I look forward to it every week, I love the concept but...this happily ever after thing is really starting to get to me.
Every week the volunteers are able to find these random obscure pieces of information that the police could never find. They always identify the body and catch the killer. Yes, I understand this is TV and is not supposed to be completely real but exactly how much reality am I supposed to be suspending???
Sometimes they need to fail.
Very good point. I think there will come a time when they don't succeed in their mission. But keep in mind that the show needs to establish itself first before it can start to branch out a bit.
I remember watching an episode of Perry Mason (it was a rerun. I'm not that old...) where he didn't get the bad guy to confess on the stand as usual. The guy got away with it. It was the only time in that shows run (that I know of) where that happened and It made for a very cool episode.
Yeah, the guy "got away" only to have Mason still get the confession out of him by the end of the episode, just not on the stand.
Someone once asked Raymond Burr how exactly Perry Mason won every case he ever tried. Burr's response was that they only showed the cases that were tried on Tuesday.
As for The Forgotten, I look at it as the characters don't have the same rules to follow as the police. In other words, a character could sweet talk their way into viewing security tapes or interview a witness more informally. The officer has to follow police procedure. Also, many times the information isn't obtained in the beginning because the witness doesn't realize it's important or simply that enough time has passed that the witnesses no longer feels compelled to keep the secret.
"Yes, I understand this is TV and is not supposed to be completely real but exactly how much reality am I supposed to be suspending???"
How much reality do you want? In real life, only a fraction of the cases involve murder. Many of their cases deal with missing children, who are still alive but have been snatched by one of the parents. The majority of the cases are unresolved. How interesting would that be even if one show out of four involved a case that went nowhere?
Check out www.doenetwork.org if you're interested.
Yes I understand that the majority of cases are not solved, in fact that's my point. I'm not saying this should be completely realistic as that would be very depressing and no one would watch it. What I'm saying is, it would be ok if sometimes they find out the person's name but not the killer.
If I only liked "happy" shows I wouldn't watch shoes like this one.
I never got the impression that every episode ended with a "happily ever after". There is still the young lady in a coma. The football player who has to come to grips with his father killing his coach. The woman who has to find the reason why her husband's brother set him up to take the fall in a murder so he could move in and take over his brother's life. I always thought is was about closure and moving on to the next step in the grieving process and not that once the murder was solved that life turned into sunbursts and lollipops.
I think the endings for this show are a lot more realistic than the ones for Cold Case.
House: Hey I can be a jerk to people I haven't slept with. I am that good.
I agree. The show hasn't ever given the implication that everything is happily ever after that I can recall. Instead, they give the families closure, in stark contrast to Alex who never got any.
shareOK so maybe happily ever after was the wrong way to describe it. Yes, the endings aren't happy. But in every episode they are able to not only name the victim but catch the killer, I just think sometimes they should fail just to give it a touch of realism.
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