Reno 911!
Dean
I am a big fan of Reno 911!. I find the show utterly hilarious. Most of the cops I've known would probably also find it utterly hilarious. I find myself wondering at times if the cops in and around Reno like the show, but I suspect that some of them do. For all that it satirizes cops, it satirizes absolutely everybody, and an awful lot of the routines they do on the show very much remind me of stories various cop-friends have told me. (Most cops love telling stories, and most of them have some amazing ones to tell.)
And he's only half-kidding.
Great stuff!
f
"I don't like donuts. Remind of orifices."
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
But as he's being taken out, he spontaneously comes up with "You can't arrest me...I was the Milkshake on Reno 911!"
This cracked up the cops so much that he ended up getting a nice ride home instead of a night in jail. He also became a.k.a. "MILKSHAKE" forever after.
Which reminds me, I have a CD here that Milkshake wants to borrow...
American television is in my view currently in a golden age. The advent of so many more television channels available means, of course, that there is a lot more crap, but there's also a lot more high quality stuff. It's a matter of knowing where to look.
Reno 911! is high comedy, with a troupe of actors portraying cops on in a so-called "reality show" format. I have had any number of friends who are or were cops and the skits they portray on this show seem terribly like the many stories real cops have told me--although raised to a level of absurdity of course.
Fred: My favorite is probably Wiegel, although Jones and Garcia constantly make me laugh.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
Corollary to Sturgeon's Law: If you increase the number of offerings, there will be a greater number of items that are NOT crap, despite the fact that the percentages haven't changed.
In my neck of the woods, people often blame Californians for bad driving. (And let me tell you, I've seen some egregious violations of traffic laws and good sense from other states as well.) If one applies Sturgeon's Law to California drivers, you will see that though there is no greater percentage of bad California drivers, simple numbers mean that there are more of them for out-of-staters to encounter. (Personally, I'm of the opinion that people who learn to drive in densely populated areas are either very good or very dead.)
Suddently, a white van drove up to the scene with a big "CSI" painted on the doors. I got excited -- "Hey, this is gonna be exciting," I naively thought.
Then...2 fat guys came out of the van in overalls, holding clip-boards and began milling about like the rest of the folks there. No injuries, no Marge Helgenberger, no nothing.
"Darnit," I muttered to myself, "How come this ain't like the t.v. show!"