AVQ&A: What's your pop culture pet peeve?

One of life’s greatest pleasures is sitting with friends to enjoy a meal. No wonder most TV shows rely on this perfect excuse to huddle characters together. So it annoys me when they mostly just push their fork around the food, barely eating it. The Big Bang Theory and Gilmore Girls commit this offense frequently, with huge plates of grub going to waste. I understand the logistical issues of eating for multiple takes (messy, continuity errors, a sensory overload for the actors, etc.), but it feels like a op-out to make dining a huge part of almost every episode and not figure out how to make it feel real. When TV shows commit to the bit—like Dwight scarfing everything down in The Office—the result is always way better. A similar pet peeve is when characters order food or a beverage and let it sit on the table only to rush out without consuming it, throwing a few bills down on their way out. Nothing makes me yell at a fictional person on my screen more. [Saloni Gajjar] 

Some characters are so rude. In fact, most characters are. But even more than not finishing their food or stubbing out cigarettes seconds after lighting up, the most annoying thing they do is put their dang shoes on the furniture. It’s everywhere. It’s not just a Netflix problem. From period pieces like A Complete Unknown to the far reaches of The Spider-Verse, movies are lousy with characters not minding their manners and placing their dirty ass shoes on beds and couches. This would never fly in reality (at least not in my house!), and it strains credulity that no one would tell these characters to remove their shoes before lying down. As Charlie Murphy learned in the ’70s, it is detrimental to the upholstery. Fuck your couch? No, fuck your shoes and keep ’em off the furniture! [Matt Schimkowitz]

This is a specific and admittedly woo-woo complaint, but I hate when something I’m watching gets Tarot cards wrong. When a show or movie goes for spooky mysticism, they try to add foreboding to the situation by throwing out the “Death” card—but “Death” isn’t necessarily negative (the card is typically meant to signal major change, not actual death). Sometimes I’ve noticed fictional tarot readers just making up the meanings of cards wholesale, because the writers know the audience largely won’t be familiar enough with Tarot to know the fictional reading is wrong. It always feels like a cheap storytelling shortcut to me. In my opinion, you can’t get your point across with an accurate Tarot reading, find some other way to get your point across. [Mary Kate Carr]

I’ll be a parody of myself here and note that I get genuinely a little irritated when movies or shows portray playing video games in blatantly incorrect ways. The ur-example, Jesse Pinkman playing id Software’s first-person shooter Rage with a light gun controller in an episode of Breaking Bad, at least works as a plot point for the show, showing him wrestling with his trauma about taking a life. (Another episode, where Jesse “plays” Sonic by having Aaron Paul flail his fingers all over his controller’s sticks and buttons, is less defensible.) This issue has gotten better as more people who’ve actually held a controller even once in their lives show up in pop culture, but nothing completely unimportant will irk me more than watching someone “play” a video game like they’re desperately trying to win a thumb war with themselves. [William Hughes]

Nothing takes me out of a film or show more—not even, say, cars pulling off the impossible feat of speeding through certain swaths of Manhattan or London in the middle of a workday—than when a smoker stubs out a cigarette prematurely. In my experience as a longtime (and happily former) puffer, smokers—not the casual or social I’ll-have-one-with-a-drink kind but the ones who count down the minutes until their next cig break—never do this. Nicotine addicts cherish the moments with those terrible and expensive things that will certainly ruin them. I get why this happens in a technical sense (the scene might have run its course before the prop cigarette is burnt down close to its filter), but it really wipes away that character’s verisimilitude for me, even in (to repeat my colleague William Hughes’ reference above) the great stuff. [Tim Lowery]