Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2012

Hawaii Five-0, the most unrealistic cop show yet

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As usual, Gregg Easterbrook’s weekly NFL column contains a fair bit of non-football stuff. This week, he spends a bit of time detailing just how unrealistic the rebooted TV show Hawaii Five-0 is. It’s a rather overwhelming list of unlikely, unrealistic, and just plain silly TV:

All action shows contain some nonsense. As the television critic James Parker has noted, an action series that consists entirely of nonsense is an art form. Parker thought 24 was an achievement in that sense. Inheriting this mantle is the reimagined Hawaii Five-0, whose third season kicks off Monday. Five-0 has emerged as television’s most entertaining delivery system for pure nonsense.

An episode begins with a prisoner on a commercial flight killing the U.S. marshal escorting him. The murder weapon? I am not making this up: Two plastic airline knives held together with a rubber band. Passengers were unaware a murder was in progress onboard, because the marshal inexplicably did not fight back or cry out, although it would take quite a while — probably hours — to kill someone using two plastic airline knives held together with a rubber band.

[. . .]

On Hawaii Five-0, a small group of cops has an omniscient supercomputer the CIA would envy. Plots regularly involve automatic-weapons fire on the streets of Honolulu. The Aliiolani Hale, a Hawaii landmark, is presented as the secret headquarters of Five-0, as if a Washington, D.C., detective show presented the Washington Monument as a secret headquarters. “I confer on you blanket immunity from prosecution, so you can go outside the law to stop crime,” the governor tells McGarrett. Gov, think about what you just said! Not even Oliver North had advance immunity.

There’s a long list of laughable TV cop tropes, including the inability of bullets to even slow down Five-0 agents, immortal super bad guys, better-than-SF crime-solving technology, plus the usual imaginary laws, ignoring both common sense and the laws of physics, and so on. But he also points out a serious flaw in most modern TV representation of police and other law enforcement activities:

On TV, cops in street clothes just say, “Police” or “NYPD,” and instantly are believed. In a CSI: Miami episode, the David Caruso character, asked to prove he is a cop, dismissively waves his badge too far away to be seen. In a Five-0 episode, a person being questioned asks McGarrett for proof of who he is. “This is all the proof you’re going to get,” McGarrett snaps, flashing his badge so briefly no one could know whether it was real, let alone read his name.

Why do TV script writers promote the idea that it is unreasonable to ask law enforcement officers to establish identity? No honest cop objects to this. Fake badges can be purchased in a costume store, and criminals pretending to be police are a long-standing problem. If a guy banged on the door of a Hawaii Five-0 producer, claiming to be a detective but refusing to show ID, that producer surely would dial 911.

Of course action shows are preposterous. But it is troubling that television crime dramas imply that law enforcement officers should never be questioned. Why does Hollywood think this is a notion the American public should be force fed?

May 19, 2012

Mark Steyn on “The Great Baracksby”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

In his weekly Orange County Register column:

It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:

“Geography is about maps

But Biography is about chaps.”

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author:

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007:

“He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”

[. . .]

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake — an elite schooling — Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure — the impoverished roots — merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives — the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi — are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

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