Interesting debate. I think the key for courtroom dramas is that there should be enough "correct" that it creates a legitimate feel for being in the courtroom, especially among those who have first hand experience while not directly replicating the experience. A show is being done for drama, suspense, comedy, etc-- and we don't want to wade through long hours of tedious procedures.
Exactly. It's the same as writing hard science fiction, or anything else touching on a particular field of knowledge or expertise -- you include enough accuracy to give it a flavor of believability so that the liberties you take for the sake of fiction are easier to buy into. At least, you nod toward how things
should work so the savvy reader knows you did your homework and aren't just ignorant of your subject matter. (Like giving the Flash physically impossible superspeed, but nodding to physics by saying he also has a forcefield that protects him from burning up from friction -- or in the case of the 1990 TV series, acknowledging the friction damaging his clothes and using that to justify giving him a supersuit.)
It's like being a con artist. If you want to convince the mark, you need to give your con game a semblance of truth, make it close enough to reality that it seems credible and eases their skepticism. (The first non-canonical Ferengi Rule of Acquisition I coined for
Star Trek prose fiction was "A near-truth is an economical lie.") Of course, the audience for fiction knows it isn't real, so there's no intent to deceive, but it's still easier for the audience to buy into if it has that feel of credibility and doesn't put
all the work of suspending disbelief on their shoulders. Your job as the writer is to make that suspension easier for them, to meet them halfway or further. It doesn't matter if some viewers are more tolerant and willing to accept anything, because others are more demanding, and you can't win over the whole audience unless you win over the hard sells.
This is similar to portraying writers in fiction. We don't want to see long scenes of someone sitting at a keyboard, or writing and re-writing drafts of course, but it always takes me out of a scene when we see a writer typing away at what is obviously a first draft and then just packing it up and sending it away to the publisher.
It's always astonished me how incredibly inaccurate the depictions of writing and filmmaking are in books and films/TV. That's the one thing where you
know the creators know how it works, yet they routinely depict it in a way that isn't even close to reality. I get the need to simplify for the audience, but most of the time, it's not just simplified, it's a complete fantasy. Like, say, getting an entire movie written, filmed, and released to theaters in the span of a couple of weeks. Or having a character go through an entire elaborate action scene with stunts and special effects in real time without realizing they're on a film set.
(The first spec novel I ever wrote, which never sold, was called
On Location and was about the first movie made in outer space -- I optimistically projected a Mars colony mission taking place right about now. I wanted to prove you could depict the filmmaking process accurately and
still make it a good story, so before I wrote the novel, I wrote the whole screenplay for the movie, worked out a plausible shooting schedule, and plotted the novel around it. I reread the manuscript some years later, and though the screenplay was awful, I thought the novel still kind of held up.)
