Are there any "accurate" modern TV shows?

You need to watch Swamp People. Yeah it's a reality show and the network types almost certainly think they're allowing the rednecks to make fools of themselves but that thinking has backfired more than once. And of course there is the ever popular Duck Dynasty. Guns are portrayed as a natural part of life for rural people. Despite the worst intentions of the network types these shows have reinforced the morality and decency of hunters and their families. Swamp People actually shows alligator hunting as the central theme of the show. The gators get shot many times per show. They attempt to make the people look like hicks and rednecks but I have a lot more in common with those people than I do the network brass types.

Guns and hunting are making a comeback in American culture despite the worst laid plans of mice and rats. I saw some guys coon hunting just a few minutes ago. I wish I was still able to go myself. I loved doing it. And I'd love to take a History Channel exec frogging with me. I'm sure he would pass out from the sight of blood and guts. Personally it makes my mouth water and my stomach growl because I know what those legs are gonna taste like when they get cooked up right.

There's still plenty of garbage on tv that portray rural people as lawless loons. They especially like to pick on West Virginia it seems. They have always hated WV since it first broke away from Virginia. It wasn't long before the mythology of the hillbilly as born and it was WV and Kentucky that was the central location for those wild people. Heck one of my best friends in college played on the Hatfields And McCoys tv show that aired last year. He was "Cousin Mickey (McCoy)" for those that watched the show. Those people are my friends and family. I went to church for years with the guy who played Devil Anse Hatfield in the History Channel documentary on the Hatfields And McCoys a few years ago. We have been great friends for about 25 years. He works for a newspaper and a tv station in Huntington WV which is where my daughter also works as a finance manager. She still sees that guy around on a regular basis.

Both of those shows on the feud and their families were pretty insulting in a lot of ways. But what the outsiders thing of as showing how stupid we are really just shows how traditional we are. They would like to have you believe we are still like those feuding types (watch "Appalachian Outlaws" if you have any doubt about that). It really doesn't bother me what they think. We've gotten along just fine for a very long time without their approval. It is true that some people protect their land and their resources diligently. So do people in the cities. They hire an army of cops to do their dirty work. We mostly do our own. But ginseng has been almost eradicated in much of these mountains so what they're claiming is just silly. I was raised in the woods and I've never seen the amounts of ginseng that show talks about. It's mostly tractors, farm animals and homes that get protected by the people that own that stuff because the law is too far away to ever be of any real help. You can get them to come out and look for trespassers and the like especially when it comes to deer hunting. There's big money in renting your farm to people who have no place to hunt so we don't like poachers coming in and killing off the deer much. People who get caught at that sort of thing get some hefty penalties too. I know of people that were fined like $50,000 for killing deer out of season and on land they didn't have permission to be on. http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/where-hunt/2009/03/kentucky-man-faces-stiff-poaching-penalties

Watch "Life Below Zero" and see us unscripted folks with guns and using them as intended; For Hunting and Self defense.

It's not on anymore but The Unit was pretty good. I know at one point they were the leader for most amount of firearms on www.imfdb.org
You can probably find it on Netflix or your local library (if they're the type that let you check out DVDs).
4 seasons of a SF team. I enjoyed it.

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/The_Unit

And I'm still PO'd that they canceled it after the 4th season with at least three cliffhangers hanging!

I miss the Unit and we watch Swamp People and Duck Dynasty.

Problem with The Unit is that it doesn't fit the criteria. It was a military based, special forces action show. TV can portray military and police as heroes with guns, but civilians virtually never have positive gun experiences outside of reality TV.

However, I will say this, a law abiding citizen lawfully carrying a firearm as the basis for a primetime action show would be boring. Accurate, but boring. Entertainment is wrong more often than not, fantasy over reality by design.

It sure would be interesting to see fan reactions if on a show like Modern Family there was a shot of the middle aged father sitting at the table cleaning an AR-15 or even a shotgun or pistol with no other commentary on the matter. They show plenty of cooking and cleaning so wouldn't be a waste of episode seconds. Don't foresee anything like that happening though.

"Blue Bloods"
"Falling Skies"

I can't say I'd call swamp people realistic or accurate. I've seen scenes edited so borribly that they attempted to make it look as though one gun was used, but in fact two completely different guns...even different action types...were plainly seen at certain points. But...at the beginning off the scene and the end of the scene, there is one rifle being used. Things like that bug me to no end.

I like "Strike Back" , Blue Bloods, and Justified. Justified and Strike Back are a little over the top, but stay current with the weapons part, and the characters weapon handling skills are good.
Timothy Olphant from Hitman, and Deadwood, has gotten comfortable around guns. It does push the boundaries of what is believable, when he faces off against 6 armed killers, and tells them he will drop 4 before they clear their holster and then worry about the other two, but it's old fashioned John Wayne type parody.
Strike back follows the escapades of a British SAS type outfit, who are always outnumbered and also have the latest weapons, or weapons, some that you will recognize form your club or range, or closet. Again, over the top, but the hour flys by, and they explain how they shot the scenes at the end, Camera angles gunfire etc. As far as casual working the gun into the scene, "sons" did that a lot, there were scenes where one of the club was cleaning a pistol or rifle without mentioning it, and most of them have guns on them at some point. We are due for a China Beach type show on Afghanistan soon, that's my prediction. One thing they have in common is that they can get shot stabbed and beat within an inch of their lives, and are up and running in the next scene.

Instead of retyping the whole thing, here's what I posted on another site about the lack of realism with guns in almost anything..... along with why I don't watch "normal" TV any more.

My wife's health isn't great and we have one TV in our bedroom. She watches her shows there. It's the nicer TV. Mine is downstairs.

I watch sports, news, history and science stuff, and that's about it. The only "reality" shows I watch are Duck Dynasty and The First 48, both on A&E. She watches lots of other stuff including the whole range of CSI shows, NCIS, and some other ones like that. I don't. I was in our bedroom and she was watching CSI:Miami. I happened to begin paying attention to the show at exactly the wrong time. Blonde-dude-from-nypd-blue is talking to some other guy about a Cuban guy who was blown up by an land-mine right after getting of a boat escaping from Cuba. There were two other guys on the boat who got off and didn't esplode. One was a baseball prospect (which is what caught my attention. I'm a baseball nut.) and he had been threatened by the other guy. The threatenerizer gave the baseball guyer a couple of things to prove he was serious about killing him if he didn't keep his mouth shut.

A spent 223 case.

And a laser boresighter.

Blonde-dude-from-nypd-blue discussing with other police dude comments on the boresighter. "It's used to make sure the gun is extremely accurate. It looks like we have a sniper on our hands. We have an assassin."

That's when my head exploded.

After I got my head spackled back together, they cut to the next scene where the were running the spent case through some database that can match it with any gun that had ever been fired in the US. It matched it to a specific HK gun _and_ shooter, just from the firing pin indent and extractor/ejector marks on the case.

"That's some serious firepower."

My head exploded again, taking out most of my left shoulder.

My wife kicked me out of the room.

Click to expand...

It wouldn't cost that much for them to get a half-decent technical consultant, but they honestly don't care.

The bore sight was (IIRC) one of the site-lite slip-in-the-bore ones. I think it would have been funny to have them show the "sniper" shooting someone with it still in the bore... or duct-taped to the scope.

Even the History channel can't get it right quite often. I have a pic of what they're calling the "Colt Peacemaker", a.k.a. Colt Single Action Army but it's actually a cap and ball revolver that I think is a Walker Colt. And this was on a show about the evolution of handguns!!!!! No one caught that one before it aired and I've emailed them about it and it still runs that way.

Matt

Skribs said:

However, TV does this with a lot of stuff, so I think for the most part it's not just guns they get wrong.

Click to expand...

It's usually worse when it comes to computer stuff. I remember watching a show where the bad guy was "steering" a virus through the internet and all he had to do was reboot his computer when he hit a secure router and he'd be through. Funny how rebooting didn't so anything to his massive see-through glass monitor. He even managed to get the virus on the intended computer, even though the computer wasn't connected to any network. :banghead:

The incremental cracking of passwords where one letter at a time shows up just drives me nuts.

Matt

Doc7 said:

It sure would be interesting to see fan reactions if on a show like Modern Family there was a shot of the middle aged father sitting at the table cleaning an AR-15 or even a shotgun or pistol with no other commentary on the matter. They show plenty of cooking and cleaning so wouldn't be a waste of episode seconds. Don't foresee anything like that happening though.

Click to expand...

Believe it or not, there is an episode of Modern Family wherein it is revealed that when the blonde mom tells her family she is going to yoga class, she actually visits a pistol range. It is suggested that she does so regularly. She is discovered by her "trophy wife" stepmother, who then joins her on the range and chastises her for not being a better shot for all her practice. It is shown and suggested a few times that the stepmother is quite skilled with a handgun, with the only explanation given being that she is Columbian…

There is an episode or two of CSI where a homeowner is shown retrieving a handgun to investigate a "bump in the night" during the cold opening. Once on Criminal Minds, a woman discovers that she is being targeted by a serial killer and runs out and buys a shotgun. The agents are shocked (SHOCKED!) to discover that she could do so with no waiting period. The local detective shrugs it off. "Hey, this IS Texas." -rolls eyes-

Insofar as "regular people" concealed carry on television, I am hard pressed to think of an example off the top of my head. As has been stated, it's always an off duty police officer, a criminal or a "vigilante" out to take justice into his/her own hands(!).

As has also been stated, we are talking about drama/comedy here and regular ol' law abiding CC would be boring. We are in a quite literal "Chekhov's Gun" situation as far as this discussion goes.

Movies are VERY occasionally different. An example that immediately springs to mind is in Boogie Nights. A robbery is going down in a doughnut shop. One of the main characters, I'm hesitant to use the term protagonist given the overall tone of the film, is in grave danger. At a table a quite stereotypical heavy-set middle aged white guy, complete with vest and trucker cap, pulls a big ol' honkin' S&W 29 out from under that vest and saves the day.

Haven't read the comments, so I'll just post what I see.

"Jericho" is a pretty good one for this topic. It's a small, rural town in western Kansas. The people are gunowners, and overwhelmingly the show portrayed gun culture as it really is. It's a "post-apocalyptic" show, but is mostly about the day-to-day struggles of a small town cut off from the world. Most carry firearms (even rifles) in the show, and it's acceptable. There did not seem to be writers involved who wet themselves at the sight of firearms.

"Falling Skies" and "The Walking Dead" similarly present guns as normal and acceptable, but that's in extreme circumstances; not necessarily showing universal acceptance for gun culture as safe and normal.

I dislike so-called "Reality" shows, including Duck Dynasty. Blasphemy, I know.

Oh! I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard good things about "Justified" in showing gun culture positively. Can anyone confirm or deny that?

Justified is a great show, IMHO. However, I don't know that it would qualify as a positive illustration of gun culture. While it does seem to show just about everyone in the "hollers" of Kentucky packing, most of the characters are either LE or criminals. Most are portrayed as hillbilly folk, but even the well-to-do are pretty shady.

Joe Mantegna trys to keep Criminal Minds on the straight and narrow. One show had somebody say something about any other uses for a 308 than as a sniper round and he flippantly says "in Texas? only everybody and their grand ma uses one for hunting" or something like that.

Justified is far fetched but they're pretty good about gun ownership Raylen quite oftens pionts out how felons aren't supposed to have them but they all do.

I happened to be in the room while my wife was watching one of those real estate "reality" shows called "Flipping Vegas." A guy and his wife partnered with a couple of PIA twin guys from NYC and bought a house in Vegas, sight unseen, to renovate and flip for a profit. When they initially entered their investment property, it was apparent that preppers were squatting in the house. If I recall correctly, there was what appeared to be an automatic weapon setting on a table, a room lined with plastic sheets with exposure suits and gas masks hanging on the wall, MREs, etc. At one point, they removed all of the stuff from the house to get started on the renovation. They came back to the house on a subsequent day and there was a note spray painted on one of the walls "Give us our stuff back" or something like that. There was another incident with a smoke bomb in the house. During one of these visits, it sounded like they surprised the preppers who were still in the house, and the guy pulled a gun from concealment to investigate. This guy looked like a typical anti, with an artsy interior decorator type wife. It suprised me that he had a gun on him and he said that he has a CCW and carries everywhere. I'm sure most of this is probably loosly based on reality and somewhat scripted, but I found that to be pretty surprising.

Kate on Lost was pretty quick with a handgun to go check on Aaron... The show is iffy on everything else gun-related, though. Sometimes they cock the hammer every move, other times they don't, sometimes fingers are off triggers, sometimes they're not, and I think a Sig turned into a Glock once, or the other way around, but then... they are on an island that jumps through time, so... maybe it's not their fault.

Justified and Strike Back are a little over the top

Click to expand...

A LITTLE???

The commercial for it, where he comes up to the guy playing Marco Polo fits.. The at the end he shoots the pool.. The water sprays out the hole not like it's within an inch of the top but at the bottom of a 20 ft tank... really???? it was a funny commercial though.

Oh, and Hell on Wheels. It takes place in the 1860's, but it's still a new show portraying guns fairly accurately.