(Pictured: Buddy Ebsen, star of Barnaby Jones, 1976.)

We learn a lot about life based on the media we consume, and it’s been true for almost 100 years. When Paul Henried put two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them both, and handed one to Bette Davis in the 1942 movie Now Voyager, a whole generation of men took notice. Television brought role models into every home: teenagers learned how to dress and talk and move from other teens on TV; millions of aspiring rock musicians were born the night the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show. Suburban kids who have never met a Black person adopt the look and speech patterns of rappers. Young athletes spike the ball and flip the bat like the pros do. Grown-ass adults internalize what they see on TV as the “right” way to behave, until they’re acting like reality show divas, or electing one president.

I am a child of the 1970s, and like everyone else, I was shaped by what I saw on TV growing up. I was less overt about it than many; apart from briefly wishing I could be cool like Keith Partridge, I didn’t set out to imitate anyone specifically. But I did learn some life lessons, especially from watching cop shows. The trouble is that now, decades later, when I rewatch those same shows, like Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, and Barnaby Jones, I find that many of the lessons I learned from them are untrue.

For example, there’s a lot less diabolical laughter than I was taught to expect. Real-life villains don’t waste time laughing about their plans; they just go off and be bad. Related: in real life, people tend to laugh at jokes, or things that are clearly funny. On 70s TV, it was common for people to react to disappointment or surprise by laughing uncontrollably, which you just don’t see on your average day.

There is also a lot less slow-acting poison being administered on the average day. Your boss never comes to you at 10AM (laughing diabolically) and says he poisoned your coffee, and that if you want the antidote, you’ll have to finish your project by the end of the day. Related: 70s TV cop shows taught us that it is very easy to put poison in somebody’s beverage, and that they will drink it without noticing anything and fall over stone dead within a couple of minutes. Sadly, this is not true in real life, however convenient it might be.

There is also a lot less truth serum and hypnosis being used in real life than I expected. Practically nobody is faking his or her own death, and real-life plastic surgeons aren’t nearly as skillful as the ones on TV.

I expected a lot more people to have hidden caches of diamonds, and/or to be sucked into quicksand.

In my adult life I have learned, contrary to what I saw on cop shows, that if you punch a guy in the face once, you probably won’t kill him. Also, a person who is knocked out cold or diagnosed with a concussion will not be able to return to normal activities within minutes or hours. Joe Mannix could do it—repeatedly—but not you or me.

In the real world, as opposed to the world of 70s TV cop shows, a car that goes off the road and down into a ditch or ravine will not automatically explode like Hiroshima.

One other thing I have learned from watching 70s TV cop shows in the new millennium that I didn’t know back then: apparently, none of these shows had anybody on staff whose job it was to say, “this script sucks and we shouldn’t do it.”

In Memoriam: Any Major Dude With Half a Heart does a regular “In Memoriam” post, recapping the names and biographies of those we lose each month. It’s how I learned about the recent death at age 91 of Rusty Warren, who released seven straight certified-gold comedy albums between 1959 and 1967, and became the top female nightclub comic in America, but with no radio airplay and without a single appearance on network TV. That’s because her material was too hot for broadcast media in the 60s, as you might expect from somebody whose most famous albums are called Songs for Sinners, Knockers Up, and Banned in Boston, and whose most famous bit is called “Bounce Your Boobies.” In 2010, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff told her story here, and it’s wild.