TV Keeps Setting Terrible Traffic Safety Examples

I haven't watched much live TV since I got my PVR. Commercials? What are those? That 30-second fast-forward button, click click click. I can watch a baseball game in about 20 minutes.

So I'm not always 100 percent up-to-date on the shows.

I finally got around to the season finale of CSI New York a few days ago. In this episode, 'Danny', the scruffy younger detective (don't know the actor's name - I fast-forward through the credits too) and his fellow-detective wife Lindsay are taking their infant daughter on their first 'family' vacation. Baby is properly ensconced in her car seat, in the middle position of the back seat, where it should be. The couple has bought a Volvo, so they're obviously safety-conscious.

Neither Mom nor Dad is wearing a seat belt.

What the HELL?

In New York state, belt use IS mandatory, yet TWO detectives in the NYPD are NOT wearing belts? Driving with their infant daughter? In a Volvo convertible, yet? (It was a C70, I think.)

Wait; it gets worse.

PVRing through a re-run of a 'numb3rs' episode a few days later, where 'Charlie Epps', the ultra-smart (Princeton at age 13) nerd decides to take real FBI training to get a better idea of what his brother, agent 'Don', goes through.

Part of the program is police pursuit driving. There's Charlie behind the wheel of a Ford Crown Vicky, chasing - badly - another Crown Vicky around a pylon course in a parking lot.

Charlie is wearing a helmet (looks like one from 1955), his instructor is not.

And NEITHER of them is wearing a seat belt!

I mean, come on...

Don't these shows have technical advisors? No advanced driver training program in the world would send students out without wearing seat belts. Not all such programs insist on participants wearing helmets. But if the student was wearing one, for sure the instructor would too. It’s his head that’s metaphorically in the hands of an untrained driver after all.

Is there no-one on these sets - script writer, actor, director, camera operator, script assistant, continuity person, coffee lady - ANYBODY - who has half a clue here?

Guess not.

A few months ago, I ragged on Canadian actor Allan Hawco for exactly this same thing in his ‘Republic of Doyle’ TV show on CBC. In a telephone interview he apologized, and said he wouldn’t let it happen again.

Now, that’s a show about a devil-may-care detective driving a hot old Pontiac GTO. You’d almost expect him to be irresponsible.

But detectives driving with their infant daughter in a Volvo? An quadruple-digit-IQ FBI consultant taking advanced driver training?

Geez…

Comments

[Sean McConnell]

As long as they weren't 50-over the limit, what's the harm?

[sjk]

In regards to Numb3rs, that might have been a lapse. I distinctly recall the FBI team members (Colby and Nikki in particular) regularly put on their belts every time they got in a vehicle.