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Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

It's a dramatic trope. I'm an american, born and raised as they say, and I've never seen that. It probably happens sometimes in places I'm not familiar with, but ... come on, it's absurd, anyone would be incapacitated by that many pills.

I was thinking about this when watching The Shape of Water, Michael Shannon's character is in his car, arms shaking, pouring the whole pill bottle on his face ...

It's a dramatic trope.

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I wonder how much these tropes and storytelling techniques shifts the baselines of cultural norms. For example, a sitcom would often find it convenient to have friends meet daily in a bar and somehow drinking almost daily is perceived to be a normal thing to do.

Haha no offense, but I don't think that's as abnormal as you're imagining.

For this particular example, if anything I think drinking frequently with friends and family was much more frequent in times prior to television. But agree that television has this effect in general, shaping perception around social norms. I suspect it is used this way intentionally in some cases.

In the 80s there was a show called Cheers centered around the same people being at a bar every day. I don't think it is a new phenomenon and it has actually been going the other way - it used to be typical to hit the bar after work every day (and still is in a lot of places) and was generally more about winding down/socializing than consuming alcohol.

It's a "problem" nearly as old as America. One of the scapegoats much touted in handbills and pamphlets of the "ills of society" that led to Prohibition in the US was that "fathers spend too much time in the pubs drinking alcohol after work rather than at home raising children".

It was the source of many jokes in sitcoms in the 1960s, too, not just the 80s, including notably what we think of today as a "kid's show" (despite being a primetime show when aired) in that it was a recurring thing in The Flintstones.

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