Creative license or where do they get those machines and marshmellows?

I love the following shows. I really do.

But…

The little Las Vegas police department’s annual budget must be $73 billion dollars. $72.99 billion of it going to the CSI unit. I can’t believe all the sophisticated equipment they have in their pentagon-sized lab. Giant elaborate machines that do nothing but crosscheck tracks from vintage Mark C. Bloom tires only. How often would they use such a thing? Who approved the purchase of it? Do they ever let the guys from Reno come over and use it?

If the CSI'ers need to decipher pillow talk in a crowd they conveniently have computers that can filter out hurricane noise. And programs that can zoom in on a satellite picture down to someone’s pores. Every real police department has trouble getting requisitions to replace the ink pads used to take thumb prints.

I think OCEAN’S 14 should be the gang trying to knock over the CSI lab.

On LOST I don’t know what provisions the Dharma Initiative provides but last week Hurley convinced Jin to join him in an overnight campout by saying they would roast marshmallows. These survivors have marshmallows? When they’re not battling “the Others” they’re making smores? They must be very upset because the New England lobsters won’t wash ashore till June.

Meanwhile, the hospital on HOUSE is CSI with MRI’s. What insurance provider would possibly approve all the tests those doctors perform? You’d hope Blue Cross would at least get a discount on all the misdiagnoses. And since they have gigantic cyclotron machines that can identify specific helixes in DNA and crosscheck Mark C. Bloom tire tracks, how do they routinely go 45 minutes and remove a vital organ before identifying the real problem?

I guess they save money by not having an ICU. Patients have heart transplants at 10 and are back in the room drinking orange juice by noon.

Who would want to live near that hospital? It’s the weird mystery disease capitol of the world! Every other hospital might get some unusual case once every ten years, this Princeton facility has three at any one time. There’s a waiting list. The minute you start feeling dizzy sign up. Don’t wait until you actually discover you’ve grown a third foot.

Princeton Plainview Hospital (or as I call it -- Cedars of Malpractice) is also the only facility with floor-to-ceiling glass walls between patients’ rooms and corridors. Nothing like using a bed pan or trying to pass a kidney stone into a little strainer with visitors and candy stripers going by. But it looks cooler on TV. Where's the Gynecology wing???

Most other medical facilities I know have specialists perform tricky operations. Neurosurgeons and like that. But on HOUSE the young doctor protégés do it all. Drilling holes in peoples’ heads, angioplasties, removing pesky tumors from spinal cords – when these kids are not screwing in a transparent attempt to siphon some of GREY’S ANATOMY’S audience they’re whizzes with the knife.

And then there’s the FRIENDS apartment that only Stephen Sondheim could afford.

All shows take creative license and I mention these examples more out of amusement than criticism. After all, I worked on MASH, a show that asked an audience to believe eleven seasons of stories all took place within one year and CHEERS where in eleven years no one ever paid for a drink.

Tomorrow: more CHEERS sleight of hand. We even got away with some of it.