If real CSIs don't like the TV CSIs, then... (1 Viewer)

[Buzz Foster]

Though I have never seen it portrayed in a TV series (though I am told one did exist when I was a kid), my profession (air traffic control) is almost always misrepresented in movies. I laughed my way through Die Hard 2. (DH2 event: "The airport manager in is the tower!" real response: "We don't work for the airport. Tell him to get his ass out." DH2 event: "Let's get these birds on the ground!" real response: "Did he just say 'birds'? What a moron. Besides, we don't work for you, get you ass out of the tower. How did that cop get in here? Take him with you!") For anyone who ever worried that such events could happen: if pilots were unable to reach an approach controller, they would not fly in circles until they ran out of fuel...they would go back to the last frequency and divert to another airport. End of story. Not as dramatic as portrayed, but there you go.

I did hear that recent portrayals of air traffic controllers in factual 9/11 movies were extremely accurate, though only a small part of the bigger story.

 

[Buzz Foster]

Oh, and I do love those TV/movie satellite images that are live and show every blade of grass in the lawn. As if that technology would not be trained on nude beaches 24/7...

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Well, there are just some things you have to fudge for dramatic reasons. Otherwise CSI would open a case in September and clear it the following May when the results come back - or else each episode would take place over a period of months. Neither alternative works when the stories must be mostly stand-alone but character development and relationships, and some story threads have to progress over the course of a season. Something's gotta give. I'm sure most people realize that DNA does not take minutes to get back, just as people know that in real life there isn't an open parking space directly in front of every building you need to go to and that elevator doors rarely pop open - on empty cars - six seconds after you press the call button. A show that needs to tell a story - sometimes a couple of stories - in a 42 minute "hour" simply can't afford to be realistic about the mundane details of life, so lots of things get telescoped out of dramatic necessity. These aren't documentaries, and they'd be boring as hell if they tried to get all the non-dramatic details right. I'm willing to cut shows (and movies) a fair amount of slack on most of this stuff. It's when they simply violate the laws of physics or do something stupid when they could have been smart and accurate in the same amount of time that I get pissed. (Like the scene in The Firm where Tom Cruise clicks a button marked "print to laser printer" and you hear the sound of a dot-matrix start up in the background. )

Regards,

Joe

 

[Paul McElligott]

You didn't have to be an air traffic controller to laugh at DH2. Airport security, baggage handlers and flight attendants probably howled at it, too.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

What did you think of Pushing Tin?

The Flight 93 movie should have been accurate. Not only did many of the actual participants in that day's events consult on the film, a number of them played themselves on-screen, including a senior FAA official for whom 9/11/2001 was his first day on a new job.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Oh hell, anybody who'd ever walked through an airport was laughing at that one. I especially loved the Pacific Bell pay phones in a D.C. metro area airport.

Joe

 

[Holadem]

On some old episode of the 4400:

Genetically altered Weirdo Guy who produces some sort of substance of interest to the gvt dies an untimely death in the lab.

But all is not lost, 'cause according to the resident lab geniuses: "we analysed the sample and figured out the exact formula so now we can replicate it".

Huh? So... all it takes to make something is knowing it's composition? Ok....

One need not be a chemist to pick up on something like that (I am certainly not). But I do know that if knowledge of a formula was the only prerequisite to synthetising a substance, we would be in a whole different (presumably happier) world.

--
H

 

[MarkHastings]

Joseph, you could have summed up post #23 in two words: Artistic License.

 

[Jason Seaver]

Probably not, but CSI is somewhat unique in how it has made the work of the real-life people it portrays much more difficult - district attorneys and policemen, for instance, routinely find themselves dealing with juries who expect something as definitive and obvious as they see on TV. If 24 made people expect me to have instant access to any computer in the world, I'd hate Chloe Sullivan with the heat of a million suns, especially if the end result was potentially criminals going free.

 

[Nick Martin]

And yet real CSIs still complain about it. It's TV!

Perhaps that leads to what you were saying, Jason - it also makes it difficult not to wish that DNA results were that fast. CSI makes everything seem too easy, I guess.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Cute. Except that artistic license doesn't cover everything, which was kinda the point of the post.

Real DNA results that come back much faster than current technology and budgets allow is OK. Totally fake "pulled-it-out-of-my-butt" science on the order of that Bruce Willis asteroid movie whose name I have mercifully forgotten isn't. Improbabilities like the cops finding an empty parking space in front of the witnesses apartment or making it from midtown to Wall Street in 10 minutes in rush hour are acceptable. Total lapses of story logic aren't. I don't buy the idea that you can do any stupid thing you want in movies or television and be able to deflect criticism by exclaiming "Artistic License!" like it was some kind of magic spell. But I also don't see blowing a blood vessel over shows that bend the rules of reality out of artistic necessity without throwing reality completely out the window.

Regards,

Joe

 

[MarkHastings]

And speaking of speeding things up for drama; what about the opposite end...

How about those guys that take forever to trace a call when I can use my caller ID phone and instantly see the phone number?

 

[JeremyErwin]

Some prosecutors find CSI to be annoying because they have based their cases on witness testimony rather than on physical evidence. Witnesses have traditionally been considered more reliable (consider the US evidentiary requirements for treason charges,) although some psychologists have shown that witnesses are, on the whole, unreliable.

 

[Max Knight]

What I want to know is if The Blue Light of Science is actually used in all labs for CSIs around the nation. It seems that every time you need to find something, run a test, etc. you need to use that blue light. Can I get one for home when I'm looking for my keys?

 

[JeremyErwin]

how luminol works

Basically, the luminol combines with the iron in haemoglogin to produce an unstable intermediate chemical that glows when exposed to ultraviolet light (such as that emitted by the "blue flashlight")

 

[JeremyErwin]

and this link goes into more detail

a chemilumiscent chemical absorbs light at one wavelength, and emits it at another.

 

[Anthony Hom]

As a person studying to be a computer forensics tech, I find CSI entertaining, not caring how inaccurate it is. The best part is the opening teaser waiting for Grissom to say something really corny before "Who Are You".

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Too bad you weren't the producer of Torque.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The best part is waiting for Catherine to just show up, anytime, anywhere.







Regards,

Joe

 

[Nick Martin]

I prefer when it goes something like this:

coroner: 'sick bastard who killed her doesn't know his own strength'

detective: 'well he's about...(puts on the sunglasses of justice)...to know ours'

YEAAAAHHHH!!!!!


Can't get enough of Horatio Caine.