New TNT Series ‘Perception’ Calls Bush a Liar in Very First Episode
If you were producing a pilot for a new series hoping your show would get picked up for an entire season and beyond, wouldn’t you try not offending half your potential viewers?
On Monday, TNT premiered a new show called Perception that for some stupid reason - in the very first episode! - completely trashed former President George W. Bush as a liar (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
The program’s plotline centers on Dr. Daniel Pierce, a psychologically imbalanced neuroscientist played by Will and Grace’s Eric McCormack who’s enlisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in solving some of its most complex cases.
He works closely with Special Agent Kate Moretti, played by Rachael Leigh Cook, a former student who recruited Pierce to work with the Bureau.
During a session with his psychiatrist after a rather disturbing psychological incident, Pierce explained that in his dream, he was told that a witness involved in the murder he’s investigating is lying.
To determine if she is, Pierce brought in an aphasiac to be a human lie detector.
Pierce explained to Moretti, “Jimmy’s an aphasiac. He’s lost the ability to comprehend spoken language. To compensate, many aphasiacs become highly sensitive to subtle inflections in speech. Now when we lie, those vocal nuances become more pronounced. Most of us wouldn’t notice, but aphasiacs do. And for some reason to them, it sounds funny.”
The aphasiac was shown Bush’s State of the Union address when he said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Not surprisingly, Jimmy broke out laughing.
Without getting into whether Bush lied or not – many believe he was just echoing the intelligence we had at the time – using this as a test-case for prevarications was preposterous, especially in a television pilot.
The producers certainly could have gone in other directions like for instance former President Clinton saying he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.
They also could have shown a video of candidate Barack Obama saying that if elected president, he’d immediately close down the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
Smarter still if you’re trying to maximize your audience by remaining apolitical – which you would think would be the goal of a new series trying to get picked up for a full season! – would be to use a neutral subject that wouldn’t offend anyone.
This could be done by taking a famous movie scene where the star was clearly lying.
Classic examples would be “Scarface” when Al Pacino told Florida immigration officials he was a political refuge. Or Pacino again at the end of “The Godfather” telling his wife that he didn’t have his brother-in-law killed.
Such things would have been extremely effective at proving the aphasiac could accurately detect a lie on a video.
But no, the folks involved in this show felt it was necessary to be highly partisan by making a mockery of the nation’s 43rd president.
Hopefully the show will flop and those involved will learn from their mistake.
(HT NB reader Elaine Michaels)
- Noel Sheppard's blog
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Comments
"The producers certainly
Submitted by bretzysdude on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 10:30am.
"The producers certainly could have gone in other directions like for instance former President Clinton saying he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky."
Shame on you, Noel. You obviously didn't see the full episode. They showed this toward the end of show. Granted, it was as the sound was turned down and you could hear Pierce do a monologue instead, but they showed it nonetheless.
This is irrelevant to the core of your editorial though. The insult to Bush was still a sucker punch that wasn't necessary to those who tuned in.
As for me, I was overall disappointed in the show. Rachel Leigh Cook can't act, and "Monk" was a much more insane individual.
(Edit: Oh, yeah, and as I recall, Monk was very apolitical from what I recall, didn't pull garbage like that.)
Bretzsy
Submitted by Radical1979 on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 11:04am.
The Clinton impact was not nearly as strong as at that point the show was pretty much over. I wrote last night how disappointed I was that politics seems to be inserted into every show anymore.
Really, they could have left
Submitted by bretzysdude on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 11:06am.
Really, they could have left both scenes off. They could have found a way to get a character to laugh at lies without talking about politics.
It's a 3 part formula for Hollywood success
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 11:30am.
Did they have the obligatory gay couple and the blacker than black man dating/married to the whiter than white blond woman?
It was proven that President Bush did not lie.
Submitted by AFVet on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 11:43am.
I am glad I did not watch this show, I probably would have thrown something at my TV. It has been proved that President Bush did not lie and the '16 words' was completely backed by the British Government and their intelligence. Joseph Wilson in an effort to disprove President Bush and call him a liar provided a report from his trip to Niger to the CIA that quote: 'Based on what Wilson told them, CIA analysts wrote an intelligence report saying former Prime Minister Mayki "interpreted 'expanding commercial relations' to mean that the (Iraqi) delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales." In fact, the Intelligence Committee report said that "for most analysts" Wilson's trip to Niger "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."'
Even the very left-wing Annenberg Political Fact Check could not bring themselves to make the claim that President Bush lied. As lefties that had seething hatred for President Bush that made the claim that he may have been wrong but did not lie. However if you read their report on the matter it looks to any intelligent person that President Bush not only did not lie and he was not even wrong according to British Intelligence, and that the real liar here was the leftist Joseph Wilson.
http://www.factcheck.org/bushs_16_words_on_iraq_uranium.html
In the end it appears that the documents from Italy may have been forged, but British intelligence never used the Italian documents in their fact gathering and did not even see those possible fraudulent documents until well after the British intelligence agency had already given their data to the CIA.
So this only goes to prove that President Bush never lied and that the real liar was Joseph Wilson who was making the false claims concerning President Bush.
Testing the response against a movie depiction of lying?
Submitted by CO2Maker on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 1:47pm.
You think that testing the ability of a person with aphasia to recognize a lie by watching a famous movie scene in which a person lies is reliable?
Well, duh. Every word spoken on stage or in a movie is a lie. The actors are pretending, after all. And they're trained to fool the audience, who are reasonably good readers of nonverbal cues, like facial expressions, gestures, all that stuff.
But ordinary people can be fooled by good acting, because ... the actors are lying.
BTW, here's an enlightening test: turn the sound completely off and watch a movie or TV show. You can notice how unconvincing the expressions of many of the people on screen are—the speakers, people standing around just watching, all of them.
Scum On Top Of Scum
Submitted by rammingspeed on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 3:05pm.
The people who do this show couldn't care less about their "mistakes," they're willing to risk everything to get something on the air that will successfully trash the Republicans before November. They are stupid, stupid people who believe they're being patriotic, and will be taking one for the team if it doesn't work out. This is what the educational system has bred.