Continuity errors and other annoyances

Continuity errors really bug me. Not the little things, like "Oh, in the last shot, his cup was halfway empty, and when they changed angles, it was full again." I understand that movies and TV shows are made much like sausage, and there is a maximum allowed level of insect legs/visual take-to-take errors that creep in. I am not a perfectionist ... about that, at least.

No, it's the writing errors that bug me. Sitcoms, as the lowest form of television writing, are the worst. They just don't care; all they're interested in is achieving the laugh. The classic example is Bewitched: the rules about magic changed from week to week, to suit the storyline. Some weeks, Samantha couldn't undo another witch's spell; some weeks she could. Once you accept that the writers are just monkeys chained to typewriters in the basement, desperate for a punch line, you shrug it off. If they don't care, why should I? It's more disturbing when it's a high-brow sitcom like The Dick Van Dyke Show, when Laura's married name and how she and Rob met keep changing from flashback episode to flashback episode. TDVDS is the caviar of sitcoms, and it's painful to see them flounder. But it was truly a different world back then; who would ever have thought in 1966 that all the episodes would be captured on DVDs for people to sit down and watch and critique in real time, rather than spread over five years.

It's when the errors occur in shows that focus on attention to detail that they really rankle. Monk is all about attention to excrutiating detail -- and yet Adrian's beloved late wife Trudy was a scholarship student at a private day school in San Francisco at the same time as she was growing up the daughter of a wealthy game show producer in Los Angeles. It's not just TV, either. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, at the top of page 166, Harry "heard the door close" and then, in the next paragraph, he "hurried across the room [and] closed the door." That was tremendously disappointing. I had such respect for J. K. Rowling that for the rest of the book -- and indeed, the series -- I kept waiting for this discrepancy to be a plot point, for it to be revealed that someone had been sneaking around his room to explain the twice-closing door.

Which brings us to this week's Chuck and what isn't technically a continuity error but rankle nonetheless. The whole impetus of the plot was that Sarah didn't have any friends to invite to her and Chuck's engagement party -- that it was going to be all his side coming, in other words. So Chuck hunts down her old teammates and adventure/hilarity ensues, of course. Then we get to the engagement party that was the source of so much angst, and it's peopled entirely by good-looking extras, a virtual reenactment of Ellie's party in the series premiere. Who the heck are all these people? Chuck's friends? I don't think so. None of the Buy More staff, no Big Mike, no Jeffster! (Granted, Ellie wouldn't have invited them, but they would most certainly have crashed the party to perform.)

Now, I'm fully aware that, in real life, the lack of Buy More recurring cast was almost certainly due to budgetary issues. They had to pay Lou Diamond Phillips and three hot chicks, so the Buy More staff (not to mention, Captain Awesome) got a week off. But in an episode whose entire plot is set in motion by Chuck feeling bad that Sarah wouldn't have any friends at the party, shouldn't Chuck have had some friends at the party?