We watch “Mistresses” in this house, because while I publicly eschew reality and trash TV, I will gleefully and happily embrace trash-like TV if it has “BBC Series” written on the box. I love a good bit of dosh, particularly if said plot involves four women who drink, hang out, and generally may need to think about keeping their knees a little more firmly locked together.
(As an aside, I do wish I had more female friends who lived nearby that I could meet up with wearing strappy heels and sparkly dresses and enjoy fabulous bottles of wine over gossip. This does not happen, yet I continue to accumulate strappy heels. Someone help a girl out here?)
Alastair often goes right off of series when something factually incorrect occurs in them, usually to do with wiring, sockets, or lights. That happens and you’ll see the back of him as he leaves the room. Me, I hang in there and troop on because it may be an error, but it’s all about suspending belief.
Except for one area.
There’s one area where the belief, she is not suspended.
I can watch most anything – blue people who are alive in one place, normal human-being like in pods in another? Sure. Modern day Sherlock Holmes solving crimes in London? Niemus problemus. Four women posing as feminists who are slaves to fashion and have hunky rich men in their lives while swirling Cosmopolitans? Check.
Get this one wrong, though, and I get very cross.
In “Mistresses” last week one of the characters started IVF. I pay attention to these things because it’s maybe as much of something I know as wiring and lights are to Alastair. You become sensitive to IVF and all things around it, and you even (usually) know the celebrities going through it. If you’re out and about – particularly here in the South of England, where fertility-treatment induced multiple birth rates are the country’s highest – then you think about. See twins out and about and you think “IVF”. People probably think it of me, not unfairly. I think it of others, and it is common for people to think that way (as evidenced in May’s comments here.) Maybe it’s because we’re aware of it, maybe because we’re more in tune, but whatever the reason, IVF is something we think about.
So when the character in “Mistresses” picks up her bag of down-regulation drugs at her IVF clinic and, looking at the nurse, exclaims “There’s a baby in here!” I had to be physically restrained.
No dear. Your bag contains hormones – rumoured to be from nun or hamster or urine but likely grown in a lab – that will make you crazy. You will throw your body into menopause and give your physician the ability to control your uterus. You will have hot flashes, you will cry, and you will scream at random people who assume you have a rocking chair and two dozen cats.
You do not have a baby in there.
The writers of the series should maybe have done their homework.
We all have things that wind us up. My beloved hates when people mis-use “blogging” and “posting”. Alastair hates when you watch a period movie and you see a satellite dish on a house. Me, I can just about tolerate when someone pushes a “baby” out and the nurse presents them with a kid just about to hit their first birthday. What I can’t deal with is getting IVF so hideously wrong. IVF affects so many couples and changes our lives, one way or another. Do some homework. Write it correctly. But don’t refer to a bag of down-reg drugs as a baby in there. It’s a step of many.
-S.
PS-you lot and your food peculiarities are absolutely fabulous, and I mean that. I read every comment and laughed, agreed, or shuddered. Thanks for that!
This is an excellent post on your blog, m’luv. :-)
And I hear you. I can suspend belief in a lot of things as well but it irks the shit out of me to see a cooing, giggling 9 month old handed off to a sweaty mum who supposedly just projected the sprog through her crotch. No.
I also get irked when people screw up details about Paganism, so generally, I just flip that shit off right away because nobody ever gets it right. The one time I suspend that is during “The Craft” and that’s only because I want to shag Fairuza Balk till she screams “I’m flying!”
I know! I was just reading an article in a magazine about a family with one kid adopted, one kid from a surrogate, and one born the “old fashioned” way, all within a year. I get really pissed off when people talk about IVF and how they implant the embryo. No, they don’t implant it. If they COULD implant it, then IVF would have a 100% success rate. And geez, folks, I didn’t even go through IVF.
And by the way, I would totally love to put on heels and a sparkly dress and swig wine while gossiping with you. But I live a bit far away. Maybe one day.
I can suspend belief pretty easily too, yet I find as I get older more things piss me off when portrayed wrong. From something as simple as a person knitting on a crocheted piece to big things, like mental disorders or alcoholism. Though in the case of the latter two, or any serious subject matter, the more accurately portrayed the harder it is to watch sometimes.
I hate it when a drama focuses on adoption. No, really you can’t have a cute healthy baby is 2 months after filling out a post it note with false information. My husband laughs at me when I start screaming at the TV. Oh the woes of an adoption specialist:-)
Bag o’Baby? More like Bag o’Bullshit. Considering the hell some women go through with infertility, the least they could have done is get their facts straight. Right on, sister!
I ranted about the very same programme on Twitter. I was half way through the penultimate episode shouting “you watch, it’ll all end happy ever after and they’ll succeed on their first treatment”. Then when the closing scenes showed her reaching for the barroom cabinet, I literally hit the ceiling “oh wow, of course, why didn’t stupid me see the oops pregnancy coming?!”
The ‘pregnancy’ didn’t actually transpire and I was grateful to the programme for not making it all perfect in the end, cause it’s bloody hard, for a long time.
Oh and I have a similar issue with Big Brother contestants misusing ‘up for nomination’ in stead of ‘up for eviction’. But then again the fact that I was programmer like that sums up my intellect!!
I’m with Dee – anyone watching Corrie at the moment? I wouldn’t watch it anyway but apparently they find out at panel (which happens 6 months after their miscarriage) that there was a nasty secret in the references and there is a punch-up, but the word is they get to go back and are approved again. Which of course will lead to them having a gorgeous newborn placed with them within a fortnight.
I pick out continuity errors for sport myself. What is hilarious to me, is when someone shoots some low budget c Grade movie (think American Ninja 4) and they’re talking about “Being in Miami” and then we see our local beach (in Cape Town) coming up on screen, complete with cars driving on the left (and them miraculously driving on the RIGHT and ignoring all the road signs facing the wrong way… oh – and bad accents grate me too. Here in SA we have a lot of fake american accents advertising *whatever* and I’m like, geez if I can do a passable american accent (I really can, I Promise) then why can’t someone – who is PAID to?
Going through a limited amount of IVF then adopting two internationally I totally agree. The notion that they give away Chinese girls makes me want to throw something. Not that I adopted from China, but if you know anything about their guidelines they are extremely strict. Also if I hear poor adoption language again my face turns red. “She is so lucky to have you in her family.” Yes we make her bow every morning and kiss our feet for the fact that we adopted her. No you dumbass no one asks to be ripped away from their birth mother and have to go to a new country. Think about it for two seconds. ::end rant::
I’m not saying this to be contentious but rather to help you get over this hurdle, so you can keep watching a show you like without being irked at that one point. : ) I wonder if they meant it as a metaphor like an agent looking at a football player and saying, “There’s a million dollars right there.” What he means is, “There’s the means (or the path) to me getting a million dollars.”
I’m not trying to defend the show. I’ve never even heard of it; and I know nothing of IVF. I honestly was just trying to provide an option.
I’ve not seen any of the previous series. Turned the tv on during the first episode of this series, realised that it involved IVF and I was hooked. I shuddered when she said that line. I would also like a friend who was a)in a position, and b) willing to lend me £10,000 for treatment (not that I would accept it of course, it just made the whole IVF thing more unbelievable).
I’d go buy strappy heals and dresses for that weekly drink. I suspect you’re onto something good there.
You would not like Private Practice, the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff. One of the doctors is an infertility specialist and they get it so spectactularly wrong it’s unbelievable. I think they’ve hit every part of the cycle at this point and completely blown it. Actually, I think they’ve hit most pregnancy related things and gotten them wrong. If it weren’t for the pretty, pretty people I’d have been out a long time ago!
Baby/pregnancy inaccuracies bother me more than they probably should for a single, childless chick, but I think it’s that all medical inaccuracies irk me, and when it comes to having babies, it really shouldn’t be that hard to get right since it’s kind of a widespread phenomenon, baby-making is. I stopped watching “Brothers and Sisters” (which is just blatantly inaccurate in almost all respects and so melodramatic it makes me want to barf) but the breaking point was when a character went to an OB appointment and the doctor happily announced she was six weeks along and then let her hear the heartbeat. About five minutes later, a pediatrician handed a seven-month-old a lollipop.
Twenty seconds on google, people. TWENTY SECONDS.
Oh and @ Erin – Private Practice gets everything wrong…they clearly don’t do any research. They did an episode about a little boy with diabetes that was so off-base it made me want to cry.
I hate how everyone loved ‘Juno’. Same thing I guess.
Yes to most of these, esp the IVF and other medical ones. But I find myself probably more annoyed at stupid editing mistakes in books – eg in Jennifer Weiner’s latest, which is actually much better than the last few, someone starts a bad moment on a Sunday, and somehow ends up going to sleep at the end of the following day, and waking up on saturday morning. It drives me BONKERS.
It’s totally normal to be more annoyed by mistakes when you have such deep experience with the realities. I get physically upset if a Spin City rerun is on, because I can recognize my husband’s Parkinson’s symptoms that Michael J Fox was trying to pass off as acting quirks. Doesn’t make me angry, but I can’t not notice.