5 Things TV Writers Apparently Believe About Smart People

The Problem:

Yes, it's just TV fantasy, and yes, our entertainment will always involve action heroes who are impossibly strong or wise guys who are impossibly witty. What bugs us about this is the implication that if you are born with these supernatural smart people genes, time and effort become meaningless concepts.

This lets us to drag out our favorite and most often-quoted statistic: acquiring mastery in just one field takes approximately 10,000 hours, or ten years... even if you're really smart. Some shows get around this by simply saying the character has eidetic (or a "photographic") memory, but that's a skill so rare that it's doubtful that it even exists, and there is no recorded example of a single human using the ability to become a genius in every subject they touch.

So it's annoying because these characters are kind of an insult to everyone who's ever actually become a genius in a field through 30 years of laborious study. They create the impression that a talented person can soak up perfect knowledge of ancient Chinese literature in six months or so, allowing them to move right on to molecular physics or Jiu Jitsu. No big deal -- in the shows they honestly don't seem to work any harder than the average Joe.

And nothing else in their life suffers -- they had time to keep themselves attractive and toned, plenty of time and energy to spare for working out, eating right and learning good fashion sense.

In other words, all of the real-world scientists with bad haircuts and pocket protectors, grinding away in super-specialized fields for decades to cure diseases or study black holes, now look like lazy jerks.

Hey, speaking of jerks...

A further staple of the supergenius genre is the guy who treats other people like crap, and gets away with it because of his amazing talents. It's actually hard to find a TV genius who isn't a jerk. These people are unfriendly, antisocial, or generally messed up when it comes to communicating with other humans, but avoid getting sued or shot in the face only because it turns out they're always, always right.

Obviously Dr. Gregory House is the best example, dissing his superiors at every opportunity and regularly putting his patients' lives in danger because he's in a bad mood. That was part of what made him unique six years ago. But later, Cal Lightman from Lie To Me, Walter Bishop from Fringe, Patrick Jane from the Mentalist, and many others popped up. All of them share a similar tendency to see humanity as one giant Youtube comment thread, ripe for trolling.

The Problem:

First of all, let's be clear that these people make it look like being a schmuck is totally awesome. The shows pay lip service to the backlash the character gets from others (see the House storyline when a wealthy new hospital board member called for his head), but by the end of the episode or story arc, the schmuck always wins (the board member was gone a few episodes later). In the long run the genius keeps his job, continues to be treated as a superstar, has friends and gets hot girlfriends. The message is clear: when you are a genius, there are exactly zero consequences to acting this way.

So it sends this horrible message that the primary motivation to become the top dog in your field is that you will finally get to treat people like garbage.

Yes, the writers always set it up so that the good the character does outweighs the bad. In real life, on the other hand, the people who think they're geniuses overwhelmingly are absolutely not. Seriously -- it's science. The more you learn about a subject, the less likely you are to consider yourself an expert (because you have actual knowledge of how much you don't know). It's the guy who has read two books on the subject and worked in the field for a year who's more likely to decide he's graduated to the league of smug, condescending know-it-alls. We have a feeling that soon the offices of the world will be full of sarcastic people because they came through on one project and now believe they're the indispensable Dr. House of their operation.

Also, in the shows the antisocial characters usually have an excuse for their horrible personalities, typically a single traumatic event in their past. The Mentalist's Patrick Jane had his wife and child killed by a serial killer who he'd foolishly insulted on air. Detective Adrian Monk of Monk blames himself for his wife's murder. Criminal Minds' FBI agent Jason Gideon had a serial killer blow up six of his fellow agents. Cal Lightman blames himself for failing to prevent his mother's suicide. House has chronic leg pain.

Let's just put this out there: TV writers may be awesome and talented people, but they are not Nobel prize-winning, once in a generation intellectual giants. Yet, they are forced to write about such characters, people smarter than themselves. That requires some amount of guesswork about how a superhuman intellect functions, since the very plotlines of these shows involves tracking the genius character's process.

As a result, the characters on TV virtually always solve crimes and medical mysteries using blinding flashes of realization brought on by coincidence. In House, a doctor realizes that a misdiagnosed patient is actually suffering from a light allergy after a fellow doctor taunts him with a laser pointer. Another realizes a patient is suffering from a food-stealing tapeworm only when he steals a friend's sandwich.

Meanwhile in Castle, crime author Nathan Fillion figures out the true killer of a young woman when his daughter randomly quotes a line of lyrics to him. We're meant to be amazed by the bizarre eccentricities of the genius mind, when in fact relying on this sort of answer to solve puzzles is about as intellectually responsible as trying to cure a disease using feng shui.

The Problem:

This goes back to the "genius means never having to exert yourself" issue we brought up earlier. We actually remember a time when TV characters would sit down and do research in order to find an answer to their problems. Which is pretty similar to the way we solve things in real life - reading, researching, going through mounds of evidence, furtively checking Wikipedia, giving up and submitting questions to Yahoo! Answers, etc.

Even in the not-exactly-realistic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the characters solved their dilemmas in nearly every episode in the library over stacks of books. That is, real discovery is often a slow grind through theories other, smarter people came up with in the past.

Not so for the TV supergenius. The answer is always waiting right there in their head, their superhuman brain basically playing the role of a magical genie that grants instant knowledge to the blessed protagonist. They even portray the rest of the team slogging through old-fashion tests and experiments, only to arrive at a dead end until the genius character has his epiphany and rescues them.

Television didn't invent this idea -- pop culture is full of myths like the apple falling on Isaac Newton's head and giving him the idea for gravity in one sudden "Eureka!" moment. School teachers have for decades been telling kids Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but failing to mention that getting a working product took 80 years of tedious trial and error by numerous inventors.

As a result, you have people who have convinced themselves they are stupid because great ideas don't just pop into their head while they're sitting on the toilet.

And yet, in the world of TV it appears that all of the world's one-in-a-million supergeniuses have landed in this field. FBI profiling agent Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds has three PhDs, an IQ of 187, and a reading speed of 20,000 words per minute, which must come in useful whenever he wants to read Atlas Shrugged four times in his lunch break. In the space of a single episode, Reid casually rattles off facts about veterinary science, human psychology, obscure Chinese board games, biblical Hebrew, and modern Irish literature.

But even he pales in comparison to forensic artist Angela Montenegro of Bones, who developed and built a 3D volumetric display which assembles images of victims from bone fragments, apparently in her spare time. Detective Robert Goren of Law and Order: Criminal Intent speaks five languages and shows off encyclopedic knowledge at every opportunity.

In the world of TV, these geniuses aren't freakish outliers who get called in when all the normal cops are baffled -- shows like the CSIs, Criminal Minds, Bones, and Numb3rs all contain entire teams of these supergeniuses. In every case, rather than using their skills to invent fusion power or take over small countries, these human libraries of congress have relatively low-level government jobs in police departments and forensics labs.

None of them even take off to make a fortune for themselves in Vegas - not even the guys in CSI, who are already in Vegas. They all just keep toiling away as cops or salaried lab-workers.

The Problem:

One, it implies that in even mid-level jobs you'll find yourself competing with someone who literally knows everything. Two, if you do find yourself around somebody with seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of your field, there is no reason to respect or admire them at all -- their magic brain makes it very easy for them.

And three, our children are going to have wildly optimistic expectations of public servants. How can there ever be another terrorist attack? TSA agents can spot bad guys on sight by identifying a rare type of pollen found only in bomb-making facilities.

At this very moment, somewhere, a furious person is telling a cop, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T KNOW WHO STOLE MY TELEVISON? CAN'T YOU JUST RUN A GREEN LASER OVER THE FLOOR AND TRACK HIS DNA??!?"

It's good to keep your expectations realistic.

In other words, these professionals have unusually exhilarating, non-monotonous jobs that give them many chances to apply their nigh-infinite knowledge base. Television CSI agents have it best of all: due to what we suppose are crippling Miami budget cuts, David Caruso accompanies SWAT teams as they arrest suspects, supervises the transportation of confiscated drugs, and investigates arson crime scenes while they're still on fire.

Other CSI agents interview suspects, comfort witnesses, chase down bad guys, and talk down criminals in hostage situations. In other words, the guys performing the supposedly impartial scientific tests are the same ones who are identifying and interviewing suspects, which makes the subsequent forensic evidence about as reliably objective as a driving test administered by a neighbor whose son you ran over last week.

The Problem:

Again, we realize this is what Hollywood does. No, Baywatch was not a gritty documentary on the lifeguard industry, Top Gun doesn't do much to prepare you for a career in the Navy.

But we feel like there is a difference here. After all, there such a thing as becoming a fighter pilot, and even seeing combat -- the movie just exaggerates the frequency of the excitement. A lifeguard may very well have to run toward a drowning woman, and his or her coworkers may in fact have huge [ahem] assets. It's just that the real job has a lot of tedium in between the dramatic emergencies.

But the whole point of pursuing a career in a profession made up of the smartest of the smart people is that you find the boring stuff exciting. That is, you enjoy the things things that are boring to other people -- the silent, steady crawl toward discovery, the long, painful untangling of a mystery, one thread at a time, over half of your life. You know, the parts that Hollywood sweeps under the rug for fear that you'd be bored out of your skull watching it.

There's nothing wrong with making genius sexy -- the scientists and teachers and analysts should be pop culture heroes. But Hollywood has done the opposite -- instead of giving us characters who are super smart yet likeable and heroic, they've given us the same old rogue action heroes we've been watching since the old West days, then threw in the, "Oh, also he's a supergenius" thing as an aside, as if it's as minor as pointing out the guy can play the guitar.

We have a feeling that ten years from now a lot of kids are going to find their degree led to a lot fewer car chases than Hollywood led them to believe.

For more ridiculous lies Hollywood taught you, read the Cracked book, You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News: Shocking but Utterly True Facts.