I know I’m not alone in my enjoyment of the TV show “Monk“. It’s usually a funny show with enough quirkiness to make anyone laugh. I think they cut some corners today in the set department.
In the episode, Monk is trying to find a stolen diamond and claim a big reward. He’s being followed by a group of wanna-be detectives also after the money. One of them, played by DJ Qualls, is a nerdy detective with all sorts of spy gadgetry. Things were going good until he pulls out a PSP and calls it his “stress detector” (or some such thing). Huh? Is that all the prop people can come up with? Did someone say, “we need something high tech looking. Oh, and black!” and a stage hand pulled his PSP out of his backpack and said, “how about this?” Come on, USA! You can do better than that!
And what does this say about the PSP? It’s already been relegated to bad props on a TV show? That can’t be good.
LOL @ Tony. You know if it would have been a Nintendo DS you would of had a glowing post about the vast love you have for monk and nintendo. But since it was a Sony product you shun it.
Honestly, do you think Sony didn’t pay to have the PSP used? Of course they did.
Other shows produced by NBC Universal have made use of the PSP and actually seem to use it properly (the only one that comes to mind now is The 4400).
Even though I am sure that Sony paid for that product placement, I’m surprised that it was featured incorrectly. Perhaps if he called it a “stress reliever” or something I’d go along with it, but “stress detector?”
Jeremiah – If they would have used a DS, I would have ripped on them, too. It was just plain bad, DS or PSP.
Corvus – I wouldn’t put that past them.
Will – yeah, I saw an episode of Law & Order where they were talking to some kid on a college campus and he was playing a PSP. They even had the white earbuds! The stress detector was pretty lame.
It makes as much sense as the PSP commercials – “a carpet you can watch outside”.
It’s all silly anyway, how could you use a PSP to detect voice stress? It doesn’t have a built in mic. (I’m kidding here, but don’t you wonder if there weren’t at least a few people who went online looking for “stress detector” software to download for it?)
mb – Ahh! Those PSP commercials drive me crazy. The graffiti ads didn’t go over very well, either. Now they get bad product placement. Someone over in marketing isn’t doing his job very well.