I used to dismiss those obvious Hollywood cliches, but the more I looked into the space professionally, the less silly it sounds. Images-as-data are far richer than images-as-images, it turns out, and clever algorithms can extract a lot more information from them than you would naively expect.
They are silly though. You can't create data out of thin air and this article even notes multiple times that for more complexity/detail, it requires more data to be ingested at shooting time.
Yes, though you can do better than is commonly claimed:
You can make use of known properties to improve the picture/extraction as you aren't taking pictures of random data.
You can improve resolution with multiple frames, having video gives you a lot more info.
You can extract even with very low resolution in limited cases, getting number plates for example. Very limited possible inputs (one font, known character, limited combinations) mean you can find a closest match more easily.
Of course some TV things are silly, but sometimes they're also far worse than we can actually do.
So yeah, you're right!