You know the scene. Two characters (usually a somewhat harmless looking protagonist against a burly big tough guy) start to fight. A crowd forms around them.
“5 bucks on the big strong guy.”, says one person in the crowd.
“10 bucks on the obvious winner.”, another crowd member bets on the same.
“100 bucks the underdog main character wins.”, shouts a supporting character also in the crowd. The others look at him in disbelief.
Then the fight happens, underdog wins, and we cut to the supporting character with a wad of cash in hand being really smug.
What’s the logistics of that money exchange? Like, if there was a bookie keeping track of who bet how much on what, and doing the pay outs, that would obviously work. Or if people individually accepted each others bets. But these stories always just display people shouting, and then the winner with the money. Is this shouting style betting actually based in reality, or is it just a nice dramatization for entertainment purposes?
There’s loads of things in tv shows that just skip the boring, logistical parts. Nobody wants to see a bookkeeper painstakingly taking leaflets and bets in orderly fashion.
Besides, if there’s no record whatsoever, what’s to stop a bookie from taking money from the losers, and telling the winners ‘prove it’? Besides a knuckle sandwich, that is.
Another one is basically any desk job, but particularly IT jobs in TV and movies. Even the most elite hackers don’t just insert a thumb drive in a laptop, hammer the keyboard and yell ‘I’m in’. Mr. Robot is the only show so far where hacking is portrayed somewhat believable, and it’s still mostly social engineering.
As for programming, the only show I’ve ever seen who do a realistic way of describing VC funding and agile project development is Silicon Valley, but even there you’ll find the most boring things are just omitted.
Point is, it’s just difficult to make administrative tasks interesting enough to keep the attention of viewers.
A bookie is stopped from not paying up by reputation- you won’t bet with them again if they don’t pay up.
the bookwork is hard to make interesting though.
Damn you, you started to say that hacking is not portrayed realistically and I was going to reply with Mr. Robot, then you said about programming and I was going to mention Silicon Valley. Which goes to show that those are likely the only two realistic examples out there hahaha