Two new campus comedies (Rooster, Vladimir) raise the question: Have TV writers ever been to college? | Television's fictionalized depiction of higher education is becoming a real-world problem.

Its like that Todd person I never met. I don't think he's real but he has a lot of followers and allegedly works in mysterious ways.

And to think: I let him pilot that magic carpet in my dreams last night.

They’re this close!

Don't let my confusion undercut their importance.

[There is an SNL sketch about this topic exactly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNUKou8vnJQ)

I believe in it too. The only afterlife I will ever accept. Well the Chidi version. 

The csi effect is real… “thats the best evidence they could come up with, must not be legit then…” 30 years of shows add up 

Like that «wait 24 hours to report someone missing». Yeah, no. Actually harmful and damaging to victims

Yeah actually that's a great example. I worked for Legal Aid and had clients with very valid claims who had delayed contacting us or were terrified to go to court because they thought the judge was going to be mean to them and tell them they were stupid like "Judge Judy." That garbage hurts real people.

I know nothing about American law so I thought Suits might have had a few things correct in the early seasons. Then they had a Finance season and I realized the writers had no clue how anything worked. (Plus the later seasons just had random people walking into rooms with files and repeating the same 8 sentences)

Police procedurals used to have cops who followed laws despite the shortcuts being easier. Now they follow their faith or their guts and ignore laws they disagree with to Defeat the Bad People.

Even the best and "most accurate" shows like The Pitt get university health care systems wrong. In no universe are Med Students touching patients or giving nurses orders to do anything. The most a Med Student may do is a suture under the VERY close supervision of a Resident, Fellow or Attending Physician. Don't get me wrong, it's a great show, but you wouldn't even have a season 2 as most of the cast wouldn't be on rotation again together for quite some time. Your Attending Physicians and Fellows would still be there, but that would be it. I think some programs would have rotations of one month on one and one month on another, but still.

Yeah High School in tv shows was insane, who were all these 25-year olds with cars and tons of disposable income and seemingly limitless free time

I still remember asking my older sister if high school was going to be like Saved by the Bell.

I'm going to guess he was happy to be teaching to a small group of kids who actually wanted to learn the useful stuff he had to teach and he wasn't going to have to spend the whole semester debunking myths to kids who didn't care.

Oh sure. But depictions of college affect particularly young and naive people making a particularly big financial decision. Kids who DON'T go to college and make a poor choice of first job based on something they saw on TV are not out that much money, if you spend a few months working at a bakery before you realize you hate it and it's nothing like "Cake Wars," at worst you've made some money and are not much worse off than you were a few months before. The closest thing I can come up with for shows that lure people into making wildly-uninformed-but-enormous financial decisions are the ones about home renovations and "flipping." But even those aren't affecting literal kids. Again, I don't blame the shows, they're there to entertain, not educate, but it's something people who are there for kids need to be aware of and counteract as much as they can. EDIT: somebody above mentioned legal shows having a deterring effect on regular people going to court and yeah, that's another genre that can have a very serious financial impact on particularly vulnerable people. I definitely agree that "college shows" aren't the ONLY ones that are a problem in this way. SECOND EDIT: Oof somebody else above mentioned joining the military... A high school kid joining the military because of unrealistic stuff they saw on a screen is every bit as bad or worse than a kid making college decisions because of unrealistic stuff they saw on a screen. At least college won't actually kill you (unless you're doing it really wrong).

Briefcase Wanker!

I think that was more about a short lived period where being smart was cool in high school. Didn't last long as TikTok/manosphere/Covid did a number on intellectualism.

>the turn of the century bro, if you're going to make us sound ancient at least use the much cooler millennium. Turn of the century makes it sound like you graduated in 1901

There absolutely were goofy things like that when the movie was set, especially in rural texas.

I went to HS in Texas and was the same year the main group, I was a Jr/sr the same year Randall “Pink” Floyd and his friends were in the film. Not only was the film made by someone who had been to HS, it was made by someone who went to HS in Texas, both in Huntsville and Houston. And by someone a year younger than Pink and I. 😇 The movie setting resembles Huntsville and if you know the movie you know it’s just a short drive to Houston to get your Aerosmith tickets. In my case, it was a shorter drive, I lived closer to Houston and my have played against the directors HS team, Bellaire, in basketball. I’ve told dozens of people I could put names to many of the characters as, “man, that kid is just like my friend _____” I never bought beer as a jr high kid. I went to jr high in another state and didn’t drink THAT young, but me and all my friends knew where to get beer where you wouldn’t get carded. I bought my first beer at the grocery store I worked at. My next door neighbor was a bar at the nearby Hilton. He was the same year in HS I was 😂 bottom line on the drinking is, the legal age was 18, and it’s easy for a 16 year old to look 18, far easier than to look 21. Dazed and confused is among the few movies or TV that nails it. So much so the director was threatened with litigation by the real people who went to HS with him because they saw themselves in the characters.

Bullock feels like a frighteningly plausible guy in charge of a government agency nowadays.

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?

IT Crowd and Silicon Valley, the only 2 exceptions.

I give you: "Severance"

Yeah, starting in the 70s/80s there began to be a lot of information for following established templates. IE Tropes and spec scripts. The profession became more and more pushed towards just being tweaks. To established formulas. The industry was always rife with formulas, but the creators were during their study at least *trying* to be creative before they became a cog in the machine. Stories about Hollywood are usually finer tuned because even today they force writers to follow the old rule ‘write what you know’. The Majestic shows the typical life of a writer in the 50s - forced to follow spec scripts until they could build enough credibility for their break out.

Now there's a guy who knows how to pay off a reference!

Lol reminds me of a bit in Cougar Town where someone wonders why they never talk about work and then it cuts to a montage of the characters at work doing monotonous boring tasks 

There's a reason there's been very few shows that get real kudos for its realistic depiction of their workplace settings. Shows like Mad Men and The Pitt are generally exceptions and I don't think audiences are expecting shows to get the depictions correctly because if they did, like you said, it wouldn't be compelling TV.

I think people don’t quite get that a fair amount of people would be interested and engaged in a boring workplace television show.

No-one is arguing that the *workplace drama* (or the comedy) is fabricated/exaggerated. The discussion is that the setting/environment itself is completely out of touch with reality. Like you said: > watch as the manager talks about marketing goals, the staff do their work, and an intern learns about the business from a practical perspective Parks & Rec and [Utopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_\(Australian_TV_series\)) are examples where of course the characters and situations we observe them in are **completely** exaggerated, but the overall setting/vibe seems (somewhat) *realistic*.