The Invaders would have a hard time staying hidden with cell phones.

Yeah but she wasn't THAT sexualized. She was much more girl next door.

And in a really odd coincidence, I just found out today that Ashton Kutcher was such an advocate for ending sex trafficking and developed some start up company that designed a program to combat sex traffickers and even testified before congress.

A cultural change is that it would be easy to convince the public that lots of important people were actually aliens in disguise and part of a vast conspiracy in the 1980s show V.

Bill Gates and George Soros are really aliens who are wearing masks of human faces? Makes sense to us!

That's really surprising that they would hire someone under 18 for one of the leads. Weren't all of the other "kids" on that show at least eighteen?

I was always under the impression that kids were difficult to work with, mostly because of all of the rules involved (ie, needing tutors on set, limiting the amount of hours they can work), so most shows centering around teenagers (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer) cast young adults as the high school kids. On Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar was eighteen or nineteen, and all of the other leads were in their twenties despite playing high school sophomores. Granted, that was an hourlong drama, and the premise required a lot of night shoots.

She lied about her age and the producers did not check to make sure she was 18. All they went by was that “she was going to be 18.” Not specifically when.

Get Smart wouldn't work today. That shoe phone is so outdated, and much harder to get at than a regular cell phone.

But the weather started getting rough. The tiny ship was tossed for god's sake! Anything could happen!

They sure could have used them in the parking garage.

No signal in the garage. Plot solved!

And yet there is a film from 2008.

This is the first show that comes to mind for me as well. I don't think cell phone reception would reach that far out to most remote islands. I don't think there are any uncharted desert isles anymore. There probably weren't back when the show came out either. But if a passenger ship were to go missing and not sink, it couldn't be as hard to track with today's technology. I'm sure most boats that carry passengers are legally required to have some kind of system that would allow tracking of the ship for safety purposes. So there would have to be a general idea of the location of the ship and the Coast Guard would think to check any nearby islands where the boat was last recorded as being located. Since the boat didn't sink, it would likely be "pinged" where it ran aground. I don't remember what happened to the minnow on the show, other that all the boards fell apart in the early episode, so the pieces of the boat could have been washed to sea, but it was still mostly intact when they were first stranded.

And yet we still have no idea what happened to that flight from Malaysia a few years back, right?

There's still room for "lost at sea" stories.

The plane sank, or at least most of it did. It was also traveling at a speed much faster than a boat caught in a storm would, so it had a much larger search range than a boat would have. Also, it was very possible had someone intentionally interfering with tracking devices on the plane, which wasn't the case with a boat getting accidentally lost at sea.

How they get stranded isn't important. Gilligan's Island is about being stranded/lost. Just do Lost as a comedy. Same thing.

Threes Conpany. Mr.Furley would be "Cancelled" in today's society and would be considered homophobic.

Well, for one thing, Jack wouldn't need to pretend to be gay in order to live in that apartment. Renting to a man and two women would not be an issue today.

And, to be perfectly honest, that even seemed kind of dodgy for late 70s/early 80s California, too. I really can't see Mr. Roper, Mr. Furley, or Mr. Furley's unseen brother giving a shit what was happening in that apartment as long as the rent was being paid on time. It just seemed like something to generate humorous conflict.

I could maybe see a mixed-sex roommate situation being an issue in the South or Midwest at that time, but not in Santa Monica.

There’s still issues with Airbnb owners discriminating against certain ethnicities. So you can still find room for storytelling.

But with Today's story-telling the landlord would have to be confronted by someone (and taken down in some fashion) before the end of the pilot.

A modern way to do this show would be for a father to be renting out one of his real estate properties to his two daughters or daughter and her best friend. The daughters want their new boyfriends to move in but knows the dad wouldn't allow it, so they tell the father they are gay and they want them there because the neighborhood may not be safe.

Not really a technology thing but does Night Court still exist? Did it ever ? I assume court has regular hours and folks brought in after hours just have to wait in jail overnight for processing .

Not only that, but the show would be a half hour long, since they wouldn't always have to run back to the school or the Magic Box or Giles's or Willow's to find everybody.
One group text, "Meet at the graveyard, got some slayin' to do", that saves two commercial breaks.

That and the fact that the court cases were handled the same day as the incident. There was no time to collect evidence or get your own attorney. you had to settle for the on duty public defender. It also seemed to be the court was all inclusive of leagal activity. It handled criminal charges as well as civil liability at the same time.

Edit: So it does still exist to some degree. Here's an article about New York's night court whic is held in the same building that was shown in the opening for Night Court.

https://nypost.com/2014/03/18/citys-...st-attraction/

^ Well that is super interesting. I had no idea. Thanks!

Yeah, and how did that work out?

But the premise of Three's Company was that despite the "sexy" situation, there was no hanky-panky going on in the apartment.
BTW, they added a 24/7 Three's Company channel to Pluto TV

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