How am I having a rich fantasy life? I'm the one that keeps saying that these shows are completely divorced from reality.

Umm...OK.
I wasn't paying attention all that well so I used the modifier, "maybe" WBahn.
The fact that you are familiar enough to discuss these crime fantasy shows kind of led me to think you watch some of them.
I don't, so I assumed you had more interest than you really do.
My bad.

 

Umm...OK.
I wasn't paying attention all that well so I used the modifier, "maybe" WBahn.
The fact that you are familiar enough to discuss these crime fantasy shows kind of led me to think you watch some of them.
I don't, so I assumed you had more interest than you really do.
My bad.

The first series may even have been more science and technical than real life - I'm fairly sure UK forensic labs can't afford much of the high tech gear they showcase on the show.

Talking of showcasing - I often wonder whether its sponsored by scientific instrument manufacturers trying to get their gear noticed.

Some of the gear actually looks the real deal - even Hollywood has to watch the pennies when acquiring props.

 

- I often wonder whether its sponsored by scientific instrument manufacturers trying to get their gear noticed.

That's called, "product placement". If the brand name of the machine is displayed prominently, they are paying for it.
Anything, even a can of soda pop, that didn't pay for advertising will have its backside presented to the camera.

 

That's called, "product placement". If the brand name of the machine is displayed prominently, they are paying for it.
Anything, even a can of soda pop, that didn't pay for advertising will have its backside presented to the camera.

Must admit I never paid that close attention - but I'm sure I've noticed visible brands at various times, although I wouldn't recognise any of those brands so they're unlikely to conciously register.

There was at least one episode of NCIS where Abbey described an instrument brand name, but there's no way I'd know whether it was fictitious or product placement.

 

Add some positive feedback and boom, it feeds itself with oscillation!

You got it. The TS must stay engaged to act at the negative feedback element.

See, event threads that go wildly off-base serve to illustrate EE (well, control systems in general) principles!

 

Umm...OK.
I wasn't paying attention all that well so I used the modifier, "maybe" WBahn.
The fact that you are familiar enough to discuss these crime fantasy shows kind of led me to think you watch some of them.
I don't, so I assumed you had more interest than you really do.
My bad.

At some point, such as staying in a motel while on business, I'll get to see episodes of many of these shows. It doesn't take more than one or two to see how crappy they are.

But there are actually a few shows that my wife an I watch when they come out on DVD (we don't have ANY TV of any kind other than DVD). While it's somewhat fun to groan at the technobabble (though I would MUCH prefer to watch a show that had it right), I watch for two reasons -- first, the character interplay on some shows is interesting enough to be engaging, and second it is something that my wife and I can spend some time doing on the couch together. We don't get to spent nearly enough time together and this is one way (albeit poor) to get that.

 

At some point, such as staying in a motel while on business, I'll get to see episodes of many of these shows. It doesn't take more than one or two to see how crappy they are.

But there are actually a few shows that my wife an I watch when they come out on DVD (we don't have ANY TV of any kind other than DVD). While it's somewhat fun to groan at the technobabble (though I would MUCH prefer to watch a show that had it right), I watch for two reasons -- first, the character interplay on some shows is interesting enough to be engaging, and second it is something that my wife and I can spend some time doing on the couch together. We don't get to spent nearly enough time together and this is one way (albeit poor) to get that.

CSI used to have lots of blood and gore - but even that's been toned down!

 

CSI used to have lots of blood and gore - but even that's been toned down!

Yeah. So? All shows ebb and flow as they try to hit their stride and maximize their audiences. They are always aggressively seeking focus group and fan feedback. Some shows increase the blood and gore and others decrease it. The same for sex, the same for this, and the same for that.

Speaking of CSI, I saw the pilot episode for that show (I'm pretty sure it was the pilot episode). The science was pure crap right from the beginning. It was the one where someone put some chemical into the tire of a bus while it was at a truck stop causing it to have a blowout on the highway (I forget how that played into the plot). So the main CSI guy (can't remember the character name), "puts the bus on a treadmill" in order to prove what happened. So he spouts a bunch of technobabble, puts some of the chemical in a tire, runs the bus on a dyno and, sure enough, the tire blows out at exactly the same distance along the dyno as the bus was from the truck stop. Of course, he has no idea how much chemical was put in the tire, how long the chemical sat in the tire before the bus started moving, what the tire pressure was in the tire, what the condition of the tire was, or what the temperature of the tire was. None of that matters nor does it matter than if you did this in 1000 different tires the distribution would probably cover a span of dozens if not hundreds of miles. All that mattered was the incoherent technobabble that sounds so techie it just has to be authentic and well-researched, as evidenced by how well it actually worked to solve the crime!

In one regard, this actually shows how their approach works so well. I remember the details of the "forensics" and the "innovative approach" that the CSI team used to solve the crime (even though I can't remember a whit about the crime that was solved). So the key elements of the allure of the show stuck even in me, albeit in a way that turned me off of the show.

 

Yeah. So? All shows ebb and flow as they try to hit their stride and maximize their audiences. They are always aggressively seeking focus group and fan feedback. Some shows increase the blood and gore and others decrease it. The same for sex, the same for this, and the same for that.

Speaking of CSI, I saw the pilot episode for that show (I'm pretty sure it was the pilot episode). The science was pure crap right from the beginning. It was the one where someone put some chemical into the tire of a bus while it was at a truck stop causing it to have a blowout on the highway (I forget how that played into the plot). So the main CSI guy (can't remember the character name), "puts the bus on a treadmill" in order to prove what happened. So he spouts a bunch of technobabble, puts some of the chemical in a tire, runs the bus on a dyno and, sure enough, the tire blows out .

IIRC: it was solvent - that would break down the rubber, and also the solvent would expand with temperature and create much higher pressure than air.

And you have to understand that they can't extend the time of an episode indefinitely waiting for an experimentally got at tyre to burst.

 

IIRC: it was solvent - that would break down the rubber, and also the solvent would expand with temperature and create much higher pressure than air.

And you have to understand that they can't extend the time of an episode indefinitely waiting for an experimentally got at tyre to burst.

They didn't need to extend anything. For their experiment to be useful in solving their crime it needed to yield a time to failure that matched how far the bus actually went from the time it was tampered with until the accident. It wasn't enough to just demonstrate that it COULD cause the tire to fail (though they could have re-written the episode to have made that the case), but, no, the writers chose to make the experiment such that the time at which it failed had to match the actual event and that THAT was what the experiment was all about. And, due to all of the variables involved, such an experiment would have resulted in a time that had almost no relation to the amount of time it took the tire on the bus to actually fail. But the writers didn't care about that. Just like they didn't care about being able to do infinite image enhancement whenever the plot calls for it or being able to detect dry ice residue.

Their commitment to forensic accuracy has never been any better than any screenwriter, director, or editor's commitment to not having a guy with a six shot revolver stand there and fire fifteen rounds rapid fire non-stop without the camera moving away from him -- people only run out of ammunition when it fits the plot, not when a desire to match reality would demand it.

How many times in these shows have they had an encrypted file that only took them half an hour to break -- unless of course it was "high-grade military encryption" in which case it might take a few hours?

I had an interesting conversation with an independent film produce that I was sitting next to on an airplane flight and I asked her about all of these stock, absurd plot devices that are used over and over and over as well as obvious editing sloppiness such as the fifteen shot six-gun and she said that audiences have an expectation of "reality" that is based on what they have seen on screen previously more so than what is actually real. She claimed that if, in their movie, they weren't able to do any of those things that the audience wouldn't buy it and conclude that the movie wasn't "real" enough. I don't know that I believe the claim is true (but definitely can see that it might be), but that doesn't really matter. It is what she and the majority of the industry believe. Reality doesn't matter and claiming that something is accurate when you haven't made any effort to actually make it accurate is fine because it is what audiences expect.

So you end up with stuff like the dead guy gets found sitting in his car in his driveway hours after he died and when they pull him out it turns out he is frozen solid, including his arms and legs. It turns out that the bad guy mixed liquid nitrogen with the hot soup in his thermos so when he took a sip of it after getting in the car before leaving it froze him through and through. They were able to prove this because they found liquid nitrogen residue in the thermos bottle. Then, in the commentary for that episode, they talk about how that story came straight from an actual case file and that the only details they changed were about the relationship between the victim and his killer.