What’s Continuity?

A fun trivia question is “What was Henry Blake’s wife’s name?” Because the answer is both Mildred and Lorraine. Similarly, the Pierce family had a summer home in Crabapple Cove, Maine, that by the end of the show became their only home. His mother retroactively died when he was ten, and his sister faded into nonexistence. It doesn’t take much digging to find these examples, because there was no continuity in the series. No one worried about it, even though there was already the idea that TV shows might go into syndication and be watched repeatedly.

These days, shows have story bibles. You want to know what someone’s childhood pet mentioned once in passing in season one was named? Someone wrote it down and kept that information so the sixth season episode that mentions the same childhood pet in passing will give the pet the same name. You watch enough older TV, and you realize that this was not the case Back In The Day. Ethel Mertz had three middle names. Mrs. Rayburn on Leave It To Beaver was June’s teacher when she was a girl in one episode but she didn’t recognize her on a different episode. The layout of the Petrie house changed based on the needs of the episode.

Even personality traits can change. On Emergency!, there’s an early episode where Johnny and Roy go on TV, Johnny freezes up, and Roy is a natural. A later episode has them go on TV “for the first time” and Roy has stage fright before they even get near the studio. These are entire B-plots of episodes, but no one bothered taking note of that. Even well into my childhood, people could suddenly be different from who they had been before then. Quite famously, Frasier Crane claimed to be an only child and orphan on Cheers, which had to be retconned for Frasier.

It turns out to be basically impossible to look up when story bibles, as they’re called, came to be used. (Go on, you try to Google a figurative use of “bible” with the word “story.”) Almost certainly it’s when shows started to be released on video tape. Because, yes, you could buy at least some shows on VHS, even if it was by episode, before you could on DVD. Ask how much I spent on Mystery Science Theater 3000 on VHS. If you’re bingeing Gilmore Girls, you’re going to notice things that audiences watching Newhart might not have.

It’s weird, though. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t care enough to keep track of what Watson’s wife’s name was or where he was wounded, and he has to have known that people reread books. Maybe people just care more now than they did in the past, or maybe Doyle was lazy. I suppose it was unlikely most people had the time and energy to reread the entire Holmes series all at once in those days to catch the errors. You’d think they’d at least remember the name, though.