40 TV Show Inconsistencies That Are Genuinely Infuriating

Dwight learns near the end of The Office that he’s actually the father of Angela’s kid. Except… didn’t he steal the baby’s diaper and have a doctor run a DNA test, proving he wasn’t the dad? That’s confused fans of the show for ages. Editor David Rogers has said that there was originally some dialogue implying Dwight grabbed the wrong garment, dialogue that really that should have been left in.

So when exactly was Ross Geller born? In one episode he tells Joey his birthday is in December, but leap forward a few seasons and suddenly it’s in October instead. Come on, the writer’s room didn’t make a note of all their birthdays? As if that wasn’t bad enough, some Friends fans did the math and Ross was 29 for far longer than he should have been.

Many a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has wondered: Can the vampires actually breathe or not? Angel himself claims that no they can’t, and that’s why he’s unable to give CPR to Buffy. And yet vampires drag on cigarettes, they get strangled, and Spike is even tortured by drowning at one point. Even magic can’t really explain all that away.

In the first season of Modern Family Jay states that he first ran into Gloria at a wedding and they shared some chocolate cake. But later on, the story changes. Later episodes establish that Jay actually met Gloria at a diner and what’s more, he noticed her sister before noticing her. So what’s the truth?

Hardcore fans of the beloved show M*A*S*H might have noticed this one after a few rewatches. During Season One Col. Blake refers to his wife as Mildred, but in later episodes she’s suddenly renamed Lorraine. Oh, and to make things more confusing another character’s wife was called Mildred as well.

The Umbrella Academy establishes in Season Two that whatever kind of alien Reginald is, it’s definitely not a humanoid one. His face is just a mask with a load of weird reptile under it. And yet… Back in Season One we saw him on what was presumably his own alien planet, alongside a companion, and both appeared human.

In the opening of Game of Thrones’ Season Five, a flashback shows young Cersei asking a witch what her future will be. The witch tells her she will have three children, all of whom will die. But Cersei went on to have four children – back in Season One she remembered a black-haired child which died in infancy before its three siblings were born. Some fans theorized this child actually survived and grew up to be Gendry, but nope.

Back in the early days of Glee, the audience was shown a pretty clear photograph of Rachel’s two dads. Unfortunately they don’t look anything like Brian Stokes Mitchell and Jeff Goldblum, the actors cast to play Rachel’s dads later on. There’s also some inconsistency as to whether they had Rachel via a surrogate or adopted her.

Whenever an era-defining new story happens it quickly gets referenced in television shows, but this can lead to problems. For example the death of Osama bin Laden was mentioned in Breaking Bad, but the show was set in 2007, before that event happened. Showrunner Vince Gilligan admitted to Slate magazine in 2012 that he made a mistake there.

Apparently The Simpsons has the most mistakes of any TV show, which makes sense seeing as how it’s been around so long. But one particularly bad one is this: in the 1995 episode “And Maggie Makes Three” a photograph of Maggie can be seen on the wall in a flashback taking place before she was born. Criminally sloppy.

We all know who Kirk from Gilmore Girls is. But back in Season One he seems to be going under a different name, Mick. He doesn’t get called Kirk until the episode “Cinnamon’s Wake.” Actor Sean Gunn never actually expected he’d get to appear more than once, but the intended cameo character is now a fan favorite.

The first episode to feature iconic Doctor Who monsters the Weeping Angels was 2007’s Blink, starring future star Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow. Future Doctor Who events put a plot hole in the episode, though. Later on in another episode featuring the stone-faced slaughterers it’s established that whenever an image of such a fiend is captured, doing so creates a new one, yet Sally has photographs of Weeping Angels – and they don’t do anything.

Two different versions of how Turk and JD first crossed paths are presented in Scrubs. In Season Two we get a flashback of their first meeting, where JD introduces himself to Turk in their dorm room at college. Then in Season Four we again revisit the dorm room, except this time Turk is the new arrival and JD’s wearing a wizard hat. As you do.

WandaVision is an interesting case where a TV show is inconsistent with a movie rather than itself. Back in the film Age of Ultron, which introduces the Maximoff twins, Pietro says that their parents were killed by a bomb while eating dinner. In WandaVision a flashback shows them being killed while watching TV. Maybe most people wouldn’t notice that, but MCU fans did.

In one episode of The Big Bang Theory Penny refers to her father as “Bob.” But when he shows up later, his name is “Wyatt.” That led some fans to question, perhaps Bob was his first name and Wyatt his last, making Penny’s mysterious surname Wyatt? Kaley Cuoco herself loved that theory, but it always remained just that, a theory.

The A-Team van is of course absolutely iconic. But its very existence in the show throws up a plot hole. Why would a bunch of people who were supposed to be on the run pick out such a very eye-catching, distinctive mode of transport? The show never took itself too seriously, but even so…

During a Season One episode of How I Met Your Mother, Robin says that she never played any team sports. But this was contradicted shortly afterwards: the episode “Best Prom Ever” has Robin stating she missed her prom due to a field hockey match, and then in Season Four it’s revealed she was an ice hockey player too.

Maybe family didn’t matter after all? The Winslows on Family Matters once had a third kid, Jaimee Foxworth’s Judy – but then one episode she went offscreen and was never even mentioned again. Apparently, she was let go due to a budget issue, but surely the writers could have worked around that in a more elegant way?

In the Brooklyn 99 episode “Cheddar” Amy asks Jake if he’s about to grow a mustache. He answers, “No, you know I can’t do that, and it’s cruel of you to keep bringing it up.” Yet in the Season Five opener, an incarcerated Jake is sporting a face full of hair. Maybe prison just does that to a man...

Fans have noticed that there’s a lot of brain tumors in Grey’s Anatomy: far more than you would expect statistically. But despite this anomaly, these highly trained doctors never seem to detect them on time. Both Izzie and Amelia suffered this most debilitating of afflictions, and yet they continued to work for months without any negative effects. Then again, Grey’s Anatomy was never the most realistic show.

Pay close attention to the glass Phil uses when he takes an aspirin in the Season One episode “Bang the Drum, Ashley.” He takes the glass from Geoffrey and downs the water, but a few shots later the water is all back in there again. Who knows, perhaps Geoffrey is simply an incredibly good butler?

Don’t be a child in a TV show: you might be wiped from existence at a moment’s notice. In Season One of ER George Clooney’s character Doug Ross mentions he has a son, but later on he implies he has no kids. Confused? Well, in 2019 executive producer John Wells offered to the website TVLine as an explanation, “There are people among us who lose track of their children.”

The premise of Futurama’s Season Four episode “Where No Fan Has Gone Before” involves the fact that all acknowledgement of the Star Trek franchise has been banned for a long time. But back in Season Three’s “That’s Lobstertainment!” we hear mention of a film called Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation. Oops.

So in Season Six of Game of Thrones, Melisandre takes her necklace off and instantly becomes an old woman. Clearly the pendant is the source of her power. Except… Back in Season Four audiences saw her without the jewelry and still youthful. Actress Carice Van Houten admitted to Elle magazine in 2017, “That was an oops moment.”

In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Leonard says he can’t drink wine because it’ll give him bad headaches. And yet, he seems to be drinking wine all the time in future episodes. Maybe you could spin it as he’s willing to put up with the migraines, but it seems much more likely that the writers just forgot.

You know Uncle Jesse, John Stamos’ character on Full House, as Jesse Katsopolis. But that wasn’t his original name! During the first round of filming he was called Adam Cochran, and then in the actual show he was Jesse Cochran. But Stamos wanted his character to be Greek like him, so before long the character name was retconned to be Jesse Katsopolis.

One ongoing problem with apocalypse shows, be they comedic or serious, is how do the characters keep powering their cars when the fuel will inevitably go bad? The Last Man on Earth was a comedy, but the characters actually pointed out the fuel wouldn’t last forever. Yet seasons later they were still driving around.

One scene in Gilmore Girls shows Rory with a cast on her injured arm. Pretty hard to miss, right? But somebody did indeed miss it, because in the next shot the cast has mysteriously gone. Sure, it’s not a massive mistake in the grand scheme of things, but it’s definitely annoying once you realize you can’t un-see it.

In the Season Five finale of Orange is the New Black, the prison guards have to count all the inmates after a riot and find ten missing. We the audience know where they are, but there should have been more than ten prisoners gone. Chang and Pennsatucky both escaped as well. Sure, Linda from corporate was counted as a prisoner, but that still means 11 people, not ten, should’ve been missing.

Putting babies in your TV show is so tricky. Take the Season Six opener of Sex and the City as a reason why showrunners might want to avoid their characters having kids: Carrie meets Aiden in that episode and he has a baby of around six months. But if you consider the timelines and how Miranda’s own baby aged, it’s impossible that Aiden could’ve married and had a kid in that short amount of time.

In the episode of The Golden Girls called “The Way We Met” each Golden Girl talks about their backstory. Rose brings up how she had to move because she had a cat. But come Season Four of the show, Rose says that she’s allergic to cats. There’s not really much of a workaround for that plot hole, unless you can imagine she kept a cat while constantly scratching and sneezing.

Remember when Jess on New Girl had a sister? That was Abby, played by Linda Cardellini, and she was a pretty important character for a few episodes. Then she just vanished and was never mentioned again, not even when Jess had her wedding. Perhaps they couldn’t get Cardellini back, but there should have least been dialogue to explain her absence, no?

During Season Two of Parks and Recreation, it’s established that Eagleton is two towns over from Pawnee. But in Season Five, we see Leslie standing in front of the “NOW ENTERING PAWNEE: Good Luck With That” sign which divides Eagleton from its neighbor. Perhaps Eagleton’s so rich the whole town can move wherever it wants?

Here’s one where an actor created an inconsistency on purpose. During Season Five of The X-Files David Duchovny got married to Téa Leoni, and he decided to wear the ring as Mulder too. The idea was that fans might see it as an inside joke or a nod to Mulder’s many mysteries. Nope… Instead it became a plot hole for X-Files devotees to mull over.

So we know That ’70s Show is set in the ’70s, but beyond that it’s impossible to pin down a timeline. The show started in 1976 and ended in 1980, but there were five different Christmas Days during that time. The birthdays and ages of main characters were very inconsistent as well.

A pretty major continuity error happens in the Season Two “Make Me Lose Control” episode of Grey’s Anatomy. When Richard and Derek are in the lift, Richard’s bandages are very clearly visible underneath his hat. But as soon as he takes the hat off, no bandages. What on Earth was going on in that hospital?

Whenever Dexter is about to murder someone, he looks them up on the internet first. But he uses his office computer, which is linked to the police database… And somehow no-one in the department ever notices that all the searched names end up dead later on. Then again, this was far from the only plot hole in Dexter.

Nothing about the elevator in The Big Bang Theory makes sense. In Season One, Leonard informs everyone the elevator broke two years ago. But in Season Three there’s a flashback episode of the same character breaking the elevator seven years ago – and also, Howard acts like he doesn’t know what happened to the elevator, even though he was there when Leonard broke it.

Bizarrely, Rachel and Chandler get introduced to each other not once but three times in Friends. In the first episode Monica tells Rachel who Chandler is as if the two had never interacted. But they have! In a later flashback episode Rachel runs into Chandler, who tells her they’ve already met. Consider that their younger selves even kissed once and this plot hole gets all the worse.

Did anyone like the big revelation in Gossip Girl? Plenty of fans came out and said it made no sense. If Dan Humphrey was GG all along, why was he spreading rumors that also hurt him and his family? Why was he seen reacting to Gossip Girl posts, while alone, if he was the one who wrote them? It wasn’t a popular ending.