A Critical Look At Walter "Scorpion" O'Brien

1729 (581437) writes Back in August, there was speculation that the "real life" Walter O'Brien (alleged inspiration for CBS's new drama Scorpion) might be a fraud. Mike Masnick from Techdirt follows up on the story: "The more you dig, the more of the same you find. Former co-workers of O'Brien's have shown up in comments or reached out to me and others directly — and they all say the same thing. Walter is a nice enough guy, works hard, does a decent job (though it didn't stop him from getting laid off from The Capital Group), but has a penchant for telling absolutely unbelievable stories about his life. It appears that in just repeating those stories enough, some gullible Hollywood folks took him at his word (and the press did too), and now there's a mediocre TV show about those made up stories." Masnick's article is a fascinating look at a man who appears to have conned both TV executives and journalists into believing his far-fetched Walter Mitty fantasies.

Comments

Suspension of Disbelief

[mythosaz]

I'm happy to suspend disbelief for a good show. Scorpion is not a good show. It's impossible to suspend that much disbelief for the junk they threw at us.

Re:Suspension of Disbelief

[gurps_npc]

Totally true. They confabulate genius with autistic savant, they misrepresent what genius (or autistic savants) can do, and generally have no idea how "normal" people react.

The basic problem is that the writers are not smart, let alone geniuses, so they simply do not know enough to write a show about geniuses.

Re:Suspension of Disbelief

[Reason58]

The basic problem is that the writers are not smart, let alone geniuses, so they simply do not know enough to write a show about geniuses.

Most of the viewers are not smart, let alone geniuses either.

Re:Suspension of Disbelief

[sexconker]

Suspension of Disbelief: Spiderman exists and has super powers and is the only one capable of stopping The Lizard.

Terrible Writing: Some guy in New York totally knows all the crane operators in New York, knows the location of Spiderman as well as his destination, and at a moments notice is able get all his crane operator buddies to line up a dozen or more cranes on building tops along a single street and extend them so that Spiderman may web sling from them.

Hollywood: The cops hate Spiderman and want to capture him, but after seeing The Lizard they have a change of heart and love Spiderman. To show their newfound love for their new favorite superhero, a police helicopter hovering just above the roof Spiderman is on shines its spotlight onto the cranes that were lined up for him. Showing Spiderman the way to swing, swing, swing, swing, swing toward the Lizard Man is a nice gesture, but it would have been faster, easier, less dangerous, and a hell of a lot more practical to just give him a ride in the fucking helicopter.

Re:Suspension of Disbelief

[i kan reed]

Holy hell is this post ever going to come off as smug and condescending, but I have a point I want to make, and I can't express it less awfully.

Entertainment and intelligence are basically oil and water, most of the time. You can take brilliant writers who are very smart people, and they don't write "intelligent" stuff for mass market entertainment. They just focus their intelligence into making good writing that is evocative to everyone. I wouldn't expect a brilliant screenplay to expect everyone in the audience to make the kind of deductions I know some people are capable of, to tie everything together super subtly as some kinda cleverness test(though the occasional piece like that is nice).

In the same way, writers of all stripes(though mostly bad ones) write "smart" characters by filling their lines up with appropriate jargon. In some cases most familiar to slashdotters that means technobabble, but in others legalbabble, moneybabble, or psychobabble. They do this because actually coming up with intelligent things to say is hard and requires a lot of in depth knowledge of an appropriate field(there's an anecdote out there about the director of "A beautiful mind" expecting their math consultant to fill a chalkboard with genuinely intelligent math equations in an hour, as if that were no problem). And in the end that hard work doesn't come off to most people as nearly as intelligent as a bunch of nonsensical jargon.

That brings me to my thesis: real genuine genius is only interesting to people equipped to break it down and understand how it's novel. And that has a lot more to do with field-specific domain knowledge than intelligence. For example, anyone versed in math can tell you that the triumph for a brilliant idea comes when you have an new notion of where to start deducing things, not when you write the final calculation down. And the formulation of a clever computer program comes way back in the architecture phase, not a few lines of coded jotted out at the last moment.

You don't want it in most entertainment. It's nowhere near as satisfying as coming up with the right thing at the right moment to solve the problem facing you. It doesn't fit with the narrative format.

Re:Suspension of Disbelief

[cayenne8]

Damn...wish I could have thought of doing this and made some serious $$$ selling my story to the network.

I've just been wasting my tall tales for free in the bars when getting hammered.

Re:Suspension of Disbelief

[mythosaz]

I enjoy BBT.

While the idiosyncrasies of the characters are grossly exaggerated, and while Sheldon's character is rife with contradictions, I still find the show enjoyable for exactly what it is -- simple comedy. 22 minutes a week, most weeks, where I get to have a laugh with some familiar faces who stumble through the same sort of tried-and-true TV comedy tropes of shows past -- except this time it happens in places and settings and over topics I'm intimately familiar with. I've sat in a game store and had conversations about girlfriends over comic books. I've seen friends that needed rescued from 96 straight hours of WoW. Putting your basic "Cheers" comedy in this setting makes it something I can relate to.

I can put aside Sheldon's conveniently-ignored-when-inconvenient logic as part of my suspension of disbelief.

The show used to be about the "triangle" between Sheldon and Leonard and Penny. The show has evolved to a compare-and-contrast of the relationships of Shedon/Amy, Leonard/Penny and Howard/Bernadette. Even now we explore the relationships of Raj and his new girlfriend, and minor character Stewart and Howard's mom. I've grown up in the nerd world. I'm watching my younger friends get married now. I see the same compare and contrast.

...and non geeks can relate to this. They can relate to normal human interaction told in a funny way but in a slightly nerdier setting that most of them come from. People could laugh at Wings, even though they'd never worked in a regional airport...taking a plane flight or two probably helped though. You didn't have to be an alcoholic to like Cheers, you didn't have to serve in Korea to like MASH, and you didn't have to share an apartment in Manhattan to like Friends. You can hate all of those shows, of course, but it's possible to enjoy these shows from the outside looking in too.

It's not perfect, but it's an enjoyable 22 minutes.

Aside: If you enjoy Chuck Lorre's comedies AT ALL, I suggest tuning into "Mom." It's surprisingly dark with a wonderful cast who deal with real problems -- teen sex and pregnancy, alcohol and drug dependency, infidelity, money....real problems. It's not intended to be literal-serious, of course, but it's a wonderfully refreshing twist on what Chuck gives us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Re:Then, he's the writer of the series?

[gstoddart]

I don't understand why it'd matter

From the sounds of it ... he's making some pretty deluded statements about his life, passing them off as if they're true, and then selling it to people who are making it into TV which says 'based on a true story'. In many places, that's called fraud when you financially gain from it.

Why, when I first carved the internet out of an old bar of soap, I took the left over soap scraps and molded them into the prototype of the first iPod, but Steve Jobs and I got drunk and I forgot all about it until years later. I told Al Gore he could keep the whole internet thing as long as we made sure to put plenty of porn in it.

And then my wife, Morgan Fairchild (who I've slept with) and I decided to go on an around the world cruise in our giant yacht, and by the time I was done rescuing all the baby seals, Apple was already marketing it. I swear, between the sea-sickness and the size of my giant penis, poor Morgan could barely walk for weeks.

Why only the other week, Warren Buffet was calling me to ask why I never filed a patent, and BTW, what do I think of HP splitting into two companies. I told him I don't have a lot of time to explain market fundamentals to him, and suggested he reads Investing for Dummies" first. And, besides, I'm still on retainer with HP as their shadow CEO, so it would be unethical.

I'd tell you why Kim Jong Il has been out of the public eye for a while, but I'm sworn to secrecy for the next twenty years. Fortunately, me am Obama were chilling over steaks the other night, and he had a good laugh about it. At least I can talk to someone about this. The Secret Service guys are really cool, and sometimes let me shoot the guns, and the airforce pilots let me show them how to do a hammerhead in airforce one. Good times. You wouldn't believe what they've got in the secret fortress under Camp David, though. All I can say is Area 51 isn't where the really cool stuff is.

Basically, it boils down to credibility. Sure, have all the fiction you want. But if you are passing it off as fact, and someone is failing to check if any of it's true, and then subsequently pass it off as fact ... they're morons.

It sounds like this guy has been going around making extraordinary claims, and nobody has had the slightest inclination to challenge him on it.

This show made my brain sad

[uvsc_wolverine]

I watched 10 minutes of it the other night (on accident I swear!) and had to spend another 10 minutes explaining to my wife why I was laughing so hard. They were tracking down some cyber-bad guy (ugh) through the internet and one of the characters stopped working to do the obligatory "I'm going to explain how the internet works to the seasoned tech-illiterate detective who fears technology" part of the episode. He then proceeded to explain how data flows through many points on the internet to get where it needs to go (okay so far). He told the cop that these points are called (I am NOT kidding) "Router-hubs". These router-hubs each keep a "shadow copy" of every document (shut up shut up SHUT UP!) that flows through them for months (what the hell?) and that they could find the document they needed by going to some random data center with one of these router-hubs (it hurts to type that) and getting the shadow copy.

Then they went to some random building start doing things on a computer next to a long row of what appeared to be rack-mounted LED lights. Oh, and there was a smokey haze in the DC for some reason. Probably some atmospheric bullcrap. Anyway this show does have entertainment value, but only if you look at it as a parody.