Decker

Inspired by the Movie thread of the same name, I was thinking about some TV shows with a major problem in the center that it's hard to get around.

Obviously everyone starts with Gilligan's Island. You could do an entire thread on that. The premise is so ridiculous and it's been nit picked to death, but it's still funny to think how absurd it is that these people were going on a three hour tour with luggage.

One that I have been thinking about recently is Sex and the City. My daughter is working her way through the show now and it hit me again : Carrie's job is writing a column for a New York paper about sex. She is apparently writing about her boyfriends and her best friends' sex lives and yet nobody has an issue with her doing weekly columns about who her friends are sleeping with and their weird sexual proclivities? That would be a good way to quickly lose all of your friends, or at least all except Samantha. Did they ever address this on the show?

fujishig

How I Met Your Mother. Father telling his kids about his sexual exploits with women who aren't their mom. The ending season and resolution ramps up the ridiculousness to such a level that it almost ruins the entire series.

The reveal of who "Gossip Girl" really was doesn't really make any sense if you rewatch the series.

I'm not sure if this is more a sign of the times but it's hard to watch Married with Children, where the Bundys are basically a single income family with two children off of a shoe salesmen's salary and always down on their luck but they are able to afford a two story house.

And I'm sure GOT is going to come up.

Neil M.

Dexter. Just about everything after season 4.

morriscroy

Not any particular show.

Generally any show which portrays computer processing / hacking in a manner which is entirely wrong at a technical level.

Michael Corvin

More of a peeve along the same lines as morris...

CSI - we still don't have technology capable of some of the things they were showing us 10 years ago.

Nick Danger

Numb3rs is supposedly about a savant mathematician who solves crimes that nobody else can, but he's using 9th grade math. I gave up after the episode where he figured out that the crimes were in a cluster, which nobody else had been able to do. Then he drew lines on a map showing the shortest distance from the crimes to a center point, and that really was the building where the criminal lived. Every episode I watched, of a program supposedly about an super-smart guy, insulted my intelligence.

Nick Danger

CSI caused problems with real world juries. They started to expect that kind of irrefutable forensic proof in their cases. My favorite was how the show did DNA testing in an hour or two. At the time, the backlog for DNA tests of rape kits in my state was something like nine months.

dex14

Charlotte says early on something like "don't write about this", so there must've been some sort of consent from them before the show takes place. It's not like anybody in the broad scope of things knows who the writer's friends are unless they know the writer directly.

and

Well Game of Thrones.. but I'd prefer not to give that a second thought. Designated Survivor has a ton of plot holes from the first episode lol

Decker

Speaking of Keifer shows, obviously 24 has a million of them but the one that I couldn't get past was that you would think over the years that someone might have noticed that when things start going sideways at CTU, the worst stuff always seems to happen at 58 minutes past the hour. At least be ready for it.

SteveA

Basically every time travel show. Especially where they go back in time to change something and then everyone seems to remember that the something was changed.

GoldenJCJ

I also remember reading how many people Jack killed over the series run which amounted to him killing something like 34 people a day.

At a certain point we need to realize that Jack Bauer is just a serial killer.

Michael Corvin

"you would think over the years that someone might have noticed that when things start going sideways at CTU..." that they'd realize they have yet another mole in the building.

CTU had the worst human resources department. At some point, maybe look into head of HR as the mole?

Count Dooku

None of the characters on The Simpsons ever age, and even though they occasionally acknowledge events from the past, there is no continuity.

Decker

MASH celebrated like 6 Christmases in a three year war.

GoldenJCJ

And in one instance, they went through an entire year in a single episode.

Neil M.

But does that really ruin the show? South Park went with continuity and I feel like that ruined the show to a certain degree.

morriscroy

Beavis and Butthead didn't appear to age either. (Except maybe the flashbacks in the movie).

They appeared to be the same age in the 2011 revival, as the original series in the mid-1990s. But with then-current topical references.

fujishig

I feel like you have to take most cartoons out of the equation. The fact that the Simpsons don't age is like the least of the believability problems with them. If that's what ruins the show for you, I'm not sure what show you're watching...

morriscroy

If Beavis and Butthead were to age, they might very well resemble the show "Trailer Park Boys".

milo bloom

Time sliding in animation doesn't bother me, but when live-action shows have someone give birth and the next season the kid is a toddler, that's a jump the shark moment.

I'm a little more forgiving here, since we don't really know how time travel works. If we really are living in a simulation, then we may remember quantum traces of other realities.


People living in extremely nice places that they shouldn't be able to afford is one. Frasier in that kind of apartment doing a radio show? Even if they're using Martin's benefits and Niles chips in, that's a really nice place.

Josh-da-man

The old someone is hacking into a computer system by violently mashing keys while random numbers streak down the screen, which begins to break down into squares because there's a virus trope.

Josh-da-man

Count Dooku

Something ruined it.

morriscroy

Visual depictions are funny.

Very misleading is stuff like cracking passwords in a few seconds. Even for a weak password, it can take many hours to crack by running a simple "dictionary attack".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_attack