Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am joined as always by my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, reporting for duty.
You know, it is funny, we were just sitting in the kitchen earlier today with our housemate Daniel, and he was telling us about his latest binge-watch. He is really into these shows that feel grounded, you know, the ones where you can almost smell the rain on the pavement or feel the tension in a room because the details are just so right.
Right, he sent us this great prompt about the work that goes on behind the scenes to make fiction feel real. He mentioned shows like Strike and Fauda and The Diplomat. It is a fascinating question because we often just take that realism for granted when it is done well, but when it is done poorly, it completely pulls you out of the story.
Exactly. It is that feeling when a doctor in a show uses a defibrillator on a flatline, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of medicine just groans. But today, we are looking at the opposite of that. We are looking at the teams that go the extra mile to get it right. So, Herman, let us start with the basics. What do we actually call this process? Is there a formal name for this kind of deep-dive research into realism?
Well, in the industry, it is usually referred to as technical consultancy or subject matter advising. But if you want to get fancy with the literary term, it is all about verisimilitude. That is the appearance of being true or real. When a production team is aiming for high verisimilitude, they hire what are called technical advisors, or T-A-s. These are the people who have actually lived the lives being depicted on screen. They are the former detectives, the retired spies, the surgeons, the pilots.
It is interesting that you mention the technical advisors because Daniel specifically asked about the interviewing and research process. It is one thing to hire a consultant, but how does that actually translate into a script? I imagine it is not just a matter of asking, hey, how do you hold a gun?
Oh, it goes way deeper than that. The process usually starts in the writers room, often months or even years before a single frame is shot. It begins with what is basically a deep-dive immersion phase. Writers will spend weeks doing ride-alongs with police officers or sitting in the back of courtrooms. But the real gold comes from the one-on-one interviews with S-M-Es, or Subject Matter Experts.
And that is where it gets tricky, right? Especially with the shows Daniel mentioned, like Fauda. You are dealing with people who have worked in high-stakes, often classified environments. How do you get them to open up without them breaking their non-disclosure agreements or national security oaths?
That is the art of it. I was reading about the creators of Fauda, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff. They had a massive advantage because they actually served in the units they were depicting. Lior was in the Duvdevan unit, which is an elite undercover counter-terrorism unit in the Israel Defense Forces. So, for them, the research wasn't just interviews, it was their actual lives. But even then, they had to sit down with their former colleagues. The trick, according to many showrunners, is not asking for specific classified details. You don't ask, what was the exact coordinate of that raid in two thousand fifteen? You ask, how did it feel in the van two minutes before you went in? What did the air smell like? What were you worried about?
That makes a lot of sense. You are looking for the emotional truth and the procedural texture rather than the secrets. It is the difference between facts and feel. If you get the feel right, the audience will trust the facts.
Precisely. And that texture often comes from the little things. There is a famous story about the production of The Wire, which many people consider the gold standard for realism in television. David Simon, the creator, was a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun for years. Ed Burns, his co-creator, was a homicide detective and a schoolteacher. They didn't just interview people, they populated the writers room with people who had lived the story. They would argue for hours over the specific slang used by drug dealers in a specific neighborhood in Baltimore in two thousand two.
I remember you telling me about that. They even used real people from the streets of Baltimore as actors, right?
They did. Some of the people who were the inspirations for the characters ended up playing different roles in the show. That creates a feedback loop of realism. If an actor who was a former detective sees something in the script that feels fake, they speak up. They will say, I would never say it this way, or, we would never enter a building through that door. That kind of on-set correction is invaluable.
It seems like there is a spectrum here. On one end, you have the creators who lived it, like in Fauda or The Wire. On the other end, you have writers who are starting from scratch. Let us talk about a show like The Diplomat, which Daniel mentioned. That is a world that is very closed-off and very formal. How do they handle the research there?
The Diplomat is a great example of modern research-heavy fiction. Debora Cahn, the showrunner, spent a huge amount of time talking to actual ambassadors and State Department officials. The goal there isn't just to get the politics right, but to get the lifestyle right. One of the things that diplomats often praise about that show is how it depicts the sheer exhaustion of the job. The constant travel, the way your personal life is completely subsumed by the state, the weird mix of high-stakes world events and petty office politics.
And the clothes! I remember seeing an interview where they talked about how a diplomat's suit should look slightly rumpled because they have been on a plane for fourteen hours. That is a tiny detail, but it tells a story.
Exactly. That is a second-order effect of good research. It is not just about the dialogue. It informs the costume design, the set decoration, and even the lighting. If you are doing a show about a gritty private investigator, like Cormoran Strike, which Daniel also brought up, you don't want it to look like a glossy Hollywood production. You want it to feel a bit damp, a bit cluttered, a bit slow.
Let us talk about Strike for a second. J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, clearly did her homework on the world of private investigators. It is very different from the James Bond version of intelligence work. It is mostly paperwork, sitting in cars for hours, and dealing with very mundane, often unpleasant people.
That is the extra mile Daniel was asking about. Most shows would find the reality of P-I work too boring. They would add a car chase or a shootout. But the teams that go for realism lean into the boredom. They find the drama in the patience. In the Strike T-V adaptation, they really focused on the geography of London. They used real locations that weren't the typical tourist spots. They wanted to capture the London that people actually live in.
I think one of the best examples of this process in action, and I know you love this one, Herman, is the show Chernobyl.
Oh, don't even get me started. Craig Mazin, the creator, is a legend for the amount of research he did. He spent years reading every primary source he could find. He read declassified Soviet reports, personal memoirs, and scientific papers. He even visited the exclusion zone. But the most impressive part was how they handled the technical details of the R-B-M-K reactor.
Right, they had to explain nuclear physics to a general audience without it feeling like a lecture, but also without dumbing it down so much that it became inaccurate.
They did it by using the characters' own expertise. When the scientists are talking to each other, they use the real terminology. They don't stop to explain it to the camera. The audience picks it up through context. And the production design team went to incredible lengths. They sourced actual Soviet-era clothes, furniture, and even wallpaper from across Eastern Europe. They wanted the show to look exactly like the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty-six. They even made sure the buttons in the control room were the correct color and shape.
That feels like a level of obsession that most productions just wouldn't bother with. Does it actually make a difference for the average viewer? I mean, I don't know what a Soviet control room button looks like.
I think it does, even if it is subconscious. It creates a sense of weight. You feel the reality of the world. When everything is authentic, the stakes feel more real. You aren't watching a set; you are watching a place. And for the people who do know, like the survivors of Chernobyl or the people who lived in the Soviet Union at that time, it is a sign of respect. It tells them that the creators cared enough to get their story right.
That is a great point. It is a form of respect. It is saying, your life and your profession are interesting enough as they are, we don't need to dress them up with Hollywood tropes.
There is a specific term for when a show gets this wrong, and it is called the uncanny valley of realism. It is when something is almost right, but just off enough to be distracting. Like when a computer hacker in a movie just types rapidly on a keyboard and green text flies across the screen. We all know that isn't how it works. But when you see a show like Mr. Robot, where the commands they are typing into the terminal are actually real Linux commands that would work in that situation, it adds this layer of credibility that makes the whole show feel more dangerous.
Mr. Robot is a fantastic example. I remember reading that they had a whole team of cybersecurity consultants, led by Kor Adana, who would actually build the hacks for the show before they were written into the script. They would find a vulnerability, figure out how to exploit it, and then the writers would figure out how to make that fit the story.
That is the gold standard. The research informs the plot, rather than the plot forcing the research to bend. It is a collaborative process between the creatives and the experts. And when it works, it is magic.
So, we have talked about the what and the how, but let us dig into the who. Who are these people doing the interviewing? Is it just the writers?
Usually, yes, but on bigger productions, they might have a dedicated research department. These are people who are essentially investigative journalists for hire. Their job is to find the people who can't be found and get them to talk. They look for the outliers. If you are doing a show about a specific type of crime, they don't just want any cop, they want the cop who worked that specific case for ten years.
How do they find these people? It is not like they are on LinkedIn with retired undercover agent as their headline.
Sometimes they are! But often it is about word of mouth. You talk to one person, they vouch for you, and then they introduce you to someone else. It is a lot like intelligence work itself, funnily enough. You are building a network of sources. And you have to build trust. These consultants are often protective of their world. They don't want to see it mocked or misrepresented.
I imagine the interview process itself is quite intense. If you are a writer sitting across from someone who has seen the worst of humanity, you have to be very careful about how you ask your questions.
Absolutely. You have to be a good listener. You are looking for the gold in their stories. The gold is usually something small. It is the way a detective always keeps their car keys in their hand even when they are inside, or the way a surgeon never wears their wedding ring in the O-R. These are the details that a writer would never think of but that make a character instantly believable.
It is about the tradecraft. That is a word you hear a lot in spy shows. Daniel mentioned the show Fauda, and tradecraft is a huge part of that. How they move, how they communicate, how they blend in.
Tradecraft is a perfect example of something that requires deep research. You can't just make it up. If you are doing a dead drop, there are specific ways it is done to avoid detection. If the show gets it right, it feels tense because we understand the logic of the danger. If they get it wrong, it just feels like a plot device.
You know, we should talk about the limitations of this process too. Because at the end of the day, it is still fiction. You can't be one hundred percent realistic because reality is often quite slow and, frankly, not very cinematic.
That is the constant tension in the writers room. They call it narrative economy. You want to be as realistic as possible until that realism gets in the way of the story. If a real-life investigation takes three years of staring at spreadsheets, you can't show that in a ten-episode series. You have to compress it. The trick is to compress it in a way that still feels true.
Right, so you show the character looking at a spreadsheet, you show the frustration, you show the late nights, and then you jump to the breakthrough. You are capturing the essence of the work without showing every single minute of it.
Exactly. And sometimes, you have to deviate from reality for safety reasons. You see this a lot in shows about crime or hacking. They will show a realistic process, but they will leave out one key step so that they aren't actually teaching the audience how to commit a crime or build a bomb.
That is a very responsible way to handle it. So, what about the extra mile examples? We have mentioned a few, but are there others that really stand out to you?
One that always comes to mind is the movie Heat, directed by Michael Mann. He is famous for his obsession with realism. For the big shootout scene in the middle of the movie, he didn't just hire stunt coordinators. He hired former Special Air Service members to train the actors. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Val Kilmer spent weeks on a firing range, learning how to move and fire as a team.
I remember that! They were using live ammunition during training, weren't they?
They were. And in the actual movie, the sound of the gunfire isn't a pre-recorded sound effect from a library. Michael Mann used the actual audio recorded on location in the streets of Los Angeles. The way the sound echoes off the buildings is exactly how it would sound in real life. It is deafening and terrifying. That is the kind of detail that makes that scene one of the best in cinema history.
That is incredible. It is such a visceral difference. When you hear that echo, you realize how exposed they are.
Another great example is the show Mindhunter. It is about the early days of the F-B-I's Behavioral Science Unit. The show is based on a true story, and the writers used actual transcripts from interviews with serial killers. The dialogue in those scenes is often taken almost word-for-word from the real recordings. They didn't need to exaggerate the horror because the reality was disturbing enough.
And the actors who played the killers were so eerily accurate. I saw a side-by-side comparison of the actor playing Ed Kemper and the real Ed Kemper, and it was uncanny. The mannerisms, the tone of voice, everything was spot-on.
That is where the casting department and the actors themselves join the research process. They spend hundreds of hours watching footage, listening to tapes, trying to inhabit that person's psyche. It is a holistic approach to realism.
So, we have talked about crime, spies, and nuclear disasters. What about something more everyday? Like a show about a kitchen or a hospital?
The Bear is a recent example that people have been raving about for its realism. Professional chefs have said it is one of the few shows that actually captures the intense, high-pressure, often toxic environment of a professional kitchen. They got the terminology right, the way people move in a small space, the constant behind! and corner! shouts. They even got the specific way chefs use blue painter's tape to label everything.
I love that. It is such a small thing, but if you have ever worked in a kitchen, you know exactly what that tape is for. It is an insider detail.
And that brings us to why this matters. When a show gets those insider details right, it builds a bridge of trust with the audience. Even if you aren't a chef, you can tell that they are being authentic. It makes the world feel lived-in. It gives the story weight.
It also makes the aha moments more satisfying. Because they aren't just convenient plot twists, they are based on the actual mechanics of the world.
Precisely. Let us go back to Daniel's question about the interviewing process. One thing that is really interesting is how writers handle conflicting accounts. If you interview three different spies about the same event, you will get three different stories.
That sounds like a nightmare for a writer. How do you decide which one is real?
You don't! You use the conflict. That is where the drama is. If three people saw the same thing differently, that tells you something about the stress and the fog of war. A good writer will use that ambiguity to make the story more complex. They might even have characters in the show disagreeing about how something happened. It adds a layer of psychological realism.
That is a great point. Realism isn't just about the facts, it is about the human experience of those facts. And the human experience is often messy and contradictory.
Exactly. There is a great quote from David Simon about The Wire. He said he wasn't trying to make a show about good guys and bad guys. He was trying to make a show about an urban ecosystem. To do that, he had to understand every part of the system, from the mayor's office to the street corners. That level of systemic research is what made the show feel so profound. It wasn't just a police procedural; it was a sociology lesson disguised as a drama.
I think that is what Daniel is responding to in these shows. He is seeing the why behind the what. He is seeing how the world actually works, even if the characters and the specific events are made up.
Right. And for the listeners who want to know what they can take away from this, I think it is a new way to watch television. When you see something that feels particularly real, look at the credits. Look for the technical advisors. See if you can find interviews with the showrunners about their research process. It will give you a whole new appreciation for the work that goes into your favorite shows.
It really does change the experience. You start to notice the background realism. The way a character handles a tool, the way they fill out a form, the way they react to a specific type of stress.
And for any aspiring writers out there, the lesson is clear: do the work. Don't just rely on what you have seen in other movies. Go out and talk to people. Do the ride-alongs. Read the boring reports. The gold is in the details that you can't make up.
It is about curiosity, really. Being genuinely interested in how other people live their lives and do their jobs.
Exactly. And that is what makes these production teams so successful. They are curious. They are willing to be the dumbest person in the room for a while so they can learn from the experts.
I love that phrase, the dumbest person in the room. It is a great way to approach any new topic.
It is the only way to learn! If you go in thinking you already know how it works, you will just end up repeating the same old clichés.
Well, I think we have covered a lot of ground today. We have talked about the verisimilitude of it all, the technical advisors, the narrative economy, and some incredible examples like Chernobyl and Heat.
And don't forget the blue painter's tape!
Never forget the tape. It is funny how those small things stick with you.
It really is. I think we should wrap it up here, but before we do, I want to say a huge thank you to Daniel for sending in this prompt. It was a really fun one to dig into.
Absolutely. It is always great when a prompt leads us down these rabbit holes of production history and technical details.
And hey, if you are listening and you have a topic you want us to explore, please get in touch. We love hearing from you. You can find the contact form on our website at myweirdprompts.com.
And if you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a quick review on your favorite podcast app. It genuinely helps other people find the show, and we love reading your feedback.
Yeah, even just a rating on Spotify makes a big difference. We are an independent show, so your support means everything to us.
Well, that is it for this episode of My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry.
Thanks for listening, and we will catch you next time.
Goodbye everyone!
