Forget Doctors, Lawyers, and Policemen. What We Need Is a TV Show About Accountants

business, humor, lessons learned, Teaching and Education 2 Minutes

I’m sure everyone has noticed. Most drama shows on TV involve doctors, lawyers, and policemen.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for something fresh, and I have just the idea:

A TV show about an accounting firm. I even have some ideas for the first few episodes:

  • after a week straight of trying to reconcile the bank statement of one of his clients, a junior accountant realizes the mistake was the result of a transposition; someone had recorded an expense as $178 when in reality it was $187. The building frustration is spilling over into the accountant’s private life where he is unable to spend quality time with his two sons doing sudoku puzzles.
  • a tax partner is tasked with helping one of the firm’s biggest clients appeal the results of an IRS audit. the tension is palpable as each side presents its case. a highlight of the testimony is an in-depth debate about the ethics of using an off-shore tax haven. the ending offers an unexpected twist.
  • the accounting firm is engaged to do the audit of one of the tech behemoths. It is discovered later that one of the accounting firm’s employees is dating the assistant controller at the tech firm. The relationship threatens the loss of the audit engagement. Will the couple break up for the good of each of their firms, or will love triumph?
  • experience the highs and lows of being a new hire. from the thrill of receiving a pocket protector, a green eyeshade, and a 10-key adding machine during orientation, to the reality of being sent on an audit to Nampa, Idaho to observe the counting of the number of chickens on hand at a breeding farm.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless.

But it’s not like accountants have been completely ignored by Hollywood.

Who can forget Kevin, Oscar, and Angela on The Office?

Ben Affleck starred in a movie called The Accountant, but Affleck has a dark side…

And in the movie Death Wish, Charles Bronson plays an architect who is set on getting revenge after his wife is murdered and his daughter sexually assaulted during a home invasion. In the novel that the movie was based on, the character was originally an accountant, not an architect. Such a role did not seem suitable for Bronson. “I was really a miscast person,” Bronson said later. “It was more a theme that would have been better for Dustin Hoffman or somebody who could play a weaker kind of man.

Not exactly the positive portrayals that accountants would prefer Hollywood use when dealing with members of the profession.

It may take a while, though, to change public perception.

I wonder how long it took for architects to be cast as tough guys…

I

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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83 thoughts on “Forget Doctors, Lawyers, and Policemen. What We Need Is a TV Show About Accountants”

      7. I saw it with my mother way back in the day. We rented it from Blockbuster Video on VHS. She was a young woman who basically spoke her own language that she had created with her twin sister and she lived only with her mother who wouldn’t let her go outside and meet other people, so when her mother died the town called these specialists in thinking she was intellectually challenged because she did not speak like them. The specialists were Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson. It’s a very good movie and if you can find it again, i strongly recommend you give it a look,

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      9. Oh yes, he was the good looking doctor (if you were a female) and she was the good looking doctor (for the males). It was a long time ago too…. back around the time that Steve Gutenberg was actually a thing in Hollywood, and I remember that because there was another movie with Liam Neeson in it about a haunted house that had Steve Gutenberg in it from around the same time. So…. quite a bit ago.

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  6. You have come up with another brilliant idea. A TV show about accountants could change the profession forever! Central Intelligence was another movie about an accountant. It starred Kevin Hart and The Rock. Maybe Trump’s chief financial officer could be a guest star in one of your episodes. That is when he gets out of jail.

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    1. I forgot about Kevin Hart! and yes, maybe one of the episodes could be loosely based on how a bunch of accountants brought down Trump’s CFO, just like they brought down Al Capone. The possibilities are endless…

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      3. Haha..I know the feeling of late (its those dam stats clocking up the posts…I don’t want it clicking back to one and starting again..Thank goodness for the reblog button at times…x

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  8. Maybe you can be the star of the show—an accountant by day and a superhero at night, solving society’s most pressing financial needs.

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  9. I am really excited to see the new series, preferably set in Scandinavia with sub titles as I love Scandi Noir. I can just see the hero gazing out from his coastal retreat at grey northern seas, calculator in hand. Accountancy Noir

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  11. At first I thought you were just being your normal humorous self, but the more I thought about it, the more dramatic scenarios popped into my head. The idea of the show revolving around a firm rather than an individual accountant allows the introduction of any number of main characters, thus appealing to a wide audience. You could have simple story lines that resolve in the span of one episode and more intricate plots that play out over the course of a season. All joking aside, this is really a great idea.

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  15. You lost me at “A TV show about an accounting firm . . .”

    What I think you need, to make this work, is a rogue accountant who carries a concealed weapon. It could be a modified stapler that shoots staples like a gun and blinds auditors. Or it could be a shiv made from a sharpened pencil. Or perhaps its a remote control disguised as an adding machine, that detonates bombs.

    The rogue accountant goes around embezzling money, and using his arsenal of weapons to do in anyone who grows suspicious. But there’s a super-CPA who’s on his trail, who also carries a stash of improvised weapons. They could have exciting fight scenes, such as with dueling pencils, or staples fired at each other.

    In short, this TV show needs action, death, and violence. Only then would it catch on and be a big hit.

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  16. my mind went to the crew on ‘the office’ right away. I’m going to guess that a mini-series about one former president’s accountants would make for an interesting show

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  18. Hehe my husband would watch this! He’s an accountant and as dark as that movie Accountant is (side chuckle) a very close representation of my husband lol funny story, my sister also thought the same thing when she watched it Hehe… Not sure what that says about my husband but I think it would be a good change for sure! 🙂

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  21. Omg don’t give away those ideas for free!! Honestly, I would totally watch a show about accountant as much as I hate accounting (not that there’s anything wrong with it I was just forced to take accounting for like two years with a really horrible teacher so now I can’t stand accounting!).

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  23. I’m glad to see so many positive responses on your “wild idea”. Truth is there is a lot of boring stuff in accounting but but I can tell you there is a lot of interesting stuff too. If there weren’t you would not have things like Enron collapsing. I just Googled forensic accountants on a whim and one of the first entries was the FBI looking to hire!

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