I too have noticed the lack of goodbyes. But this particular Monty python sketch came to mind. byebye - YouTube
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A couple of times on procedurals I’ve seen people start a conversation in their office then cut to them getting out of a car at a different location and continuing their conversation with no apparent break. And all I can think is, Well, that must have been an awkward ride.
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The goodbye equivalent for Swedes is ‘Hej då’ (reads more or less as Hay Dough*)
But very often ‘hello’ is informally “Hej hej” contributing to the confusion!
First time my son (IT) was here (SE) we entered a shop, and a clerk welcomed us with “hej hej!”.
My son was confounded and feared he had done something wrong - in Italy you would say “Ehi Ehi!” to get the attention of someone doing an annoying, dangerous or possibly rude action.
- close, but not quite…
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Haha totally. It’s one of those things that you often don’t notice, but once you do, you see it everywhere. Like, “wait- they just got from Upper Wilshire to Santa Monica at 5pm mid-sentence? What the hell happened to the two hours that would have taken?”
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I’ve been told, by well informed sources that shall remain anonymous, that movies of prurient inclination in the 70s contained a lot of driving around - it probably helped the plot.
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I’ve heard this joke made about the original 1951 Dragnet TV show too– that the whole show was them walking and driving around. That they never really did anything. I haven’t watched enough of it myself to say. Certainly the old radio drama version took place basically entirely in Friday’s car, based on some random sampling of a few episodes that I did once. 
Although, in that sense it’s probably much more realistic as a reflection of police work than modern dramas. Real police detectives probably do spend most of their day sitting in their car or making phone calls.
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Hah. We do the same.
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They don’t seem to close doors behind themselves either.
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This always bugs me, even if I know why they do it. Same with sitcoms where somebody comes into an apartment and doesn’t close the door behind them. And drinking out of obviously empty paper coffee cups.
I also thought people leaving their shoes on inside instead of taking them off at the door was just a time-saving sitcom trope until I visited friends in the US and found out it was a real thing!
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This is my peeve as well. I rant in every semi-relevant thread here that they should glue some washers in them to make the weight right. I get that actual liquids would be a hassle for production realities, but the weight is obviously wrong in them too.
Yah Americans tend not to take their shoes off indoors which I found weird and disturbing even after 25 years of living there. It always felt rude to me, even though I knew it isn’t considered so there.
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So reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s amusing essay, How to Recognize a Porn Movie, in which he makes a very good case for this (excerpt): Go into a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.
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I had a different adjective in mind for The Hobbit(s), but I can go with that.
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Buh bye.
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A writer (at a reading… don’t ask) told me that writers lie a lot (or pass on possible inaccuracies they’ve been exposed to) so that they actually have something interesting in their “true story” scribblings — that is, the real world is boring… so they have to make shit up.
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Or, “Well! We’ll see about that!” Then you see their body being pulled from the river.
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Worse, IMO is when someone knocks on the door or rings the bell, and the occupant just opens the door without even asking who’s there. In thrillers, then they try to close the door when it’s far too late for that! Hell, they did a better job in the classic SNL Land Shark skit:
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I remember a comedian who used to joke about how people in the movies and TV would always look at the handset and smile before hanging up.
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This phone call shortcut hang up has been part of my thinking from way back. We used to call it the ‘American hang up’, no goodbyes and at the very least a demand like “I want this on my the desk first in the morning!!!” cachunk!!.
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