It's often suggested that television, movies, and other visual forms of popular entertainment help keep us au courant about new trends in our society. To some extent that's true, especially (because of advertisements and product placements) if we want to be up-to-date about the latest styles in furniture, clothes, or other material things.
On the other hand, there's a lot that's false about the mass media's representation of our society. Seldom do they manage to reflect the real squalor of big-city slums, to offer just one example.
One distortion that I've noticed turns up almost without exception is the reality of funerals and burials in the 21st century. Dead people on TV invariably get buried in old-fashioned, well-maintained cemeteries with mature trees and big standing granite headstones like this:
This kind of tony cemetery (or what one relative of mine used to refer to as a "marble orchard") may be reality for an older generation that still owns a plot, or for the high muckety-mucks with lots of money, but not for most others. Nevertheless, on television, with few exceptions (and leaving aside military funerals), you'll see all manner of people still getting interred in such peaceful, relaxing spots: the policeman who died in the line of duty, the poor-but-honest whore who got bumped off because she testified (or almost did) against some bad guy, the kid who was smacked by a bus, the penniless 20-year-old cancer victim. Yes, on TV, everybody and anybody finds a place worthy of a king ... well, not a king maybe, but worthy of a leading politician or a famous lawyer.
The truth is, though, that cemeteries run in styles like everything else, and this style of "final resting place" is largely extinct. They're not making them like that any longer, and those that exist are either full or spoken for. Most folks are more likely to end up in a place like this:
Maybe this will, in 20 years or so, look like some of the older ones. At least trees may grow, though those flat-to-the-ground headstones, made to permit the big five-gang lawnmowers to trundle easily over them, aren't going to stand up and take on new shapes.
Far from showing our society as it is, in this case, mass entertainment consistently paints a false picture, showing us what we'd like to see.