The next blog challenge prompt is to write about a social cause that is near and dear to my heart–there are plenty of causes that make me leap on my soapbox, but I can’t currently think of something I want to rant about, so I will have to put a pin in that one and circle back to it in a few weeks.

Skipping down to the next blog challenge prompt–“Write a ‘then and now’ post.” OK, I have been waiting for this one.

We live with my mom, who is 78. She generally controls the TV remote most evenings, so we watch a lot of old black & white westerns. I use the term “watch” lightly for myself–that is what is playing on the TV in the background while I am either reading on my ereader or scrolling through social media or texting with my kids. Periodically I tune in enough to the show and search Wikipedia for some obscure thing mentioned, satisfy my curiosity, and then return to my scrolling.

But there is another genre my mom watches, and that is crime dramas–specifically, reruns of Perry Mason and Quincy, M.E., with a little Columbo and Monk thrown in along with NCIS (or Bones if the grandkids are home). We also get Murder, She Wrote and a few Hallmark Channel feel-good mysteries. Occasionally after she goes to bed, I watch reruns of Emergency!. And let me tell you, I absolutely CRINGE when I watch the shows from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Have you seen how they handle evidence back in the 50s and 60s?! Perry is in that courtroom just grabbing the murder weapon off the table with his bare hands, no evidence bag to be seen anywhere. Lt. Tragg handles the evidence and nods and says “Yes, that is my mark there”–they wrote directly on the evidence to identify it?! The only time it is tagged with a little slip of paper on a string is to label it with the court marker after it is logged as evidence. Very rarely we might see Perry pick up a telephone receiver with a handkerchief at the murder scene, and I do mean rarely. Egads, the contamination of evidence is mindboggling!

Blood evidence is a wild progression through the decades. Occasionally Perry and his cohorts will bluff a suspect by saying they were able to determine a blood smear was human rather than animal, chuckling to their colleagues that anyone would believe they had that capability. Quincy and Sam can tell what blood type they are dealing with (A, B, AB, O, + or negative), and at the tail end of the series they are starting to prepare gel slides of rudimentary DNA profiles that they hold up to each other to see if they matched. By the time we get to Abby in the NCIS lab, she and Major Mass Spec are pumping out computer graphics of chemical compounds and declaring that the suspect visited the Amazon jungle at the age of 15.

Computers are whole phenomenon themselves in the shows. Perry does his best to mimic what a computer would do by having timelines written neatly on a board and then having Della Street do her best Vanna White impression as she slides open each line sequentially. Quincy has a chunky piece of technology that spits out reams of dot matrix data that he pours over. McGee is where it’s at–he’s got all of the fairly modern gadgetry at his fingertips to hack and analyze.

And can we talk about the smoking? It is truly sad to watch the episodes of Perry Mason as the characters chain smoke, knowing from my Wikipedia delving that many of the actors died a few years later from lung cancer and strokes. Quincy is a bit better, mostly sticking to the bad guys and a few side characters puffing like chimneys as Quincy does a PSA about the dangers of smoking. By the time we get to NCIS, cigarettes are rare bits of evidence in a handful of episodes, and we see very little footage of the villains wrecking their health with bad choices. Alcohol is a different story–that goes gangbusters throughout the decades.

I have to work hard to suspend my disbelief as I watch the older shows, and I am constantly amazed that they managed to solve any crimes at all. When I connect actual crimes to the same decades, I am astounded that Ted Bundy and Charles Manson and other monsters were ever convicted. I’m glad they were, but hats off to the detectives and forensic scientists who did it with primitive methods.