Photo: Dexter*'s Michael Hall (left) and* Breaking Bad*'s Bryan Cranston play characters steeped in scientific fact.*
Emmy winner Bryan Cranston and three-time nominee Hugh Laurie bring acting chops to their roles as quirky men of science in Breaking Bad and House.
So does Emmy-nominated Michael Hall, who plays a police blood-splatter expert (and serial killer) on Dexter; ditto for CSI's rubber-gloved forensics geek Bill Petersen and for Simon Baker, who portrays a quack-debunking champion of observable fact in this fall's most popular new TV series, The Mentalist.
But these prime-time A-listers might not be rich or famous if not for the role played by entries in the annals of weird science – nasal granuloma, Heller's Syndrome, the Riemann hypothesis, directional analysis and scores of other esoteric methods.
It's no fiction: Scientific fact has usurped science fiction as TV's favorite inspiration for prime-time story lines. And to keep everything on the up and up, show writers and producers are hiring scores of researchers and technical consultants to get the science straight.
"We try to make sure that all the science is real, that it's researched and that everything in the show could actually happen," says Cyrus Voris, an executive producer for CBS' crime-fighting biophysicist drama Eleventh Hour (pictured, right). "In some ways, it's much easier to make shit up. When you have to make it real, you're holding yourself to a much higher standard."
Why is real science so hot on prime time? Some of the credit goes to the late Michael Crichton. Since he introduced clinically-correct doctor speak to the airwaves with medical drama ER, story lines on science-heavy television shows have been bumping up references to astrophysics, neurobiology, quantum mechanics and other topics ripped from the headlines of obscure scholarly publications.
The geek-friendly ER, which wraps its 15-year run in May, launched a spawn of pop culture/propellerhead crossovers that engage TV viewers' brainwaves even as they're being entertained by age-old soap-opera machinations. For an increasingly tech-savvy generation of couch potatoes, factually flimsy plot details simply don't pass muster.
A few examples of science faction on prime time:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
9 p.m. EST Thursdays on CBS
Since its 2000 debut, the granddaddy of crime-scene dramas has spawned a morgue full of direct spinoffs and imitators.
Big Bang Theory
8 p.m. EST. Mondays on CBS
The babe/geek dynamic drives this college-kid sitcom. But between the punch lines, string theory references are 100 percent correct. David Saltzberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, checks scripts for accuracy.
Numb3rs
10 p.m. EST Fridays on CBS
Gary Lorden, chairman of the math department at the California Institute of Technology, serves as technical adviser for this drama about a crime-solving math whiz.
Dexter
9 p.m. EST Sundays on Showtime
Crime-scene investigator Kimberlee Heale, who studied forensic technology at Cal State Fullerton before going to work for the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California, advises Dexter producers to ensure authenticity in the details.
Breaking Bad
10 p.m. EST. Sundays on AMC
Actor Bryan Cranston immersed himself in chemistry to make his portrayal of a meth-dealing former science teacher more accurate.
Eleventh Hour
10 p.m. EST Thursdays on CBS
A Princeton prof and a former NASA researcher help give this show its scientific heft.
House
9 p.m. EST Thursdays on Fox
Woven into this hospital drama's character conflicts is a weekly demonstration of the scientific method, as Dr. House and his compatriots sift through evidence before deciding how to treat patients' bizarre symptoms.
The Mentalist
9 p.m. EST Tuesdays on CBS
Contrary to TV's supernatural Medium and Ghost Whisperer, the so-called mentalist (Simon Baker) is a former charlatan who relies on meticulous observation rather than psychic powers to solve crimes.
ER
10 p.m. EST Thursdays on NBC
"Stat!" became a household term after viewers embraced esoteric medical references in this groundbreaking series. "ER was clearly a watershed," says House writer David Foster.
Fringe
10 p.m. EST Tuesdays on Fox
The show's outlandish story twists include loads of real science, with clues in a recent episode tied to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers.
- - -
To make sure their shows ring true to prime-time couch potatoes, TV producers routinely hire scientists to vet scripts for accuracy.
Princeton University professor of particle physics Andrew Bazarko reviews Eleventh Hour subject matter from autism and cloning to the hallucinogenic effects that can result from licking the skin of a certain type of toad.
And the show's considerable science chops don't stop there: Writer-producer Andre Bormanis conducted NASA-funded research in physics and astronomy, then earned a master's degree in space policy at George Washington University before getting into show biz as a science consultant for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In researching his upcoming cryonics-themed episode of Eleventh Hour about deep-freezing dead people, Bormanis got on the phone with a pro.
"I spoke to a chemist at Los Alamos in some detail about endothermic reactions," he says. "There's a little bit of a stretch involved in what you see on screen but I wanted to make sure the explanations were credible. I hope people who are familiar with chemistry and cryonics as a science will see this episode and say, 'Yeah I believe somebody could come up with that sort of a thing.'"
Similarly, Lie To Me, an upcoming Fox series about so-called deception experts, gets its reality check from behavioral scientist Paul Ekman, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.
Fox medical drama House employs Harvard-trained doctor-turned-writer David Foster to come up with stories that pit a contentious crew of medicos against a weekly barrage of bizarre medical afflictions. "House is all about the evidence and the logical piecing together of the puzzle to see what it adds up to," Foster explains. "That's the scientific method."
And, Dexter's forensic technologist Kimberlee Heale tells the Los Angeles Times, paper not plastic is the material of choice for storing evidence. "Plastic is a no-no," she says. "It traps air inside and the DNA will eventually degrade."
Crime Time
Crime dramas, a TV staple since Dragnet jumped from radio to the small screen, have flourished due to an injection of hard science.
In 2000, former Las Vegas carhop Anthony Zuiker created a show that thrust lab techs and their microscopes into the foreground. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation captivated viewers who had become fascinated with DNA evidence during the O.J. Simpson trial, and a slew of forensic-themed shows soon followed, including Miami- and New York-based CSI spinoffs, plus Cold Case, Cold Case Files, Body of Evidence, Forensic Files, Forensic Investigators, Cracking the Case, The New Detectives, The FBI Files and Autopsy. Showtime's killer serial-killer show Dexter often delves into the tales told by squirts and sprays of blood left behind at crime scenes.
CBS' Numb3rs, which revolves around crime-solving math genius Charlie Eppes (played by David Krumholtz), goes straight to the academic well to keep the science credible: Co-executive producers Cheryl Heuton and Nick Falacci live just down the street from Caltech's campus in Pasadena, California.
"When we started doing our research, we decided, why not use reality instead of just making it up?" Heuton says. "We wanted to get it right by talking to mathematicians about the initial ideas and then adjusting them to make it more real."
Sometimes, science can be too real for prime time.
House's Foster based an upcoming episode about a woman who ages at an accelerated rate on a case he read about in The New England Journal of Medicine. That publication also inspired his 2006 toothpick catastrophe story line.
"I read about this case where a woman swallowed a toothpick that poked a hole in her intestines," he says. "One woman swallowed a toothpick and it wound up puncturing her heart. That was too far-fetched even for me. Some things that happen in real life may be true but they are not actually believable. It's too crazy for television."
Science on the Fringe
How crazy is too crazy? Ask mad scientist Walter Bishop (played by John Noble, pictured right) Even his outrageous experiments, as featured on Fox sci-fi series Fringe, are grounded in real-world R&D. Consultants Rob Chiappetta and Glen Whitman pull from an archive of several hundred science and technology articles to make sure the scripts accurately reflect cutting-edge developments.
Fringe co-creator J.J. Abrams says some of the truly bizarre scenarios on his show benefit from a solid grounding in reality.
"The weird thing about our show is that a lot of the stuff is at least in the realm of possibility," Abrams told reporters this fall. "It's not sci fi – it's just sci."
Referring to recent reports that Duke University researchers have invented an invisibility shield, Abrams says, "We're living in this incredibly advanced period of achievement where every week we see, hear or read about some potentially horrifying scientific breakthrough. That keeps pushing our almost-quaint notions of science fiction to a different place."
Sometimes the science spills over onto an actors' own research. Prepping last year for his Emmy-winning performance as a chemistry teacher-turned-meth dealer, Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston took a crash course in laboratory procedure.
"I shadowed a USC professor who introduced me not only the nomenclature I'd long forgotten, but also this very intimidating elements chart," Cranston jokes. "Why is iron 'FE'? It makes no sense!"
After his Chemistry 101 sessions, Cranston suggested tweaks to series creator Vince Gilligan. "I told him, 'You'd never boil those chemicals in an Erlenmeyer flask. We've been discovering things along the way."
Photos courtesy Showtime, AMC, CBS, Fox, NBC
See also:
