I have no actual knowledge of how a TV show works backstage, but I always got the impression that writers were not very receptive to “suggestions” from the actors.
Many interviews have eluded to this, and I think it was even the plot of an episode of “Friends”. Joey offered criticism to the writers of his soap and was dropped down an elevator shaft the next episode.
I’m not sure of the veracity of that. Actors sign contracts. I don’t think a writer can kill off a character on a whim.
Yeah, it bothers me, too. Continuity is good! Too many contradictions can spoil my enjoyment of a show, at least to some degree. I’m not going to pull my hair out about it – well, probably not – but I wish that writers would care enough to develop a good sense of consistency about such matters. (Yep, I’m kinda like Sheldon, except without the intelligence…)
His mother has mentioned her two other children more than once. We’ve just never seen his brother.
But we will be meeting MeeMaw!
They dropped the character down the shaft because Joey had said in a magazine interview that he ignored the scripts and made up all his own dialogue.
Backstage situations vary widely. Some shows are quite collaborative, others not so much. It depends on the actor(s), writer(s), show runner, working environment, etc.
You’re talking about actors on a hit show here. They have the sweetest gig around. They show up, read some lines that were written for them, and get paid millions of dollars. You think they’re going to give a single flying fuck about something like that? 
MASH* was clearly set in an alternate universe where the Korean war continued for eleven years instead of coming to an armistice in 1953 in which Kennedy survived the 1963 assassination attempt but as a result of his injuries is augmented with cybernetic implants causing him to slip slowly into psychosis. He is illegally removed from office by a bloodless coup led by Lyndon Johnson who was then impeached and replaced in a widely contested emergency election by Richard Nixon. It may be viewed as a precursor to The Watchmen.
Chuck Cunningham was recruited by the CIA into a black ops assassination squad using brainwashing, gene therapy, and a new form of biogenic radiation to create the ultimate super soldier in a program dubbed “Pink Unicorn”. Unfortunately, the process was unstable and all records of Charles ‘Chuck-Monster’ Cunningham were eliminated with his family and friends being liberally dosed with LSD in an effort to erase their memories, which explains much about the trippy happenings on Happy Days including the ill-advised Hollywood vacation and the bizarre apperation in a red jumpsuit claiming to have come from the planet “Ork”.
Anyway, the king of television shows with inconsistent story lines and characters arbitrarily changing motivation or disappearing entirely without explanation is clearly Lost, with The X-Files and 24 vying for a close second.
Stranger
Penny said they had a barbecue when the pig died, but she never said they actually ate the potentially toothsome porker. Maybe they had a barbecue, like many families have a luncheon, after all the funeral business has been taken care of. They could’ve all been standing around, grilling burgers and wieners, and sharing sweet remembered times with ol’ Porky. A very slim point, I’ll grant you, but still…
Yeah, look at the late Robert Reed, who was regarded as a PITA by the writers, directors and producer of TBB because of his habit of fault-finding the scripts.
To be sure, Reed’s niggling objections weren’t so much about continuity discrepancies as about petty factual errors – for example, he objected strenuously to Alice the housekeeper calling a tomato a vegetable – but the principal is the same: nitpick the script and you’ll find yourself unpopular on the set. And in the industry.
No, they wouldn’t. Most people aren’t like that. Hell, even if the same writer wrote the joke, expecting him to remember a throwaway line from 3 years ago is really pushing it. And unless they had wanted to make the pet pig an ongoing item when the joke first appears, there is absolutely no reason for that to be on the Show Runners radar. Shows that pay that close attention, like Community, are the exception, not the rule.
There are two levels of continuity break.
One is “purposeful”. They wanted to have Sheldon go nuts and get a lot of cats. So they didn’t care if he was allergic to them earlier. Quite annoying but try getting writers to change a whole script just for the sake of consistency.
The other is “pointless”. E.g., Penny’s father’s name is given as “Bob” and then when he shows up it’s “Dwight”. Ditto the timeline of events in Sheldon’s early life. There is no justification for this in terms of story. They didn’t need to use the name “Dwight” for comedy purposes, “Bob” works just as well. And it would only take a few seconds, especially with the Internet available to check and fix these things.
This isn’t an in-joke like The Simpsons writers goofing on the location of Springfield.
The existence of so many pointless errors on these shows means that no one working on the show cares at all. Which is a sign of laziness. And lazy writers aren’t the best writers. People should care about the quality of their work and checking on such things is part of that.
And don’t get me started on the location of their apartment …
(BTW, the name of Sheldon’s brother is “George Jr.”)
Maybe you should have used your readily available internet source because his name was given as ‘Wyatt’ the second time.
Obviously,* someone *does care.
And yet, at one point they have Sheldon tell the group he’s playing Super Mario 64. They didn’t just use bleep-bloop-blops to fill in the sound, they used actual sound effects from Super Mario 64.
The only consistent thing about the show is how inconsistent it is.
Shocked! Shocked am I to find out that sitcoms do not maintain spotless continuity.
One point that should be understood is that “the writers” on a long-running series are not generally the same group of people from year to year, or often, even episode to episode. Standard schedule non-serialized television programs in the United States typically produce deliver 20 to 24 episodes in a television “season”. The development and writing staff will typically consist of an producer, head writer, script editor, sometimes showrunner (if separate from the exec producer), and then a rotating stable of writers which are on contract for the season but may be fired and replaced at the whim of the head writer.
Staff writers typically have very little if any control over anything that is produced beyond pitching ideas and often exist as little more than dialogue generators and/or a bullpen to get ideas from. The writers pitch ideas at the beginning of the pre-production season (with the hope that one of their ideas will be picked up and they will get an actual writing credit), often by going over old scripts or rejected story ideas, hence why you often see what is essentially the same episode produced repeatedly in a long-running series such as 24 or Star Trek: The Next Generation) and those are all developed essentially in parallel. The producer and head writer (and the showrunner) decide what goes in and what gets cut out, and it is the script editor’s job to try to make the script consistent, but keeping up with thousands of pages of dialogue, much of which is often changed during shooting, is essentially an impossible task, especially since episodes are shot and produced in a way that minimizes costs and schedule, e.g. scenes requiring location shoots are often shot all together even if they are in different episodes.
It should also be noted that sitcoms in particular are basically minor leagues for writers. Very few writers will remain with a sitcom for years on end, either by choice (because they’ve earned enough writing credits to move up to a more prestigious writing position or have sold a spec script) or because they get fired or not picked up for the next season. Writing for most sitcoms is kind of regarded as the dregs of Hollywood screenwriting and just slightly less discreditable than working in the soap opera boilerrooms. Writing for a multi-cam sitcom like The Big Bang Theory, where many of the jokes are likely pre-generated nerdisms and pseudotechnical references to drawn from a trick bag and inserted into the dialogue at regular intervals, is one of the least rewarding and least creative scriptwriting jobs out there; as a writer, you’re basically taking one of about a dozen standard sitcom plots, throwing in elements from the trick bag at five to fifteen second beats to maintain pacing, and then filling in the intervening space with dialogue and minimal action. The twenty-two minutes of laugh track-infused sitcom you see is probably a couple hundred person-hours of writing, editing, and rewrites by a random group of writers who may have little affinity for each others’ writing styles, dialogue preferences, or personal hygiene. It’s about as much fun as making sausage, and often just as messy. Just be glad that the writers don’t have the characters slaughter each other in a torture-porn inspired bloodfest every episode.
Stranger
Bullshit. Pure and total bullshit.
That they don’t follow up on an inconsequential joke from a few seasons earlier isn’t laziness. It’s just that they aren’t catering to a tiny segment of the fanbase that cares about such minutiae. Not checking on a pig joke from seasons earlier has absolutely nothing to do with the quality (or lack thereof - personally the show is little more than background noise as I work or cook, and even then its low on the list) of their work.
As I previously said, the shows that follow continuity to this minuscule detail are few and far between. I can’t tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t be annoyed by, but I can laugh off certain annoyances. This would be one of them.
There are a lot of serious continuity problems on BBT that ruin the show. For instance, in one scene Sheldon’s T-shirt has a small wrinkle on the left sleeve, and then in the next scene the wrinkle is gone, as if someone had smoothed down the sleeve with their hand, but no such smoothing was shown. Totally took me out of the show at that point.
I think we’ve just found our Series Finale!
There is a rumor that Charlie Kaufman (writer of Being John Malkovich, Adapatation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and writer/director of Synecdoche, New York and the recent Anomalisa) pitched a story concept and partial script for the mercifully short-lived Ned and Stacey (on which he was a staff writer) where the constantly bickering main characters start setting boobytraps and end up killing one another in the final scene as a way of venting his frustration over the facile writing and plotting of the show. As the rumor (told to me by a runner and aspiring writer who worked at Columbia TriStar, but not on that show) goes, Kaufman was complemented for the wit in the scenes he wrote but asked if he could tone it down to be less edgy and not kill off the main characters, which (if true) just illustrates just how badly television executives actually miss the point. (Given that it was Kaufman I also have to assume that he made a bunch of obscure references to Alexander Pope and rare neurological disorders that flew over the heads of everyone involved.)
Stranger