Willing Suspension of Disbelief

On Wednesday's episode of "the Unusuals", ABC's slightly quirky cop show (which replaced the really twisted "Life on Mars"), a kidnapper demanded $10 million, to be placed in a child's backpack.

Riiight.

Sixty years ago, that might have been possible, when the largest bill in use was the $10,000 bill, that might have been possible. But not now. A million dollars in $100 bills supposedly weighs about 22 pounds.

That is $1.6 million in this photo.

Ten million would weigh 220 pounds. If you have ever had the occasion to pick up a box of copy-machine paper, those boxes (letter size paper) weight roughly fifty pounds. You are not going to fit the contents of one box in a kid's backpack, let alone 4.5 boxes' worth of paper. Even if you could do that, you are not going to be able to run down the street with 220 pounds of weight strapped to your back. I doubt if the Governator of California could have done that in his prime.

The point that a cop was also able to submit a subpoena and get about six file boxes full of records in a couple hours was similarly laughable, but time compression is sort of understandable when they have 44 minutes to for an entire episode. It'd still be nice if they stuck to the rules governing the physical world.