The ridiculousness of 80's crime dramas

It's 11pm on a Friday, the kids are in bed and the wife is playing video games. All caught up on TV shows and MST3k on Pluto is playing an episode I don't really care for. So I start digging around their on-demand selection. Score, classic MacGyver. I was always a fan of 80's shows like that. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote. But boy were their setups crazy.

One thing I never quite got about Murder, She Wrote was that the protagonist, Jessica Fletcher, was constantly getting involved in murders. Everywhere she went some cousin or nephew was doing some interesting thing she had to go see and boom, someone was killed. Not just once or twice. Over 264 murders (assuming at least one murder per episode). And yet in over a decade with a death toll of a small town no one ever called the FBI. Every once in a while a detective objected to her helping due to her just being an author, and even fewer thought twice about the fact death followed her around. No one really stopped and said it was ridiculous to assume she just happened to stumble upon so many murders. Cases for serial killers started with less of a trail.

Magnum, PI was a private investigator living on Oahu, Hawaii. In nearly a decade he was involved in 162 episodes worth of crimes, car chases, shootouts and women needing to be saved. Now granted, Oahu is the most populated but my god how much crime was going on there and how many major criminals lived on that island? How are there so many tourists visiting, a million residents and yet no one noticed the Uzi fire as two stupidly expensive sports cars went flying around the island. All par for the course when living on a tropical getaway?

MacGyver, the smartest and most resourceful of all the secrete spies, didn't like guns. Every week he'd intentionally get himself involved in some crazy situation where men with guns wanted to do harm to someone he knew and never once did he come prepared. There was always the assumption that whatever place he ended up he would find just the right straw, rubber band and paper-clip to fashion himself a blow gun or a nuclear reactor to power up some dead vehicle that had been sitting out in the elements for decades. It would have been one thing if he was doing the whole Kung Fu thing, wondering town to town and just happening to fall into bad situations. But half of the episodes he was on assignment to go rescue someone and all he brought was his pocket knife. If you don't want a gun at least have a daily carry where you put some C4, fishing line, and a lock picking kit in an Altoids tin or something.

I loved these shows as a kid but they are so ridiculously unbelievable it is amazing that some of them were given modern remakes that somehow are worse at pretending to be realistic.

$ published: 2023-08-19 01:37 $

$ tags: #80s, #tv $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2023-08-19

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