Do you guys not have continuity bibles?
Teeny tiny spoiler warning for the Game of Thrones HBO show.
I recently fell down a rabbit hole of watching multi-hour long breakdown/retrospectives of TV shows on YouTube. (I especially liked the ones done by Friendly Space Ninja. His music is also good — check him out!) Some were shows I had seen a bit of (Stranger Things and Game of Thrones) and others, I had never seen at all (Riverdale and The Flash), but it was interesting to learn about how most of these shows went completely off the rails.
Something that kept coming up: continuity errors, especially in later seasons when everything got extremely sloppy. I mean, it happens to the best of us and I'm not immune. I have literally forgotten key plot points whilst writing a first draft. However, I'm just baffled that these millions-of-dollars-per-episode shows are falling into these amateur traps.
Do you people just not keep show bibles?
I found out about show/continuity bibles many years ago now. It just made sense: keep a living document of character information and important details about the TV show or series and make sure you reference it for big scenes. Then you won't have oopsie moments like "Well, Dany kinda forgot about the Iron Fleet" which just… like… there's a mark on my forehead for how hard I facepalmed. I thought maybe it was because we're moving into an era of streaming services and the people working on those shows have no experience with syndicated television, but that can't be true in ALL cases! This is absolutely mind-boggling.
I'm an amateur science fiction and fantasy author and even I have a series bible. After my first draft, I whipped up a document to keep track of all the dragons I kept mentioning in my book. I make reference to them a lot (especially for character exclamations, e.g. "Grellan's scales!") and I couldn't remember which dragon was the death one, which dragon was the especially evil one, and which ones could breathe fire. That's the sort of thing a series bible is for! My dudes, they are paying you a billion dollars for this show — can you not do the bare minimum? It's so disheartening and I feel bad for the people who really loved these shows.