Adam Baran

“A lot of sitcoms had minor continuity problems but GG seemed to revel in them. It’s like they put Estelle Getty in charge of keeping track of everything.” - Anonymous, Datalounge.com

So I’ve descended back in to the working world again, and I mean descended, cause its’ hellish indeed, despite the fact that I now work in a swanky Park Avenue high rise near the famous Lever House. Oh sure, on one hand, I seem to keep getting placed in jobs where I have like almost nothing to do and can sit and stare at the computer all day, on the other hand I have nothing to do and can sit and stare at the computer all day. My brain turns to mush and I have to push myself when real work is assigned to me. So far I’ve done about three-quarters of an actual normal person’s day’s work, all in the collective span of two weeks.My day usually goes like this – Raisin bagel toasted with butter, Spider Solitaire, Pitchfork, Page Six, New York Times (Dave Kehr’s DVD Reviews on Tuesday’s are a particular high point), Spider Solitaire, Film Forum, Bam, Moma, Walter Reade (any new movies coming out?), Spider Solitaire, Huffington Post, Gawker (by this point I’m desperate, cause I hate Gawker), FourFour, Disco Delivery, SpiderSolitaire…

REPEAT FOR THE REMAINING 8 HOURS

So I was thrilled when my friend Jeremy, who I luckily can IM with while pondering oblivion, told me about this amazing thread on the Datalounge Forums. Datalounge is this really fun gossipy site that’s basically all message boards with topics created and written by fags from the anonymity of their own homes. It’s so popular that you can never access it during what they call “Primetime Traffic” and they always try to get you to donate to it so you can get on it without waiting. They really ought to change the format and put up banners and make the whole thing free, but for some reason they don’t. This site is the best place for unfounded “I swear I know someone who knows someone who fucked him, and he swears he’s a homo” gay actor rumors. And there are lots of great posts about TV Shows and other mindless observations that usually crack me up.

Case in point, the most addictive message board thread ever:

THE GOLDEN GIRLS INCONSISTENCIES

This thread is about all the inconsistencies (not incontinences, jerks!) in the classic sitcom about four old broads played by Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White, and Estelle Getty. The idea is to discuss all of the things that bugged people about the show – things that weren’t possible and which the lazy continuity errors the writers couldn’t seem to keep track of over the years.

For instance:

• “Stand By Your Man”, Season 6- Rose pleads with them to let her keep one of Dreyfuss’s puppies, but Dorothy thinks it would be unfair to leave a dog home alone all day and Blanche insists she will not allow a dog in her house. In “Questions and Answers”, Season 7- Rose is depressed so Dorothy and Blanche buy her a dog.

• Neither of Dorothy’s kids are over 30, although Stan and Dorothy got married when she was knocked up at 17 and they were together for 38 years.

• Blanche and Rose have different kids every time they talk about them.

• Rose said she was allergic to cats, the next episode was about how they all met and she had to move out of her old apartment b/c she had a cat. Rose also questioned how Dorothy could dislike her own sister. Meanwhile another episode had Rose hating her sister (Inga Swenson). The families, especially the kids, were all screwed up.

I could read this shit all day – in fact I have been, and have been thoroughly amazed at both the dead-on accuracy of all the errors pointed out – leading to an actual critical analysis and debate of many of the mistakes, as well as the utter hilariousness of the sheer idiocy of the whole discussion. I live for stuff like this. I have always wondered why most sitcoms keep the appearance of siblings and parents and relatives all very standard. When Colleen Dewhurst showed up in the first season of Murphy Brown, she showed up again every time they wrote her in – but Golden Girls seems to take the opposite approach. Sometimes two or more actresses showed up over the course of the series playing the same part – as if it was a David Lynch movie. And these were bit parts, I mean, couldn’t they have kept this straight? Apparently this irked many other fans on the boards. You will be amazed at the passion that goes into these posts. Some of these are also taken from tv.com’s Golden Girls inconsistencies page, which is a bit more tempered in its emotions, but also user generated.

After the jump are some of my favorites.

• One huge thing I never got was… if there was supposed to be 3 bedrooms for rent initially, how were they able to take in Sophia? They all had their own massive bedrooms, so it wasn’t like any of them was sharing.

• Did Dorothy’s kids attend her wedding? Why did only one of Rose’s kid’s come to the hospital when she had the heart attack. That stuff always bugged me.

• On the “Grab that Dough” episode - How on earth did the girls make it back to Miami so quickly when their purses were stolen and all they won on the show was a skillet and a lifetime supply of soup? Their purses presumably had all their money, credit cards, airline tickets, identification, etc.?

• Big Daddy sold Hollingsworth Manor to fund his country singing career and then, when he died years later, Blanche returned there for his funeral.

• Which was less believable: Dorothy’s hidden gambling addiction or Rose’s 30-year barbiturate abuse? (response after the next comment)

• In an episode about Stan’s brother visiting (McLean Stevenson), Rose is having trouble sleeping. Blanche suggests she take a sleeping pill. Rose says she hates taking pills. Flash forward a year or so to an episode where Rose is hooked on the pills she takes for a back injury. I guess she got over her dislike of taking those little buggers.

• Rose may have been covering up the fact that she was addicted by saying she hates taking pills. See, the show may be much deeper than we thought.

• The idea that a bunch of straight guys in a bar would drop everything and eagerly crowd around a piano to watch Bea Arthur sing “Hard-Hearted Hannah, The Vamp of Savannah”.

• I don’t know anything about Florida architecture, but it did seem a little strange to have a four-bedroom house where the only place to eat was outdoors on the lanai or around a tiny kitchen table with room for only 3 chairs. Also, anyone having to use the bathroom would have had to go use one of the girls’ “private” bathrooms (standard in an apartment, but it seems like four-bedroom houses would usually be big enough to have at least one half-bathroom). Just a general imbalance in the public/private space allocations of that house.

• AND on the topic of the overwhelming elephant in the room, the kitchen table… However phony it would have been to do the stagy thing of having four chairs in a semi-circle around the table and leave a gaping hole so nobody had their back to the audience/camera… it seems much MORE phony and glaring every time someone has to pull up a stool. With 4 chairs in a semi-circle, there might be one moment of thinking, “Oh, how stagy”, then you’d immediately adjust and get over it. But as it is, every single time the four of them are in the kitchen together, you think again, “Why the fuck would they have lived together for seven years and never have bought a goddamn fourth chair?!?!?”

• Sophia seems to have had about a million “best friends” who she’s never mentioned before. Esther Weinstock (Jack Gilford’s wife who dies so he can marry Sophia) was her best friend. I guess she lived in Brooklyn so Sophia never saw her anymore… But then it turns out that her “best friend” was Sister Agnes. Losing Sister Agnes affects Sophia so much that she decides to become a nun- which is a little bizarre when the woman has never been mentioned before. Can’t remember any other examples, but I know Sophia has other one-shot “best friends”.And how about poor Geraldine Fitzgerald? The woman is suicidal cause she has no friends or family, until Sophia saves her life by promising they’ll talk all the time, she can come over every Friday night, spend holidays with them, etc. Then the character is never seen or heard of again. You have to figure that after a while of Sophia never calling, Geraldine had no choice but to off herself anyway- only this time no one was there and her body rotted away in the apartment until the stench overwhelmed the neighbors enough to call the police. Nice.

• One huge thing I never got was… if there was supposed to be 3 bedrooms for rent initially, how were they able to take in Sophia? They all had their own massive bedrooms, so it wasn’t like any of them was sharing.

• Charlie died in two different ways, as well. One time, he died in the hospital, the second, I believe he had a heart attack and died after he and Rose had sex.

• Why was Dorothy’s class reunion in Miami ?

• They lived in Miami but almost always wore layered clothing more appropriate for a cold-weather climate. I live in Florida and trust me, the last thing you would want to put on your feet would be suede boots!

• We met Miles’ daughter, but it later turned out that he was in the witness protection program.

• Also, the number of abortions Rose claims to have had wildly fluctuates.

• Inconsistency was Dorothy’s kids’ ages and how long she was married to Stan - and that she was pregnant with Michael. In 1989, Michael was 31. He was born in 1958. But Dorothy and Stan ended their marriage around 1985 - after 38 years of marriage. So Dorothy was pregant with Michael for 11 years?!

• Seriously, it was like nobody ever showed up for anything… not only did Dorothy’s kids not come to her wedding to Leslie Nielsen, they didn’t even come to Dorothy and Stan’s wedding, when their own parents were re-marrying each other… Phil and Gloria didn’t come to their mother’s wedding (unless we’re supposed to believe that, due to Rose’s “mixing up the invitation lists”, they showed up a few days later at a meeting of the Hunk-A-Hunk-A Burnin’ Love Unauthorized Elvis Fan Club)…

• It was so flagrant that you actually find yourself impressed, on the episode with Big Daddy’s funeral,that the writers remembered to include Blanche’s sister Virginia and that the casting directors could even be bothered to pick up the phone and book Sheree North, the same actress who had played her previously. Or, at least you’re impressed until you realize that they forgot to even address the absence of Blanche’s sister Charmaine… and Blanche’s brother Big Gay Clayton… and Blanche’s daughter Rebecca… and Blanche’s daughter Janet… and Blanche’s sons Skippy and whatever other boys she mentioned over the years… and Blanche’s young stepmother (or did Big Daddy divorce her?)…

• When Blanche asked if she could borrow Dorothy’s mink stole, Dorothy said “it’s Miami in June”, that’s also the night Sophia moved in because Shady Pines burned down. But in the episode Never Yell Fire Pt 1, Dorothy said Shady Pines burned down in September.

• The issue of Blanche’s financial status is always ambiguous. Here she talks about “marrying money;” however, later on in the series she talks about George dying and leaving her with no money and “just a closet full of suits that you spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of.”

• In this episode, the girls comfort Rose in her bedroom - which is huge! Although it was acknowledged that Rose had a large room (she and Dorothy flipped a coin for the room in a flash-back episode, The Way We Met telling of when they first all moved in together) Rose’s room is considerably larger than Blanche’s and appears to have it’s own bathroom. In a later episode, Second Motherhood, Dorothy and Rose work together to repair the toilet in the bathroom that they and Sophia share and isn’t attached to anyone’s bedroom. Also, doesn’t it seem strange, given that Blanche is so self-centered, for Rose to have the largest bedroom?

• In this episode, Rose gets a job at an ice cream shop. But in a later episode, she says she can’t walk past a soda or ice cream shop because a guy in St. Olaf arranged the ice cream scoops in a seductive manner on her sundae.

• In the parking garage, you can hear a woman’s footsteps moving at pretty much the same pace throughout the entire sequence. Even though Rose walks, stops, speeds up, runs, and stops again, the footsteps don’t really change and at times aren’t even in sync with her steps.

• Rose is so afraid of the robbers coming back that they get an attack dog. They are all afraid of the attack dog who is in the kitchen, you never see the dog. Rose says that she can’t go in the kitchen because she is afraid of large dogs… as you know in many episodes Rose brings dogs home, brings a dog to the hospital and is never afraid of Dreyfuss

• It seems in this episode Blanche reveals a secret about how she was afraid of dancing in a recital as a child and she was “standing in a puddle” and therefore wants to back out of the dance recital… but in other episodes she seems more than agressive in persuing actor/dancing roles … The Sound of Music, MacBeth, Henny Penny to name a few.

• Everything about Miles was one of the most glaring inconsistencies of all. In addition to the previously mentioned facts that Harold Gould had already played Arnie, the first guy Rose lets into her widowed vagina… and that his daughter comes to visit but we later find out he’s in the witness protection program and can’t let any family or friends know where he is… AFTER the Cheeseman is arrested and he leaves the witness protection program, he not only continues to go by the alias “Miles Webber” (instead of his real name, Nicholas Carbone) but he even continues to work as a college professor, a job for which he apparently had no training or credentials in the first place. And beyond all that factual stuff, it’s really pretty callous that when Rose has a heart attack and might die, nobody fucking picks up the phone to call Miles. They have a feeble line in the beginning of the episode where Rose says she can go to the high school reunion because “Miles is out of town”… but if somebody is going in for triple-bypass surgery, don’t you think you at least make an EFFORT to get in touch with their boyfriend who they almost got engaged to recently??? I know why they didn’t want him actually in the episode- it was the second-to-last one and it was supposed to be about the close bond of the four girls, not about Rose and Miles…. but how hard would it have been to give Dorothy or Blanche one line in the hospital like, “I finally tracked down Miles in Europe, he’s trying to get on the first plane back”? Things like that really made it seem like sometimes the writers just didn’t give a shit.

• One thing I love is how these women seem to have the lightest work schedules of all time… Whenever they would try to make economic anxiety part of the plotline (like, if there was something they couldn’t afford), I’d always think, “Well, maybe if you didn’t spend every weekday sitting around your house, you wouldn’t have to worry!” (Not to mention that every other week they attend some formal charity benefit in beaded gowns, not something I usually associate with people on tight budgets.) When Charlie’s company cuts off the pension Rose receives, she goes into complete drama-queen mode (which the others take seriously) about whether she’ll end up like a homeless bag lady she’s seen. Yet as soon as she gets the new job at the TV station, she’s back to a seeming one-day-a-week work schedule (with the exception of that one episode where out of the blue she’s going out of her mind because she’s “overworked”).

• There’s one episode where Dorothy and Rose are going to the racetrack (again, on a weekday) and Blanche says, “Oh, I WISH I didn’t have to work this afternoon so I could go with you!” It always takes me aback, cause it’s seriously like the only time in the entire seven years that their jobs seem to get in the way of them doing any weekday activity (including reading magazines on the sofa) that they want to do.

• It’s amazing that the most consistent relative of all was the one who was never seen- Phil! For some reason, the writers were able to keep it straight in their minds for years: “Dorothy has a brother named Phil who wears women’s clothes.” Yet there would be relatives who actually appeared, and had full episodes built around them… and then afterwards it was as if they never existed ( e.g. Sophia’s sister Angela) or they would come back with a completely different personality and backstory (e.g. Blanche’s daughter Rebecca)

See how amazing this is? Tell me you’re not hooked. Well, if you made it this far and you are reading this, I guess we both know what the answer is. FAG!!

The link is HERE!