When someone hangs up on me I never hear the dial tone. NEVER.
Huge pet peeve. What the hell is wrong with “good bye” or “talk to you later”?
Any show that does that bugs the heck out of me. I forget how many times I’ve mentally yelled at Goku “But you can fly!”
When two characters are dressed for completely different seasons. Usually young women–one will be in a tank top, and the other in a sweater outfit. Charlie’s Angels used to do this all the time, but I just noticed it in a Buffy rerun, too.
It didn’t bug me, but I was amused when, in one of the early Cosby shows, Cosby talked about driving on the freeway.
The show was set in New York. No one in New York uses the word “freeway” – around NYC, it’s usually “parkway” and sometimes “highway.” There are no “freeways” in the NYC area (though there are free highways).
Oddities in houses have been done before here, so I’ll go with inconsistencies about the character’s past:
Early in All in the Family reference is made to Archie’s father (David) as still alive, while later it’s revealed he died when Archie was a young man. Reference is made to Archie’s sister, Alma, and his brother, Fred, but later he’s an only child. Still later his brother comes to visit.
Sometimes on The Jeffersons George grew up in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, while in others he grew up the son of a janitor in Harlem.
The disappearance of Chuck from Happy Days is famous, but Fonzie’s story changed a lot too. Sometimes he was an orphan, abandoned by both of his parents, who grew up on the streets, while in other episodes he had a grandmother, nephew (Spike), aunt and cousin (Chachi) all in Milwaukee, making you wonder why he didn’t just live with them.
An episode of Eight is Enough dealt with Dick Van Patten’s character’s 50th birthday. On a reunion movie several years later, he turned 50 again (meaning that his oldest child was born when he was about 12).
I think Chad Lowe’s HIV positive artist character from Life Goes On died about three times during the show in “fast-forwards”, each time differently. (There were several hard-to-believe aspects of that storyline, not the least of which being that he contracted the virus from a one-time unsafe sex act with an HIV+ girl and less than one year later she was dead and he had full blown AIDS.)
The title character on Ellen didn’t realize she was gay until she was almost 40? Excuse me? Same with Keri Weaver on ER.
Also on ER, in an early episode with Frances Sternhagen (Carter’s grandmother) she makes reference to an award given in honor of her late husband, Carter’s grandpa. In a later episode, her husband, Carter’s grandpa (played by author George Plimpton) co-hosted a fundraiser banquet for a local charity with her.
Willow Rosenberg on Buffy the Vampire Slayer spends the first couple of seasons lusting after Xander, then another couple lusting after Oz, before realizing that she’s a lesbian with no interest in guys. The show even makes fun of this sudden change when a robot’s display identifies her as something like “Willow Rosenberg: Gay (2000-present)”.
The changes in the character of Frasier Crane from Cheers to Fraiser are fun to play with, though they don’t really bother me.
On Cheers, when Fraisier wants to marry Diane, his mother, an elderly Boston socialite widow, shows up and threatens to kill Diane. Later on, Fraiser identifies his parents as both being research scientists, and he’s an only child. At the beginning of season 2, he’s identified as being a highly-respected psychiatrist in private practice, which, alone would put him roughly in his mid-30’s. He’s depicted early on as being an accoplished athlete, albeit at rich guy types of sports such as skiiing, and squash. He’s given custody of his son when his wife leaves him for another man. He spends most of his free time hanging out in a sports bar.
On Fraiser, his mother was a research scientist who died in middle age, his father is alive and a retired policeman, and he has a younger brother with whom he was close all his life, except apparently for the ten years he spent in Boston. He celebrates his 40th birthday a few seasons in, which means he regressed in age somewhere between 5 and 10 years. He’s utterly incompetent at sports except for darts, and though he plays squash, it’s implied he’s quite bad at it, and he’s visibly uncomfortable in exactly the kind of bar where he went to relax in Boston. His wife has custody of their son.
I’m a fan of both shows, so it’s fun to look for these, but they don’t bother me so long as they’re internally consistent.
On MASH, Hawkeye and B.J. procure a canvas bathtub during a heatwave, which they later trade away because it causes a riot. This makes little sense in the first place, as a bathtub might have medical uses. Such as cooling off a patient with a high fever by placing him in said tub covered with ice. Which they do the next season, with the very bathtub they no longer own. And which would have been unnecessary in the first place if they only remembered the large metal tub that they have in the center of camp during the first season.
Hawkeye and B.J. invent a kind of surgical clamp that can be used on very small blood vessels while trying to save a damaged limb. It would be handy to keep these sterilized and ready for use should the need arise, yes? Well, no. They disappear until later on, when Hawkeye sends Radar to retrieve them from the swamp, where he keeps them in one of his socks.
Again, I find these minor amusements, especially in a show as good as MASH.
Plus, how many times did they celebrate Christmas in the two years they were in Korea?
Then it probably bugs you that Jesse on “Full House” started out Italian and later became very Greek 
On the TV show Boy Meets World, the title boy met Topanga in elementary school and didn’t like her, then later fell in love, then history was edited so that they both met and fell in love when they were two and had been together ever since. His best friend Sean was originally another middle class kid with a sister and an Italian mom (her ethnicity was mentioned in one episode) but later became an only child and “trailer trash” (very important to the scripts), then learned he had a brother, was originally stupid but later became an intelligent sensitive artist type, etc., as if they changed writers every Wednesday. (I’m sick that I actually know this stuff.)
There was an episode of The Brady Bunch in which Carol stated “I think Peter gets [his talent] from my side of the family”, which would demonstrate either a short memory or lack of understanding of genetics. Sometimes Alice had been with the family since after Mrs. Brady I’s death or departure, another time she had been with Mike since before Bobby was born.
I have a friend from Pittsburgh who goes nuts over the bloopers on Queer as Folk, a show set in Pittsburgh and filmed in Toronto. Among other gripes are that the Pittsburgh newspaper machines seen on the streets are for a paper that’s been defunct for years and that the Pittsburgh gay scene is nowhere near as huge as it is on that show (where every week has block parties and Brian going to half a dozen bath houses).
That’s exactly what my post was going to be about. I don’t remember Hawkeye and B.J. filling Frank’s slit trench up with peas and carrots, but I do remember B.J. filling it up with water. And why couldn’t Frank’s Purple Heart have been from an eggshell fragment that someone threw at him during the sniper attack when he wreaked havoc with a tank, instead of “you were opening a hard-bolied egg when you pannicked”?
I find it refreshing when shows like The Simpsons or South Park refer to earlier episodes, unlike most other sitcoms.
(Also, in the episode of MAS*H where Hawkeye drives the tank onto the garbage pile, there were two different kinds of tanks.)
On the TV show Wings, the Hackett brothers are struggling owners of a one plane airline on Nantucket. They live in their family house, a traditional New England clapboard located (it’s revealed in at least two episodes) on the Atlantic.
Any idea how much houses on the ocean in Nantucket go for? For perspective take a look at Mrs. Kerry’s far from lavish Nantucket home which is appraised at $9.2 million.
Even if the house the brothers lived in was a dump (which it’s not on the shows), the beach frontage alone would probably bring a cool $1 million. That’s enough to buy a new plane or just go your separate ways and do something else.
I’ve no idea what Will’s apartment would go for on Will & Grace, but I’m guessing it’s more than a junior partner in a law firm would make. The place is huge with a large balcony, doorman, etc., and Jack (who works in seedy cabarets when he can) somehow lives in the same building.
Not entirely true. Fraiser said his mother was a research scientist, and his Father was dead in Cheers. (IIRC, he may have even just come back from the funeral, but I’mnot 100% on that)
In a later episode of Fraiser, the writers have a bit of fun with this particular bit when Sam shows up and meets Fraiser’s Dad. “He told me you were dead”, Sam says. Martin looks at Fraiser with a disappointed look.
“Oh, you called me a stuff-shirt and hung up on me! I was mad!” Fraiser defends.
Ironically, there was a Frasier episode in which Frasier and Niles lambaste Martin for disparaging their wives (i.e. Lilith and Maris). The implication in that episode is that this was something their late mother would never have done.
Sampiro - I notice the real estate thing all the time in TV and movies. Siskel and Ebert devoted an entire show of At The Movies to what they called “How can they afford that apartment?!” One of the best ones was Lois Lane’s Central Park penthouse apartment with that enormous balcony, which she can apparently afford on a reporter’s salary. 
Maybe they didn’t feel right about selling the family house?
The first Mrs. Brady died. Carol was divorced from her first husband.
Yes, I am ashamed to admit that I know this.
That wasn’t the Hackett family home. There was an episode where a hurricane damaged the old family house and they went back to look at it (before it was torn down) and reminisced about moving in and meeting next-door neighbor Helen as a child.
The house where Joe lived (and where Brian lived with him after he moved back in after the pilot episode) was supposedly just Joe’s.
In that same vein, Helen ran a lunch counter, but she also had a nice Nantucket Cape Cod house. Running a dinky lunch counter must be a very lucrative business.
I’m guessing Sandpiper Airline made a lot of stops in Colombia. 
I have a friend who was married with two teenage children when she finally came out to herself at the age of 46. A good friend of Mom_Crayons also was married with two teenage kids before she came out. It’s not that uncommon.
Two pet peeves:
-
Hero is falsely accused, breaks out of jail – beating up three cops, wrecking four cop cars, and setting the police station on fire in the process – when at last the true bad guy is revealed, hero walks away. What about all the charges relating to the jailbreak??? He still broke the law, bigtime!
-
Why is it when two girls fight (usually well-dressed and they fall into the pool) not one can throw a decent punch?