I watched a lot of TV as a kid. Primetime or decades-old reruns, it didn’t matter. I hung out quite a bit with Maxwell Smart and 99; Lucy and Desi Ricardo; George and Weezy Jefferson; Captain Stubing and Julie, your cruise director; Gomez and Morticia Addams, and many more.
In fact, one of my first crushes as a young boy was Morticia (Carolyn Jones), which tells you more about me than you probably wanted to know.
I loved and trusted these characters and countless others, as they entertained me and occasionally taught some valuable lessons.
But they also did something else: they lied. To you, to me, to all of us.
Over the years I realized that situations that were common on TV weren’t happening in real life to anyone I knew or had ever heard about. And now I feel played.
Here are a few of the more egregious tall tales I was duped into believing.
The citizen’s arrest
You’re in line at a convenience store when some armed thug orders the cashier to hand over all the money in the register. If you were in a TV show, you’d back away without noticing the “Wet Floor” sign, slip ass over teakettle in such a way that your airborne legs flail like a windmill, and accidentally coldcock the robber with your foot.
After you gathered yourself, a deli worker would use his apron string to tie the guy’s hands behind his back. The robber would eventually come to and, bolstered by the customers’ cheers, you’d announce that you’re making a citizen’s arrest.
That night, you’d play up your bravery and, unaware that your daring act was in fact clumsiness, your wife would remark how you were going to get lucky. The next day she’d see the store’s closed-circuit footage of you pulling a Chevy Chase on the news, and feel betrayed.
You scamp!
By my TV-informed calculations, we should be seeing citizen’s arrests—be it bank robbery; purse-snatching; or good, old-fashioned mugging—about once a quarter. But not only have I never seen one, I’ve never even heard of one happening.
Then one day I wondered if citizen’s arrests are even a thing. Could it be that I wasn’t misled, but that this was a once-popular practice that had since been banned?
Nope. In many countries, including the U.S., making a citizen’s arrest is legal with surprisingly loose restrictions. For instance, the Supreme Court has said that a citizen can arrest someone for a misdemeanor that would only warrant a fine, like not wearing a seatbelt. So buckle up, or risk the wrath of wanna-be cops on patrol.
I plan to wait by Tesla Cybertrucks at expired parking meters and arrest the owner for the violation, because having an inferiority complex and shitty taste aren’t against the law.
Here’s a fun fact about citizen’s arrests that may surprise you: you’re allowed to use reasonable force, which seems to imply that someone attempting a citizen’s arrest is a reasonable person. I love the optimism.
But be careful, all you would-be vigilantes—if you go into citizen’s-arrest mode on an innocent person, you could be charged with false imprisonment, kidnapping, and other felonies that will be a huge stain on your permanent record.
Your permanent record
According to television shows, any infraction of the law would appear on your permanent record. It was unclear whether this record was written on paper or scroll, but it would be accessible by anyone in authority who might need it for whatever reason. It could make or break you.
Figuring I had a right to see what’s on mine—would it contain the fact that I’m no longer welcome to drive in the state of Maine—I thought calling my congresswoman would be a good start. Upon hearing my question, someone in her office responded, “Stop wasting my time” and hung up on me.
Undaunted, I checked with my governor’s office. After five minutes of trying to explain what a permanent record was (“You know, the official log of every misdeed and wrongdoing I’ve committed throughout my life—my permanent record!”), I assumed that had this been the purview of the governor’s office, the person I was speaking to would know what it was.
Then came my county commissioner, my township supervisor, the hospital where I was born, the superintendent of the school system I attended, my post office, my bank, my local library, and a Freedom of Information Act request.
Relentless in trying to locate my permanent record, I received only responses like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” “Please hold” followed by an immediate disconnection, and “There are harassment laws, asshole.”
As I started to worry that harassment would show up on my permanent record, it finally hit me that there must not be such a thing.
I was becoming depressed. Here was another situation TV had lied to me about. It was so distressing that I wished all of this had never happened, or that I’d forget it all by developing a case of amnesia.
Amnesia
I’m aware that amnesia is a real thing. But it’s very uncommon. Judging by the frequency with which it used to appear in TV shows, you’d think most of us would have first-hand experience sitting by someone’s bedside, their head wrapped tighter than Simon Cowell’s face, assuring them that you’re their cousin and not a rogue debt collector.
No one I know, and no one I’ve personally heard about, has ever had this condition.
In retrospect, that makes sense. To reach the number of cases of amnesia that those shows had, we’d have to be living in a land where every street is riddled with open manholes and lined with coconut trees.
As a kid, I couldn’t have known that this was just artistic license, a convenient plot device that rarely occurs in real life. They made it all seem so normal, just another one of those things that happens, like rickets or Legionnaires’ Disease.
It was all a farce. They played on my naïveté, my unfamiliarity with the neurological workings of the brain, and, worst of all, my love of mummies.
The more I learned about all the dishonesty, the more I wished I could hide from the world, or fall into a coma.
Comas
Like amnesia, comas are obviously a real medical condition, although not nearly in the numbers one would expect from watching TV. Seemingly every other week, someone or other was slipping into something more unconscious to add some drama and suspense to the proceedings.
Would they survive? Would they have amnesia? Would they awaken with a different personality? Would their doctor or nurse develop a career-ending attraction to them while they were comatose, perhaps involving inappropriate touching? It was anything goes, post-coma.
The message was clear: comas are common, and they’re a harbinger of something weird.
Another untruth.
Sadly, real comas are infrequent and rarely interesting. I’ve only heard of one person I’m tangentially connected to being in a coma, and there was nothing exciting about it. It was apparently just a lot of sitting around waiting to see if the guy was going to wake up. When he did, he was confused and disoriented, and though it took a while, everything was eventually okay.
Borrrrring.
Where was the mysterious second wife who came charging into the hospital room when she heard the news? Where was the secret love child who came onto the scene at the worst possible time? Where was the shocking revelation that the coma patient wasn’t the person everyone thought he was, but his evil twin?
Evil twins
This, by far, is the cruelest trick TV has played on us.
They made us believe that around one in ten of us had a mysterious evil twin out there somewhere, who could pop up at any time to screw up your life. Sometimes there’d be a mustache that needed to be shaved, or a wig that needed to be donned, or an eyepatch that had to be explained away, but their specialty was assuming their more respectable twin’s identity and causing anarchy.
In some instances—I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched come to mind—the identical twin was actually a cousin, making things even more confusing. (Speaking of Bewitched, they ultimately switched out Darrin not with a twin but a more boring actor (#notmydarrin). There was a lot going on in that show; just ask Gladys Kravitz.)
The twins I know have remained close with each other throughout their lives. Not one has turned evil and disappeared to wander the country romancing elderly widows to get their insurance money.
None has devised an elaborate plot to con an orphanage out of its endowment.
I can’t think of any that have gone to their twin’s house while said twin was on a business trip, seduced her brother-in-law by pretending she was her sister—home early from the work trip—and later blackmailed the husband with video of the encounter for $50,000.
What a drag. It makes you wonder why we even have twins at all, doesn’t it?
Look, I’m hurt. I don’t like being lied to, certainly not by characters I adored.
TV, I wish I knew how to quit you. But you keep roping me back in with your Only Murders in the Buildings, your Severances and your Bad Monkeys. So I have no choice but to give you another chance.
But I still have hope. If you’ve taught me anything, it’s that someday soon I’ll be stuck in a broken elevator with a handful of strangers from different walks of life. And while we wait to be rescued, there’ll be that one annoying guy who’s freaking out, the tense executive who’s late for her meeting, and the loving couple who are eventually at each other’s throats. After several hours, our defenses will break down, and shit will start getting real.
I can’t wait.
Don't forget Giligan's Island, where millionaires and tv stars keep their fortune and fame even on a desert island. This was a great post Chris. I especially loved the evil twins and amnesia. I was tricked as well into believing that with identical twins one was always evil and the other good, and that amnesia is fairly common. Liars!
And as far as television lying to you, you'd better sit down when you start asking about extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Hell, most don't even bring anal probes with them.