Whether I’m watching a movie or reading a book, one of the things that bugs me more than anything else is when there are glaring errors that they should have caught — and would have, if they had done their research.

For example, in the movie Panic Room the little girl, who is diabetic, is crashing rapidly — in the middle of the night.  You are more likely to crash in the middle of the night than when you are awake, so there’s no way she would be on a dose of insulin that would cause her to crash when she would normally be sleeping.  They try to explain it away by saying that getting worked up makes her crash, but as a diabetic I can actually tell you that exercise makes you crash, while stress makes your blood sugar go high.  But there’s much less danger that way, and it wouldn’t have made for quite as interesting a plot twist, so I think they purposely overlooked the inaccuracy for the sake of building tension.

There are other examples that I can’t  think of right now.  I often wonder how many mistakes are made in highly technical shows, such as the medical and lawyer shows that were quite popular on TV for a while.  Like that show Nip/Tuck that was on for a while — did they get all of the details regarding plastic surgery and hair replacement correct?  I’ll bet someone in the industry has a really difficult time watching those types of shows, because of it.

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