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Notes -
The first assumption you could make is that Hollywood writers are just stupid. But that doesn’t feel right especially with HBO since writers do often get intricate stories right and research all sorts of mythology and historical facts to build characters and plots.
I think this leads you to a conclusion that Hollywood views corporations and business in general as low status. Therefore, learning how a business would think can’t be done because it would be beneath them to study how business would think. Thus business thinking can only be a caricature of dumb evil villains doing silly sort cuts to get things done.
From the outside I get the feeling that writers are being taught some kind of paint-by-numbers system, the construct a basic plot, and then dress it up to match the setting.
An example from the show: Chief of Police Danvers, portrayed by Jodie Foster, takes orders from some guy from Anchorage, and has to quote regulations to get him to defer to her. If you know anything about how police are structure in America, this makes no sense. Within municipalities the chief is the highest police officer. They do answer to others within the municipality, like mayors or police commissioners, but they're not part of some state-wide system.
My guess is that the paint-by-numbers called for the female chief to have a male chauvinist superior. The writers don't bother to make that align with any bit of reality except that it's "in Alaska."
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