can sometimes get Dilberty cartoonish. In the long run most offices really only care about whether the end result generates profit, and whether they can convince their shareholders of that along the way. Places like Dunder Mifflin wouldn't last a full nine years.
Not necessarily. He just never won a case against Perry Mason. He may have been undefeated against other defense attorneys.