Trigger Warning: I'm talking about forensic science, so there are mentions of death (primarily homocide), fire, guns, and other things associated with the field of study.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good crime drama. Some of my favorite shows are "Hawaii Five-0," "How To Get Away With Murder," and most recently "Eyewitness," among plenty of others. However, after taking a forensic science class for less than a semester (I am currently still taking it), I have had crime dramas ruined for me in the simplest of ways - it's just not realistic. It's not even in the "crime would never be solved this quickly" kind of way. Everyone knows crimes aren't solved in an hour, and it's simply not that easy to solve a crime. The way that this class has ruined my views of crime television is in a much subtler way - it's too clean. As my professor always says, murder is rarely rich people in an unusually clean home home.
First of all, unless the person who dies has severe OCD, there is no way that everything in the room would be completely neat, especially if there was a struggle. Chairs would be knocked over, there would be broken lamps and things strewn about, and there generally would be a lot more mess. This is especially the case because a lot of deaths happen in drug dens or where prostitutes are based. This is the simplest of issues that I have with shows after a couple of months in a forensics class.
My second issue with it is the cleanliness of the actual dead person on TV. Of course, I know that it can't be too graphic on most TV networks. However, there are plenty of ways to show the gruesome quality of murders without having to portray excessive amounts of gore. One simple way would be to show the presence of insects on the body - since it's pretty much inevitable, especially at an outdoor murder. Even a small amount of insects (due to the limitations of TV) would be good. Use CGI if you have to. Just anything to make it more realistic. Maybe make the blood pool a bit larger. Make the entry wound a bigger if the person was shot from a distance. Be consistent with evidence, particularly blood spatter.
To clarify, the forensic evidence tends to be very inconsistent with real life. Just the other day, I watched an episode of "How to Get Away With Murder" where one of the characters washed the blood off of herself in a gas station bathroom and called it good, but that alone does not remove the blood evidence from her body or her clothing. She would still have traces of it on her skin for a while after, unless she showered a couple of times and/or scrubbed thoroughly. Sometimes there's blood spatter (yes, spatter - not splatter) where there clearly shouldn't be. Sometimes people on TV can pull a perfect fingerprint out of a hotel room, which would hardly be possible considering how many people use a hotel room within the span of weeks or months. It's just not possible to get the perfect forensic evidence that is portrayed in all of these shows, and likely the evidence alone is not going to lead anyone to a killer due to lack of documentation of potential suspects in criminal databases.
Not only that, but forensic evidence is usually collected by specific people, not whichever policeman decided it was his job to bag and tag evidence. That in itself is just an annoying inconvenience in television, so they tend to skip right over that even though it violates chain of custody.
The most irritating thing to me, though, is fire evidence. This particularly started to irritate me when we did our recent section on fire in class, because I had remembered several episodes of different shows that had terrible portrayals of fire. I recently watched an episode of the show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" where Rebecca, the main character, started a fire in her house. Later, she goes back to say goodbye to her house, and there is very minimal smoke damage considering how long the fire had been going on before the fire department arrived. In less than 3 minutes, a whole house can be up in flames. Her house still had a mural intact in the room directly connected to the one that the fire started in. My roommate was witness to me yelling "THAT'S NOT REALISTIC!" at the TV while it showed a wide shot of the room. I think this is just bothering me because I watched it so recently after we went over it in class, but it's one of the many things that causes TV crime to be so inaccurate.
With all this having been said, I still enjoy crime dramas with all of my heart. There are just plenty of reasons to critique the shows, and it makes me want to become a producer/director solely so that I can accurately represent crime on television. I'm not by any means saying that no crime on TV is accurate, it's just very rare. "Dexter" comes closest to actual accurate representation from what I've seen. If you begin to learn anything about forensic science, you'll start to see the few connections I've made and many more. I can only imagine how hard it is for forensic scientists to watch procedural crime dramas.
