My late good friend Mark Tartaglia, a retired Philadelphia detective, once told me that he couldn’t watch TV shows about cops, as he felt the shows were unrealistic.
Having spent four years in the U.S. Navy and another 33 years as a Defense Department civilian employee, I understood why he felt that way, as I found most TV shows about the military to also be unrealistic.
But unlike Mark, I watch TV shows about the military, as I enjoy pointing out the fallacies to my long-suffering wife as we watch TV together.
During the last 15 years of
my more than 37 years in DOD and the Navy, I worked part-time as a writer, and I
became a full-time writer when I retired from DOD in 2007. As a newspaper crime
reporter and columnist, I’ve covered cops, prosecutors, defense attorneys and
judges, so I’m able to point out the fallacies in TV crime shows as well as military shows, much to the annoyance of my wife.
To her, the TV shows are light entertainment that she does not take seriously enough to care much about accuracy. But I enjoy pointing out mistakes to her and I enjoy offering sarcastic asides about the TV shows as well.
I used to love Law & Order and the spinoff Law & Order SVU years ago, but I’m no longer fond of the shows as they are now boring, blatantly politically biased and poorly written. I rarely watch them anymore, but the other night I watched Law & Order with my wife, and I pointed out several unrealistic actions of the detectives and the lawyers in court.
And I could not resist making comments as we watched the DVR recording of the show.
For example, when the defense attorney in court asked the judge for a sidebar, I paused the recording, turned to my wife and said that after the defense lawyer asked for a sidebar, the judge stood up and directed the defense attorney and the prosecutor to an office adjacent to the courtroom, where a court officer made the judge and the two lawyers a cocktail.
Sidebar – get it?
My wife got it, but she didn’t think it was clever or funny.
Later, when the assistant district attorney stood up and told the judge that the prosecution rests, I again paused the recording, turned to my wife and said that after the prosecutor announced that the prosecution rests, he sat down, put his head on the table and went to sleep.
Once again, my wife was not amused.
Thankfully, I amuse myself.
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