Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer / Live-Action TV

Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Proof that short attention spans are not just for casual viewers any more.

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Game Shows

Game Shows: Not immune to this trope in the very least. On many occasions, a contestant will give an answer that was obviously correct ... but for some unexplained reason, the question writer will have provided the wrong answer ... or in the very least, not provided adequate alternate answers that could also be considered correct. More than once, this affects the outcome of the game, and when it does, the losing contestant will often be invited back to play again in the future.

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• The Hollywood Squares: Peter Marshall, in his autobiography and retrospective of the original series, recalled a question asked in the early 1970s about how iconic actor John Wayne supposedly demanded his children refer to him as "sir." Wayne saw the episode and was not amused, to say the least. He wrote Marshall personally and demanded a retraction be aired on the next possible program – he said he never made any such demand of his children – or else. The question writer conceded to "the Duke's" request. Marshall, by the way, still has the letter framed in his living room.
  • When Buzzr returned it to the schedule in the fall of 2019, Cablevision listed reruns of The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour as The Hollywood Squares. It's justified as the show itself hadn't been rerun in nearly three decades. This would later be corrected a week after it premiered.
    • During this same schedule update, at least one TV provider claimed that the Louie Anderson run of Family Feud would also premiere on the channel, which didn't actually happen.
• Jeopardy!: A 1987 episode, where one of the categories was about defunct newspapers, referred to the recently stopped publication the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. When the episode was produced, the newspaper indeed was not publishing ... but by the time the show aired, a new owner had been found and production had resumed. The publisher was very angry when he saw the episode and, in not too kind words, demanded a retraction be aired on the show immediately. The newspaper in question had also published a long, rambling editorial, misspelling Alex Trebek's name in a large-font, front-page headline and throughout the copy. The show's question writers complied and indeed it was selected (in a show later during the 1987-1988 season). But as it turned out, the Globe-Democrat's return was short-lived, and by the time the new episode aired, the newspaper had once again ceased publication, this time for good.
  • Even Jeopardy! fact checkers are only human, but that said, they're pretty good at catching mistakes albeit too late. It's not infrequent for corrections to be found and made during the episode, usually after commercial breaks (with scores compensated accordingly). Several contestants have even been brought back due to judgment calls that the producers feel affected the outcome.
  • One Kids' Week episode was subject to this when a kid was ruled wrong for misspelling "Emancipation Proclamation" on Final Jeopardy! and being ruled wrong. The media blew up over this, and demanded that the judges be more lenient with child players, and that he should be compensated. It absolutely didn't matter, since the kid who misspelled it wouldn't have been anywhere close to winning anyway (he had $9,600 and one of his opponents had $36,600 going into Final Jeopardy!).
• Million Dollar Money Drop goofed up a "which came first?" question and said Post-it Notes were introduced in 1980 (after the Sony Walkman in '79), despite being test marketed under a different name in 1977. Due to the mechanics of the show, the affected contestants lost an $800,000 wager that Post-its were the right answer. But then, everyone else, even the contestants themselves said that the network should give them the $800,000, despite the fact that it was only a bet, and even if this hadn't happened, the last question still killed them anyway!
• 1 vs. 100: A question asked what Rod Stewart song was recently found to have been covered by The Beatles. The answer was "Maggie May" ... but this is incredibly wrong. The Beatles' "Maggie Mae" (with an 'E'!) was a cover of a traditional song, and has no relation to the Rod Stewart song, which was actually written AFTER the Beatles' song was released. To top it off, this 'recent discovery' certainly wasn't - the song is found on the 1970 album "Let It Be."
  • While that answer was indeed completely wrong, it's not quite true that the two songs have "no relation": the Rod Stewart song was named after the traditional/Beatles song. This was intended as a wink to the fact that the title itself is Liverpool slang for prostitutes, since the Stewart song is about a young man who's been seduced by an older woman and is left feeling used.
• Press Your Luck: A 1985 episode featured the question: "Which well-known cartoon character is famous for uttering the immortal words 'Sufferin Succotash!'?" The correct answer: Daffy Duck. At least that's how it was given during the question round. By the end of the episode, the error was discovered and the producers managed to get a hold of Mel Blanc, who, via telephone, acted out a skit with Peter Tomarken wherein Sylvester angrily pointed out the gaffe. The two losing contestants were invited back on later episodes.
• The Price Is Right:
  • While regular viewers sometimes mistakenly refer to the final contest of the show as the "Showcase Showdown" — it's simply called the "Showcase"; the "Showcase Showdown" is where three contestants from one half of the show spin the Big Wheel to see who gets to the "Showcase" round (Drew Carey pointed out this mistake on the show at one point) — authors of the "Encyclopedia Of TV Game Shows" referred to the round as "Showcase Showdown."
  • Another history of game shows, written by the USA Today's Jefferson Graham, frequently fudged the years the original Bill Cullen-hosted version lasted, variously giving the debut year as 1954 and 1957 (it was 1956) and year it was canceled (often, 1963, which is when the NBC primetime version ended; the show ran until 1965 on ABC daytime).
  • And then, of course – although it was spoken – you have host Bob Barker constantly referring to awesome or notably bad playings as "the first time that's ever happened," usually to draw laughs.
  • A 1976 newspaper article listed George Fenneman (best known as the Straight Man/announcer on You Bet Your Life) as a former host. He never hosted the show, not even as a substitute (of which the Cullen version had many).
• The $10,000 Pyramid: In the March 24-30, 1973 issue of TV Guide, the synopsis for the debut of the original CBS series read that contestants were to identify 10 subjects in 60 seconds. That's how creator Bob Stewart first intended the Winner's Circle ... until he found out two nights before taping the pilot that it was not possible to get 10 subjects in 60 seconds. The board was reduced to six subjects with a 2x4 plank covering the bottom four windows. This was obviously not passed on to TV Guide – although to be fair, it was possible that the program description went to press before the last-minute change was made.
• Wheel of Fortune: Has been subject to many erroneous claims, most notably involving its hosts. Chuck Woolery and Susan Stafford were the original host and hostess when the show hit the air in January 1975, with Woolery leaving after the Dec. 25, 1981 show (replaced by Pat Sajak) and Stafford departing after the Oct. 22, 1982 program (after several weeks of substitutes, Vanna White came aboard). One of the most egregious mistakes came from Robin Leach, of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, who wrote an article in 2010 celebrating Wheel of Fortune, claiming the series began in 1981 on NBC with Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Other sources have listed Woolery as host into 1982, while still others have suggested that Woolery and Stafford departed at the same time (there were 10 months of shows featuring the Sajak-Stafford tandem).
  • Also, there's the matter that the daytime version was on NBC from 1975 to 1989, Channel Hopped to CBS that year, then hopped back in 1991 before ending that same year. The nighttime version, which is syndicated, has run non-stop since its 1983 debut. Many sources treat the entire show as if it began in 1983, perhaps exacerbated by its own constant references to whatever nighttime season it's on.
  • The September 17, 2013 episode quickly became infamous online due to a contestant botching the puzzle CORNER CURIO CABINET right after picking up the Million Dollar Wedge. In addition to those arguing that he was "robbed" despite clearly mispronouncing the answer, still others think that said wedge awards its prize immediately. It's actually part of a series of steps to get the million — you have to pick up the wedge, solve the round you pick it up in, hold onto it for the rest of the game without hitting Bankrupt, win the game by having the highest score at the end, hit the $1,000,000 envelope on the smaller wheel in the Bonus Round, and solve the bonus puzzle. Even if he had gotten that round right, he still wouldn't have won the game regardless.
  • The exact same misinformation rose again after a contestant on the April 11, 2014 episode mispronounced the fully-revealed puzzle MYTHOLOGICAL HERO ACHILLES while holding the wedge. While the outcries of "robbing" were to a much lesser extent, many media outlets still stated or implied that he lost a million dollars at that moment (some even claimed that he lost $4 million because he called the L while on said wedge, of which there were four). The contestant still made it to the Bonus Round (which he lost) and landed on a $30,000 envelope with the Bonus Wheel, so the loss of the Million Dollar Wedge didn't make a difference.
• The July 8, 2015, episode of ITV Game Show The Chase featured the question "Ash Ketchum is a character from which video game series?" Except that Ash Ketchum is from the anime, not the games.
• The ITV quiz show Tipping Point once asked "Statistically the most depressing day of the year, Blue Monday falls in which month?". Even the most cursory fact-checking would have told them that this was a complete fiction made up to advertise a travel agency. Using it as the basis of a supposedly factual question is like assuming the Honey Monster is a real animal. A very similar question making the same error later also turned up on Pointless.
• The UK version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? once asked "in tennis, what is the theoretical minimum number of times a player must hit the ball in order to win a set?" with the options given as 12, 24, 36, and 48. The contestant reasoned that there are six games in a set, and each of those involves winning four points - 6×4=24. This was given as the correct answer. However, once the show was broadcast many viewers noticed that the correct answer would actually be 12 - the opponent could double-fault on each of his service points, thus giving the player this point without actually hitting the ball. The show apologised the next evening, but the contestant did keep his money.
• Only Connect once called themselves out on this, having included a picture question in which the four pictures represented the surnames of the four founders of the Social Democratic Party... or rather, they were meant to represent that, except that instead of anything to indicate Roy Jenkins, it included a picture of some steel rods to represent David Steel, who was leader of the Liberal Party and not a founder, or even a member, of the SDP. This error was caught before transmission and host Victoria Coren-Mitchell filmed a special Cold Open pointing out that they'd made a mistake and suggesting viewers could attempt to spot it. The error was then explained over the end credits.
• An episode of Pointless featured a head-to-head question where contestants had to identify association football mascots. An image of Sheffield Wednesday's mascot Barney Owl was displayed, but the answer was given as their other mascot, Ozzie Owl.
• In the Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows book, the entry for Super Password is virtually identical to the Password Plus listing, leaving out the "Ca$hword" segment.
  • The book also says the judges' scoring system on Letters to Laugh-In (1969) was from zero to 100. It was +100 to -100.
  • In the entry for Tic-Tac-Dough, it says the bonus round on the CBS revival was the same as on the syndicated show (uncover money amounts up to $1000 or the words "Tic" and "Tac" before finding the dragon). On the CBS show it was to uncover an "X" or "O" pattern making a Tic-Tac-Toe before finding the dragon.

The Daily Show/The Colbert Report

• Hilariously subverted in an episode of The Daily Show. Jon Stewart talks about how reporters claim that Hillary Clinton has bones of steel. Jon then remarks that this is like comic book character, Wolverine. Suddenly, a nerd comes out of the studio and informs Jon that Wolverine's bones are made of adamantium, not steel. (Actually they're bone coated in adamantium. The adamantium was added later)
  • Jon Stewart got this done to him as well — Tucker Carlson was complaining about the host of The Daily Show, whom he referred to as "Jon Daily." Maybe he was thinking of the host of What's My Line?
  • Unfortunately played straight when Wyatt Cenac used Professional Wrestling as an analogy for Congressional filibustering, and referred to Shawn Michaels as being the good guy, and The Undertaker as the bad guy, as they were midway through an epic WrestleMania feud at the time. In fact, they were both "good guys". Michaels was technically the heel (bad guy) of the two, though.
    • Considering Wyatt's usual persona on the show, this may have been deliberate.
  • An August 2013 episode had John Oliver blow up when CNN made the outrageous assumption that billionaire Elon Musk was the inspiration for Tony Stark, when Iron Man first appeared in comics in 1963 and Musk was born 8 years later.
    • Although, it should be noted that Elon Musk, while not the inspiration for Iron Man in general, was actually the main inspiration for Tony Stark's portrayal in the movies. It is likely that CNN were referencing the character as a whole, but the Daily Show wasn't quite right either.
  • In April 2014, Jon tried to spoof the corruption of NY congressman Michael Grimm in the style of Goodfellas, yet they used the theme from The Godfather, which he immediately pointed out.
• Several morning news shows took a segment of The Colbert Report where Stephen Colbert asked Democratic Congressional candidate Robert Wexler (running unopposed in his district) campaign-killing questions ("Fill in the blank: I enjoy cocaine because...") seriously, comparing it to an earlier segment where Colbert exposed a candidate who decried the separation of church and state and yet couldn't name all of the Ten Commandments and asking, "Why do politicians keep going on The Colbert Report when it makes them look foolish?" Needless to say, Colbert took them down a notch.
  • Wonderfully deconstructed in one episode where Stephen quoted a scientist working on the Large Hadron Collider as saying: "What did they say in Star Wars? We’re going where no man has ever been? Well, that’s where we’re going." Stephen Colbert protests that it's fairly obvious that it came from Star Trek, and that the quote is "boldly go where no man has gone before". He then says that we need more nerds as scientists.
  • Let's not leave out the nerdiest call-out of all time. Some CNN reporters needed a stock image of Satan as the backdrop for their coverage of the 06/06/06 "hysteria." They used an illustration of the Balrog from a 1977 The Lord of the Rings calendar, prompting Stephen to explain, "Devils and Balrogs are totally different. Devils are angels who refused to serve God and instead followed Satan into hell. Balrogs are Maiar who refused to serve Eru and instead followed Morgoth into Thangorodrim. Get your facts straight, CNN!" The best part? Stephen noticed it himself. He just happened to recognize the illustration because he has the calendar (it's a highly collectible calendar).

Doctor Who

Doctor Who has endured more than six decades of people getting basic concepts from the show very wrong.

• Thanks to the movie adaptations starring Peter Cushing, there are still people out there who insist on referring to the Doctor as "Doctor Who". The credits of the First through Fourth and the Ninth Doctors' stories have implied this as well. The only reason it stopped was because Tenth Doctor David Tennant is a fan and personally saw that it was corrected (and presumably this was also the case with Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, a Promoted Fanboy as well).
  • The Time-Life syndicated series as aired on WOR in New York in the late 70s/early 80s featured narration recaps at the start of each serialized episode, and the narrator also refers to the character as "Doctor Who".
  • There's been at least one BBC quiz programme where the question was about the main character of the show and the answer was "Doctor Who".
  • The November 2010 issue of The Atlantic makes itself a statistic by referring to "the character known as Doctor Who".
  • In fairness to all those above, it should be noted that the actors, writers, and producers of the series over the years have often referred to the character by the name "Doctor Who", as seen also in the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time. And the long-running comic strip — which debuted in 1964, well before the Cushing film — referred to the character as Dr. Who consistently until the late 1970s.
  • The blurbs of 1970's Target Books novelisations often referred to the Doctor as "DOCTOR WHO", fitting with a trend of how major characters and aliens were similiarly capitalised, while the books themselves kept "the Doctor."
  • Quite notably, Twelfth Doctor actor Peter Capaldi calls his own character "Doctor Who" all the time, probably a dozen times in the documentary Doctor Who: Earth Conquest - The World Tour alone. If he does it, we may as well all do it.
  • Also when the Doctor drives a car with the number plate “WHO 1” or uses the alias “Doktor von Wer”, it’s not surprising that people think that’s his name.
  • In all fairness, "the Doctor" is a far more ambiguous term that could refer to anyone with a doctorate; while "Doctor Who" isn't correct, it is an easier way to clarify which Doctor one's talking about than saying "the Doctor from Doctor Who", hence why it's used even by the actors and staff members of the show when making public appearances (even if it's blatantly wrong).
    The (Fourth) Doctor: I'm not just a Doctor, I am the Doctor. The definite article, you might say.
  • The term "the Doctor" was probably popularised by the Target novelisations, the main Doctor Who fiction outside the TV series for much of the 70s and 80s, which refer to him almost exclusively as such. It was standardised in the 80s by producer John Nathan-Turner, who tended to be more hands on with spin-off material and make sure they accurately reflected the series.
  • To tweak this further, in a 2017 episode The Master claims that the Doctor's original chosen name really was "Doctor Who", but they dropped the second bit because it was too on-the-nose even for them. The Doctor insists this is a lie.
• Back in 2005, just after the first season of the revived version of Doctor Who began, there was an article talking about the Doctor and Rose battling against the evil Moxx of "Balroom" (actually Balhoon) and the dastardly Face of Boe. Both of these were actually friendly party guests.
  • There was an interview with Eccleston of the "pre-recorded then bits shown from it over someone else talking" kind, and after he answered a question about the Moxx makeup/effects, it cut back to the live anchor who said something to the effect of "Christopher Eccleston there, the new Doctor Who talking about one of the fantastic new villains in the show." He then went on to imply the Moxx was a very important character and would appear in several episodes. In reality, he is not only, as stated above, a friendly party guest, but he has about three lines, in one episode.
  • Picking up the false description of the Face of Boe as a villain, there is an actual article, for the 2007 series, describing the "evil Boe" as the Doctor's "arch-enemy". Not only was the character never a villain, but by this appearance, the character is a friend of the Doctor's and they've met amicably several times. Boe is also hinted to be a future version of Ninth Doctor companion Jack Harkness.
• Pretty much every returning alien tends to be described as a bad guy by tabloids, irrespective of whether they were good, bad or neutral in their original appearance. Ood Sigma was another example from the same newspaper, who described him as "The Doctor's old enemy, Ood Sigma" when reporting on "The End of Time". It should go without saying, but Ood Sigma was not a villain in his original appearance, and in fact the only non-hostile Ood in the episode.
  • Tabloids also forget that a returning alien is actually returning. In the run-up to "A Good Man Goes to War", Dorium (a character with only a few minutes on screen who was part of the Doctor's "army") was made out to be a new alien and, as is traditional, the villain of the episode.
• This used to be even worse. Most DVDs of Doctor Who serials from the 70s and 80s have continuity announcements (taped or audio-recorded by fans) as extras which, more often than not, have something wrong with them. These range from mispronunciations of fictional aliens and planets to announcements that seem to be describing a totally different series. Also, many fans remember an announcer pronouncing the show's abbreviated title (Dr. Who) as a single word (Drrhuu?), but no tape has surfaced yet to prove that it ever happened.
  • There was a Scottish BBC continuity announcer who during the end credits for the new series' first season pronounced the show's name as "Doctor Woo" repeatedly.
  • A Horror Channel continuity announcement for a 50th Anniversary showing of the third part of "The Keeper of Traken" refers to the episode as "Keeper of the Traken", when Traken is the name of the planet the episode takes place on.
• The Daleks are not robots, they're basically small tanks operated by the mutated Kaled creatures which resemble squid or octopuses (cyborgs, in other words). Thankfully, the frequent appearance of Kaled mutants in the new series seems to have stopped this. No less a source than the Oxford English Dictionary gets this one wrong, or at least one edition of it did.
  • Prior to 2005, it was a frequent joke among lazy comedians and journalists that "Daleks can't climb stairs". They were seen doing so in the 80s and clearly did so off screen in the 60s (in only their third story). A horde of flying Daleks finally made people get some new material.
• Tabloid newspapers such as The Sun have regularly credited Russell T Davies as the "creator" of Doctor Who, which would be an incredible feat when one realises that the series premiered seven months after Davies was born (He did revive the series after a hiatus of 15 years, but that's neither here nor there). Steven Moffat, his successor, has also been erroneously credited with creating the series.
• Tabloids have a habit of giving out plot details months before broadcast, only to have the facts completely wrong. This means it's guesswork at best. One paper claimed that the Master would kill the Doctor in the 2009 Christmas special, "Beautiful Chaos". (Which is actually the name of a novel.)
  • And they did it again. Months before Series 6 aired and just when it was claimed that the series would be in two sections, at least one paper proudly announced their discovery that Amy would die halfway through the series, implying that this was the massive mid-series plot twist. While a fake Amy does die, the real one doesn't, and that's not the plot twist.
  • The BBC deliberately sows misinformation about upcoming stories, up to and including "having" fake scripts "leak". The tabloids still fall for this.
• A non-fiction book about Science Fiction movies and television shows, published in the '70s, describes the character of the Doctor as a wacky scientist. Presumably, the authors had only heard of the two Peter Cushing films where he was indeed a human scientist, but you'd think the authors of a book about science fiction would have done quite a sight more research than that.
• A documentary about science fiction credited the creation of the series to Terry Nation. Nation created the Daleks, not the series.
  • The BBC made that mistake. In Nation's obituary, no less. It's also listed in at least one edition of Trivial Pursuit. Doctor Who is actually one of a few shows that was created by a committee of people, and not one sole person, and Nation was not a member of the committee. If you want to be really technical, the single person that could be best described as the "creator" of the show out of that committee is Sydney Newman.
  • A number of reference books also credit Nation.
• While discussing a rumored Doctor Who Hollywood reboot, this reporter mispronounces Steven Moffat's name.
• The descriptive text on the VHS boxes often seemed like they were written by someone who hadn't watched that serial (or Doctor Who in general). Some examples: The box for "Terminus" calls Terminus a planet when it's actually a space station. The box for "The Robots of Death" says it's about robot trying to enslave the Universe when it's actually about a murderer using the robot servants of his intended victims to kill them. The box for "The Rescue" ends with "...a rescue ship is on its way from Earth intent on revenge and time is running out for the planet." There's not a single part of that that's right.
  • The American version of the "E-Space Trilogy" VHS box set refers to the Doctor's companion Romana as "Ramona".
• Salman Rushdie no less managed to completely miss the point of the 1972 story "The Mutants", claiming that Doctor Who advocated wiping out mutants just because they looked different. He apparently missed the fact that the person arguing that, the Marshal, was the story's Big Bad and the Doctor was the one making the opposing argument.
• Previewing the first episode of the new series, the US TV Guide described the 9th Doctor as a "cockney dude". The 9th Doctor is emphatically not cockney (which geographically refers to an area in London) — repeated reference is made to him sounding "northern" in the series itself and he speaks with Christopher Eccleston's natural Salford accent.
  Rose: If you are an alien, how comes you sound like you're from the North?
  The Doctor: Lots of planets have a North!
• A UK newspaper, the Metro, ran a review of a series 6 episode on their website that confused Amy with Rose (with a giant "Rose is pregnant!" headline), called Rory "Ross" and referred to the Doctor as a human.
• Even in 2013, some media continue to refer to the revival of the series as a "reimagining" or a "remake" when these terms are completely wrong, as the current series is a direct continuation of the original. The only correct "re-" term in this context would be "revival".
  • Any writer referring to "poor" or "low-budget" special effects when referring to any 21st century Doctor Who episode has clearly not watched any Doctor Who of the era. (It has the occasional failed effect, but they're not the default, and they're not low-budget.)
• The BBC Radio 4 Extra pages for their broadcasts of the Big Finish Doctor Who Fourth Doctor Adventures refer to "his ancient warrior companion, Leela". Leela is certainly a warrior, but not an ancient one; she's from a collapsed Earth colony in the far future.
  • It gets worse on the iPlayer link for "The Wrath of the Iceni", which says "Leela is reunited with the ancient tribes of Norfolk", as though that's where she's from. (The page itself correctly says "The Doctor has brought Leela to ancient Norfolk to learn about her ancestors", because they took that straight from the Big Finish description.)
• When the new series was being relaunched and the word was getting out that Rose would be a bit of an Action Girl, many news outlets compared her to Buffy (which is fair enough, so did RTD), and contrasted her with the pre-Buffy companions on the old show, who were apparently all helpless screamers. No female companion has ever been consistently written as a Damsel in Distress who doesn't contribute to the plot except to provide the Doctor with someone to rescue and explain things to, and several have never been written that way.
• November 2017 saw the release of the first (and probably only) issue of a hilariously bad fanzine called Time Lord Timeline. Highlights included a guide to the Doctors that misspelled "John Pertwee" and "Peter Davidson" and illustrated William Hartnell with a picture of Richard Hurndall. Poe's Law may apply.
• A story in the Daily Mail about Ncuti Gatwa appearing at the Time100 Next Gala in New York in October 2022 referred to him as "replacing Jodie Whittaker in Doctor Who next year". This was a few days after the airing of "The Power Of The Doctor", with the twist ending of Whittaker regenerating not into Ncuti Gatwa but instead David Tennant, whose second stint as the Doctor will be as the Fourteenth Doctor and Gatwa the Fifteenth, meaning that he'll be replacing David Tennant and not Jodie Whittaker. If they were saying it like that to prevent spoiling it for those who hadn't seen it yet, they mention it at the end of the article.
• Following the release of the 2023 ''Children in Need'' special, which for the first time featured Julian Bleach without prosthetics as a pre-accident Davros, the i newspaper website in Britain claimed that Christopher Eccleston, who played the Ninth Doctor, had returned to the franchise as Davros. Eccleston and Bleach do have a very slight resemblance in facial structure, but it would be implausible for so many reasons that it's astonishing the i published it without bothering to check.

The Noddy Shop

• Because of how rare The Noddy Shop is, many people tend to mix up the show with Make Way For Noddy, a mistake that's perhaps the most prominent on Amazon's DVD listings for that show, which list The Noddy Shop's actors rather than the ones for Make Way for Noddy, with the two most common being Lauren Collins and Goldy Noltay, who are listed on every single release.
• People tend to call Johnny Crawfish a crawfish, shrimp or crab when he's actually a lobster. Other people claim that he is a toy too, when he's the pet of the shopkeeper.
• BBC's description of "Telling The Whole Truth" calls Charlene Von Pickings "Mrs Pickles". They also claimed that the episode "The Fish Story" mainly focuses on Johnny getting a new tankmate, when the episode's main plot is about Kate losing a ring while playing a fishing game with her brother and friend and Aunt Agatha dressing up as a cat to find the "rodents" ^note who are actually the goblins that stole the ring.
• The official website had quite a few mistakes.
  • The song section contained most of the errors on the site:
    • This section's URLs occasionally did not know which songs came from which episodes at time. ^note Each song was listed by episode code in the URL for each page. For example, S001 was the opening theme, and S106 was the song from "The Tooth Fairy". One instance was when "A Whole Lot Of Helping" was said to be from "Stop, Listen and Learn" rather than "Mixed-Up Magic".
    • The lyrics for the songs appear to have been taken directly from the scripts, with some pieces of the script that signified the people to do various actions (example: "Bonita ad-libs throughout") appearing occasionally. In at least two songs, the prototype names for some characters were used instead of their final names.
    • In "The Burrito Song", the word "careful" in Johnny's "Remember if you can a few of these cooking rules" solo was spelled with two L's.
  • Some plot summaries on the website left out the subplots involving the puppet characters, like the Planet Pup subplot in "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Goblins" and the Johnny Crawfish plot of "The Fish Story". On a similar note, the summaries for "Telling The Whole Truth" and "Let's Go Fly A Kite" don't summarize the Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments.
• An official British DVD of the series misspells Kate's name as "Katy" on the back cover. The guide that came with the DVD also called Noah "Granddad".
• Another British piece of merchandise, the 1999 annual, spelled Warloworth's name as "Wal-O-Worth Q. Weasel" and Gertie's name as "Gerty".
• Several sites, including TV.com and Amazon, both list Jack Fable as a major character in every episode when he only appeared in one, "The Magic Show".
  • TV.com also thinks that Mrs. Sally Skittle is a major character in the show, when she only appears in a quarter of the show's Noddy's Toyland Adventures segments. This might have been because her voice actress, Teryl Rothery, is a very prominent actress in the Canadian film industry.
• Episodate's description of the show contains several errors:
  • The description lists Theodore Tugboat and Jay Jay the Jet Plane as examples of Importation Expansion. Theodore originally aired in its' home country of Canada with the Harbourmaster segments, and Jay Jay The Jet Plane never utilizes a Framing Device and was made in the USA. The person writing the summary may have been confusing the live-action interstitials with the character Brenda Blue for being an actual framing device, when they just exist to fill time in between stories.
  • Granny Duck is called a goose when she is a duck and one character is called a bust statue. However, none of the toys that come to life are bust statues, so the writer could have been confusing said character with either the shiphead figure Island Princess or the beer mug Lichtenstein.
  • The shop is said to be part of a townhouse, which isn't mentioned in the show at all. It also says that Kate and Truman live in this townhouse, when they actually come to visit NODDY's and don't live there.
  • Noddy's design having eyelashes is said to be inspired by SpongeBob SquarePants, which came out seven years after the show that The Noddy Shop is a Framing Device for.
  • It says that Noddy is often annoyed by Bumpy Dog, when he is shown to have a good relationship with him.
• Family Wonder's review claims that only the episode "Let's Go Fly A Kite" used a song. All of the episodes of the show had at least one musical number in them. "Big Bullies", the other episode mentioned, contained two, one of which was an "I Want" Song sung by a Character of the Day.
• This page about James Rankin calls Sherman "Superman the Turtle Tank".
• Some pages about Michael Cera claim that his role as Butch in the episode "Big Bullies" was a voice role, as the show has mostly puppet and animated characters in its' cast. Butch is actually a human character who is a Character of the Day. The fact that the episode in question introduced a puppet character named Disrupto doesn't help matters.
  • Similarly, this page claims Aunt Agatha was one of the characters that was a voice role when she's actually one of the humans. The only human-esque puppets on the show are Rusty (a clown), Whiny and Whimper and Island Princess.
• One of the categories IMDB puts the show under is "Crime".
• This article from The Guardian called Warloworth Q Weasel a "wisecracking teacher-like figure". While the "wisecracking" part is right, he has not been seen acting like a teacher or mentor in the show.
• An IMDB review once again calls Granny Duck a goose.
• When Paul Haddad died, websites claimed that he worked on The Noddy Shop. This confusion might come from the fact that he was cast in several works that did use people who starred on that show, with the most common overlaps being with Sean McCann and James Rankin.
• Behind The Voice Actors' cast list mixes up the roles of James Rankin and Matt Ficner.
• Happened on this very site for the longest time. Any time the final episode "Closing Up Shop" was mentioned on it, it would be mentioned that it ended the series on a downer note, with the shop being closed forever and the toys being sold off. However, after the episode resurfaced online, it became clear that while that DOES come close to happening in the episode, at the end, Agatha sells all her hats to the customers who bought the toys in exchange for returning them to the shop, and the host of a presumed local kid's show promises to give the shop free publicity on his show.

Star Trek franchise

• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • The TV Guide had the habit of describing every episode of the original Star Trek as "The Enterprise is in danger while Kirk, Spock and McCoy are on an away mission." Granted, this isn't actually all that inaccurate for most of the episodes, and TOS sent "landing parties," not "away missions."
  • French newspapers routinely write orthography "Star Treck" (and, less frequently, Spok). Never mind that "Trek" is commonly used in French while "Treck" does not mean anything.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • A local news anchor giving a review of one of the Next Generation movies described the crew with the phrase "...and the alien Data", even giving the alternate, but inaccurate pronunciation of "Data".
    Dr. Pulaski: Thank you, Data (pronounced "Dah-Tuh")
    Data: Data. (pronounced "Day-Tuh")
    Dr. Pulaski: What's the difference?
    Data: One is my name. The other is not.
    • The mispronunciation (and maybe the inaccurate adjective) might be the result of the news anchor reading from a teleprompter. In any case, the person clearly wasn't familiar with the series.
  • A British newspaper once described the Next Generation episode "Tin Man" thusly in their weekly TV guide: "The Enterprise races to a meeting with the Sentiens." While the living spaceship Gumtuu/"Tin Man" was a sentience, the author clearly had no idea what the word meant and thought it applied to a specific alien race. (Possibly also a phonetic issue.)
  • A behind-the-scenes video of the production of Star Trek: Picard from Paramount+ mislabels clips from The Next Generation as The New Generation.
  • The Interzone magazine review of Star Trek: Generations criticized the film for trying to create drama through the off-screen death of two relatives of Picard who had clearly been created just for this purpose, as though the audience would care about characters they'd never seen. While there's a case to be made their deaths were a bit cheap, Robert and Rene Picard had appeared in the episode "Family."
  • Similarly, the SFX review of the novel Section 31: Rogue asks why writers keep making up new characters who were at the Academy with Picard. Not only are the two guest characters in the novel the same ones from the flashbacks in "Tapestry", but the novel continually refers to those events!
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • A paper treated the two-hour pilot as the ninth Star Trek movie. Therefore, it was described like that: "Star Trek 9: Deep Space". There's also a matter of many papers thinking that "Star Trek" is the name of the "titular" ship(s)... At the time said pilot was first aired in 1993, only six Star Trek movies existed.
  • "Sisko" means "sister" in Finnish, and this being a bilingual country, many episode descriptions of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in Swedish language spoke of "the sister" needing to do this or that.
  • When Eleven began airing Deep Space Nine in early 2013, TV Week magazine printed a "cheat sheet" for the series, which not only used a cast photo from Star Trek: The Next Generation, it claimed that TNG was set onboard the USS Defiant.
  • Miles Edward O'Brien was referred to as Michael Robert O'Brian... on a caption at the "Star Trek: The Exhibition" exhibit at London's Science Museum in 1995.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh's Network and Cable TV Guide, which gives full plot descriptions for each television series, described the events of Star Trek: Voyager's second season as Seska leading an insurrection (true) and "wooing Chakotay in the process (not true; the two of them had a relationship while they were still in the Maquis, but broke it off), but that she later turned out to be a genetically modified Kazon. It also describes Kazons as "a warrior race." First, Seska was a genetically modified Cardassian, which makes sense as she is from the Alpha Quadrant, as are Cardassians. Kazons are a Delta Quadrant race that had never heard of Voyager or the Federation in general, so how could they have planted Seska within the Maquis? Also, they're not a mere "warrior race", but a race specifically modeled off of urban street gangs.
  • A French TV Guide described the plot of a Voyager episode as Janeway sending "a Chakotay and a team" on a planet.
  • This review of a production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Kate Mulgrew incorrectly stated that Mulgrew's Star Trek: Voyager character, Kathryn Janeway, was "Elizabeth Janeway". Egregious for three reasons: 1) this is the friggin' New York Times, 2) Star Trek is incredibly well documented by fanboys and putting "Captain Janeway" in a search engine would have instantly brought up the correct name, and 3) Mulgrew is a prime example of The Danza, and Janeway's first name is a homonym for Mulgrew's full first name, Katherine.
    • Mitigated somewhat in that Captain Janeway's first name was Elizabeth at one point in pre-production; they could simply have been using an old source. But as mentioned, it's a flimsy excuse; a single Google search would've provided the correct name.
• Star Trek: Discovery:
  • Bryan Fuller announced early on that the series would break with established Trek tradition in that the lead character would not be the captain, but a lieutenant commander. It would seem traditions die hard. When it was announced that Sonequa Martin-Green had been hired to play the lead character, numerous online news outlets announced that she would be playing "the captain" or would write headlines like "The Walking Dead Star Sonequa Martin-Green will Command CBS's Star Trek: Discovery." ^note At the end of season three, Martin-Green's character becomes captain of Discovery, so they were right eventually.
  • Similarly, when it was announced that Jason Isaacs had signed for the series, playing the actual captain of the USS Discovery, there were umpteen articles assuming the series would revolve around his character as well.
  • The first role announced for the series was Michelle Yeoh, who would be playing Captain Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou, another ship that would have a large role in the first season of the show. Several outlets reported that she would be playing "Number One", or that her character would be in command of the Discovery.
    • In fact, Yeoh's character is killed in the second episode. A different character played by Yeoh is introduced halfway through season 1, and she does end up playing a large role in both this and the following season.
  • In the press coverage of the Blue Carpet premiere of Discovery, British magazine the Independent added insult to injury by claiming Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays central character Michael Burnham, was the "first black lead" of any Star Trek series. Avery Brooks fans took to Twitter faster than you could say "Sisko."
  • To say nothing of one of the showrunners saying something in an interview to the effect that it was high time they had a black woman in the main cast. Excuse me, Nyota Uhura would like a word...
  • When character descriptions were finally released, Trekkers lost their minds over the idea that lead character Michael Burnham (played by the aforementioned Green) was Spock's adoptive sister. Now, regardless of whether or not it's plausible that Spock would have an adoptive sister he never mentioned at all, even in private conversations with his closest friend James Kirk, the amount of tweets and articles from professional sources suggesting she was Spock's "half-sister" or even full sister were inexcusable, and likely fueled the nerdrage fire.
  • Sonequa Martin-Green has been described many times as playing Star Trek's first black woman captain. Given that she only achieves that rank at the end of the show's third season, she wasn't even the first regular female captain, which was Dawnn Lewis, as Lower Decks had introduced Captain Freeman nearly a full year before. The actual first black woman captain in Star Trek was the captain of the USS Saratoga played by Madge Sinclair in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, over thirty years earlier.
  • Screenrant delivered an opinion piece titled "15 Times That Discovery Has Brazenly Broken Canon". While many of the listed items could be described as "retcons" or situations that strained logic, or simply situations that had not been answered yet, almost none constitute "canon breaks" and those that do aren't any worse than those committed by every Trek series to ever exist. Some of them make you wonder just what the writer was thinking, such as saying the concurrent fleet is "too large" (based on the idea that there were only 12 Constitution-classes and extrapolating from that idea that the fleet had only a couple dozen ships in total. Huh?) or "Captain Pike is a hero too early", which assumes that Pike took command of the ''Enterprise'' in 2254, a long-assumed, but incorrect, idea (that was merely how long Spock had served with him).
• Although the actual writer seems better informed, the headline writer of this negative review of Star Trek: Picard describes the series as a "dark reboot", when it's totally in continuity with past Trek shows, almost to the point of Continuity Porn fanservice at times.

Other

Award Shows:

• At the 64th Golden Globe Awards, Tim Allen announced that Alec Baldwin had won the "Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series — Musical or Comedy" for his role in Third Rock. Pretty incredible, considering Baldwin never appeared on that show and it had been canceled for years. Either that, or Allen meant to say 30 Rock (which is the most obvious thing)
• On the MTV Movie Awards, Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen were about to announce an award when a "nerd" in the audience stands up to yell at them about turning the adult male character Banshee into a little girl in X2: X-Men United. Jackman and Janssen quickly reply that the character is obviously his daughter, Siryn, putting the nerd in his place. Somewhat similar to Natalie Portman's SNL monologue.

Creators:

• Ellen DeGeneres had Ben Stiller as a guest on her talk show. Stiller talked about being a fan of Star Trek and Ellen responded with the greeting "nanu nanu". Ellen may have been invoking this trope on purpose.
• On one episode of Hamish and Andy's Remembering Project, the duo talk about an incident in 2014 where, while filling in for their station's regular drive-time hosts, they gave away tickets for a holiday in Chile, which included being in the audience for an episode of their Gap Year South America show. According to the duo, the station was unaware that the show was actually being hosted from Buenos Aires and had confused the show's broadcast dates for the filming dates, so when the promotion ended, filming for the show had concluded. As a make-shift plan, they instead took 30 listeners who had won tickets for a steak dinner in Chile while watching a Gap Year episode that was "being played off a laptop".

Networks:

• British digital TV platform Freeview compiled a poll of the nation's most memorable television moments. At No5 was Bob Geldof telling people to "give us your fucking money" in an interview during Live Aid. The reason this is here? He never actually said it - what he said was, "Fuck the address [for donations], let's get the [telephone] numbers".

TV-Related Publications:

• The Bustle article "5 Nickelodeon Gameshow Classics That Ryan Seacrest's New Series Must Live Up To" actually lists The Chamber as the first show, describing its premise and asking "Was this Nickelodeon or Fear Factor?" Neither. The Chamber is a FOX show that never had a single child contestant. The picture used even had a FOX logo in the corner! Turns out at the time, The Chamber's Wikipedia article had been vandalized by a troll, and the author took the lies at face value.
  • Tellingly, the entry has since been removed, and the title has been changed to "4 Nickelodeon Gameshow Classics..." as well.
• Controversial German TV guide Hörzu managed to identify the former star of Two and a Half Men as "Martin Sheen" at least twice (in 2013, after Charlie had been part of the show for eight years and caused a major scandal).

Series:

• A truly disheartening number of professional reviewers seemed to think that episodes of American Horror Story: Freak Show like "Pink Cupcakes" were depicting legitimate Flash Forwards when they showed scenes like Bette and Dot or Paul the Illustrated Seal dead in the American Morbidity Museum, despite those scenes being very, very clear Imagine Spots for the character Stanley, which always cut back to the real world when they were over. Despite that, pretty much every review of the last two episodes at least mentioned in passing the "plot hole" created by some of those characters surviving the season. Then again, a lot of critics gave up on the series after Coven, and the recaps for the fourth season on IGN admitted as much, making it very clear there wouldn't be very much analysis going on in the reviews.
  • The description for the show on Netflix once showed an image of Dragon Tales instead of the actual show in question.
• On an episode of America's Next Top Model where the girls go to Africa, one of the girls see gazelles, and she says "Those killed Mufasa!", in reference to The Lion King. She is wrong because Mufasa was killed during a wildebeest stampede, while gazelles could be seen during the "Circle of Life" sequence earlier on.
• Even some online episode guides get mixed up about Angel's first two episodes, "City of" and "Lonely Hearts", listing them as "City of Lonely Hearts, Part One" and "City of Lonely Hearts, Part Two". For the record, "City of" is a contraction of L.A.'s common nickname (because his name is Angel, get it?) and has nothing to do with the following episode title, "Lonely Hearts".
  • A similar case occurs with the Spanish titles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The final episodes of the season six, "Two to go" and "Grave", were mixed in "Dos para la tumba", parts 1 & 2 ("Two for the grave"). ^note It's worth noting that unlike the Angel example, these two episodes were a two-parter, and the accidentally combined titles make sense in context.
• An article in The Straits Times about the 2012 Fall television lineup mentions Arrow, giving the name of the main character as "Oliver Green". It's actually "Oliver Queen", whose superhero identity is the Green Arrow.
• Babylon 5:
  • During the first re-run airing of the show on TNT, the promo for Season 2 Episode 1 featured a voiceover saying that "Sherman's In Charge!" (the incoming character's name is "Sheridan"). (Presumably whoever wrote or delivered the voice-over got their US Civil War-era Union generals mixed up.)
  • Based on the DVD slipcover descriptions for season 1, Netflix apparently thinks Babylon 5 is a starship, not a space station. A similar error happened on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine DVDs.
  • A voiceover for UK's Channel 4 described the plot of the episode "Infection" as "A virus spreads through the ship." Two small problems - no virus and no ship. (It was actually about an ancient McGuffin that turns one person into a rubber suit monster that menaces Babylon 5, which, again, is a space station, not a ship.)
  • It was common during the first season for a TV guide or write-up ad person to refer to "Captain Sinclair". The problem? Sinclair was a Commander. It also was fairly frequent for critics to mistakenly believe that Captain Sheridan had been there from the beginning, merely "recast" to be played by Bruce Boxleitner.
• Many people believe that the song "I Love You" is the theme song to Barney & Friends. It's not the opening theme, but rather the show's Wrap-Up Song played at the end of every episode.
• The Sun accused The BBC of anti-Conservative bias (they support the Conservative Party^note although they have supported the Labour Party at times) in a children's show, specifically The Basil Brush Show. An episode involved a character named Dave cheating in an attempt to win a school election and using a blue rosette (blue being the Conservative Party's colour). This was viewed as an attack on the Conservative leader, David Cameron. They would have had a good argument - if not for the fact that the episode was a repeat (a fact mentioned by the paper's own TV guide) and their screenshot proves its age by showing the character in question as a child. Whether they were saying it was originally filmed as a Take That! at Mr. Cameron or just that the Beeb took advantage of the coincidence isn't certain.
• Something somewhere on the net said that Richard Hatch played Lee Adama in the 70s Battlestar Galactica series. BUZZ! In the original series, the character had no name other than Apollo. Only in the re-imagined series is his name Lee Adama with the callsign Apollo.
  • A rather unusual situation developed in the early days of the re-imagined Galactica. Some of the fans of the original series were so mad about the remake, that they turned their entire boards' attention to complaining. This began a cycle of, every episode, a single individual who'd watched the show just to bash it posting a brief summary of the events, and the various people who hadn't watched the show complaining about "plot holes" that didn't exist in the original material. Examples included: people not realizing Baltar was crazy even though he "frequently masturbated in public" (this was based on a single incident in which Starbuck walked in on him in his lab), Starbuck being able to make it back to Caprica in a single jump at the end of season 1 (technically true, but she did it using Cylon technology for the exact reason that it would allow for a bigger jump), and the Colonials just stopping on a random planet and starting a new colony with the Cylons still chasing them (in-series it was made clear that the Cylons could not detect them while they were on that planet due to a local nebula, or at least, it took them quite a while to do so).
  • Several articles written about the series seemed to think that Starbuck was a lesbian. The character has a large gay following, and almost any fanfic featuring her will have her going after a woman, but within the boundaries of the show itself, she was shown as exclusively heterosexual; plenty of lovers, all of them men.
  • The sheer amount of confusion between Sharon "Boomer" Valerii and Sharon "Athena" Agathon could almost be the subject of a book all on its own. Much of the confusion stems from the belief of casual viewers that they are the same person with split personalities, or some variant on that belief. They are in fact two separate Cylons, both of the Number Eight line, so they look identical and are both played by Grace Park. One of them, Boomer, was a sleeper agent onboard the Galactica who believed she was human until the first season finale. She had issues adjusting to this fact, but eventually sided with her people again, becoming first an anti-villain, then a full-on villain, and then a Jerkass Woobie. Boomer (her callsign, and what the other Cylons kept calling her) was in love with Chief Galen Tyrol prior to her sleeper agent status becoming known and blowing up their relationship. Athena, meanwhile, was another Eight who always knew she was a Cylon and was sent to pose as Boomer and aid Karl "Helo" Agathon after he was trapped on Caprica, in an effort to get him to fall in love with her and thus see if humans and Cylons could procreate together. It turned out they could, but this Sharon eventually sided with the humans, both because she had genuinely fallen for Helo and because she wanted to keep her baby. After proving her loyalty to the humans, she was accepted as a member of the crew but decided to stop using the callsign "Boomer" because she did not see herself as the same person, so she chose "Athena". It doesn't stop casual viewers or bloggers writing about the show from believing that Sharon was once in love with Tyrol and is now married to Helo, or that she has "alternately" used the callsigns "Boomer" and "Athena", or other phrases that imply "Boomer" became "Athena'', when that simply never happened.
• In Better Call Saul, even after Jimmy McGill considered "Saul Goodman" to be running away and a coping method that was terrible, you can still find plenty of articles that will treat Saul as the man's real identity. So there will be lines that completely miss the point like "Saul comes back to himself."
• When MSNBC reported the passing of Ann B. Davis, famous for playing Alice the maid on The Brady Bunch TV series, they goofed by using a photo from the 1995 film version, which featured Henriette Mantel in the role.
• In the Breaking Bad episode "Gliding Over All", Walt makes a deal with Todd's Uncle Jack to kill the 9 men related to Gus's drug operation. During that discussion, Jack says that "Whacking Bin Laden wasn't this complicated." Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011. This episode presumably takes place in 2010, so Bin Laden should still be alive when this episode took place. If it's any consolation, Vince Gilligan admitted this was a mistake.
• Whoever wrote the Dutch and French episode descriptions featured in the collector's edition DVD boxes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer probably only glanced at the English ones. "The Prom" is supposedly about hellhounds that have escaped from Oz's chemistry laboratory. In reality it's about hellhounds who are released by a guy Oz used to have chemistry class with. Big difference.
• On the episode of the podcast Welcome to Halliwell Manor covering the Charmed (1998) episode "Ms. Hellfire", hosts Max and Tina frequently refer to the episode as being a parody of Alias. Even going as far to say that the scene where Prue finds a whole selection of Ms. Hellfire's wigs for undercover work only exists to hammer home the Sydney Bristow comparisons. Small problem; Alias didn't air its first episode 'til September 30, 2001, 20 months after this episode first aired - on January 13, 2000.
• Corner Gas: An episode description: "No one wants Eric on their charades team". This might be because there is no character named Eric. The charades thing refers to Oscar (note: Played by Eric Peterson, so somewhat excusable), and he is only unwanted right at the beginning, until he shows how good he is. Then everyone wants him on their team.
  • Another episode is summarised in the description as "Brent dares Brenda to quit knitting". There's no one called "Brenda" on the show, the character's name is Emma. There's no chance they were confusing the character for the actress, either; Emma was played by Janet Wright.
• In 2013 when the first trailer was released for the science series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, there were some vocal critics upset at the idea of documentary series featuring fantasy elements (in this case, a spaceship), with some suggesting this just isn't done. These critics are clearly not aware that Spacetime Odyssey is an updating/remake of the 1980s series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and that the so-called Spaceship of the Imagination was a core part of that classic series. Not to mention the fact Discovery Channel (among others) have been producing documentary-science fiction hybrids for more than a decade.
• TV Guide seems to enjoy mixing up actors' names and characters' names. One example: calling Joe Mantegna's Criminal Minds character David Rossi "Joe Rossi" in a spoiler article.
• The Guardian published a "beginner's guide" to the CSI franchise, starting with the main characters: Dr Raymond Langston, Detective Mac Taylor... and Lieutenant Horatio Nelson.
  • Ray Langston got this as well from time to time, with people mistaking him for Gil Grissom's replacement. Laurence Fishburne replaced William Petersen as the star, but Langston came in as a CSI 1, with Catherine replacing Grissom as supervisor until Ted Danson's character took over the position.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation got a lot of flak from fundamentalist Christians, because two of its main characters, Marco Del Rossi (season 2-7) and Riley Stravros (8-11), were gay. The show has multiple characters, but for the whole time Marco was on the show, Emma was the main character, and for almost all of Riley's tenure, the main focal characters were Holly J and Clare.
• News articles about the Degrassi franchise itself can fall prone to this on a widespread level. The original Degrassi generation (Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High) is often written of online as a minor footnote in the show's history. The original Degrassi was in fact pretty huge in Canada, winning awards every year during its run, and it was a televised reunion of the original cast (hosted by Jonathan Torrens no less) that sparked the idea for Degrassi: The Next Generation. Very rarely is the extent of the original Degrassi's popularity acknowledged. While relatively understandable, being a long-term effect of Sequel Displacement, in the age of the internet, where the Junior High Wikipedia page is a mile long and describes the extent of the show's impact in great detail, isn't exactly excusable, either.
• This otherwise okay review of Dinosaur Revolution seems to have misinterpreted the show's title as "Bad to the Bone: The Dinosaur Revolution". This probably came from one of the Discovery Channel's press releases, where "Bad to the Bone" was actually the title of the press release itself. Various reviews of the show's theatrical re-release, Dinotasia, also claim that this version is made up of content that was cut from Dinosaur Revolution — in reality, apart from having a couple of seconds of added footage, Dinotasia is in fact a drastically shortened Re-Cut of the original TV show.
• Internet news announcing Dollhouse said it starred Eliza Dushku as "a DNA-altered woman". Er, no. Dolls are normal people who signed a contract with the Dollhouse and got replaceable personalities. This report gives the impression that the show's a Dark Angel clone... if you'll pardon the pun.
  • And now the comic book synopses are talking about a "mind-altering virus". Er, no. It was mind-altering technology that went viral! There is a world of difference!
• Donkey Hodie:
  • A description found on Google and TV guides for the episode "The Lavender Lights" refers to Duck Duck with him/he pronouns, when in the show she's refered to with she/her pronouns.
    • Speaking of TV listings, there's a section found on Cablevision's search feature called "Neighborhood of Make Believe", which features Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood...and Donkey Hodie, which takes place in Someplace Else.
  • The book adaptation of "Pickle Penguin Problem", "In A Pickle!", has two errors:
    • The book claims that Donkey Hodie used her "I, Donkey Hodie..." catchphrase when explaining her plan. In the actual episode, she says "We will get that Pickle Penguin back, or my name isn't Donkey Hodie!".
    • The recurring song is misquoted as "We can't give up because that would be a shame. Going to turn this hard problem into a fun game!", rather than the actual "We don't want to give up because that would be a shame. Gotta turn this hard problem into a fun game!".
  • TV Ontario's transcripts for the show have many mistakes in them:
    • Most episode transcripts spell the part in the theme song where Duck Duck says "Kay kay" as "Ki Ki". In addition, later episode transcripts call Duck Duck "Kay" during the theme song due to her "Kay kay, quack!" line.
    • Several transcripts refer to the characters by the wrong gender. For instance, the transcript of "The Lavender Lights" refers to Donkey Hodie with he/him pronouns during the scene where Donkey has Duck Duck ride on her back.
    • The transcript for "Art Show Today" spells Donkey Hodie's name as "Donkie Hodie" at one point.
    • The transcript for "A Fair Way to Bounce" refers to Harriett Elizabeth Cow as Harriett Elizabeth Pig.
    • The transcript for "Bobski Bounce" calls Bob Dog Rob Dog.
    • The transcript for "Good Dog School" mispells the word "squibbit".
  • For unknown reasons, the closed captioning on the PBS Kids upload of "The Masked Veggies" omitted the parts where Purple Panda sings Jingle Bells and only showed Donkey's dialogue during that scene.
  • The book "Donkey Hodie Helps An Elephant" says that Donkey went into a bird's nest because Bob Dog's ball landed in there in the episode "A Big Favor For Grampy". In the actual episode, she catapults herself on a see-saw to get Gregory to move, but accidentally winds up in the nest.
    • On the subject of that book, Amazon's listing for it classifies it under books about horses, when the main character is a donkey, not a horse.
  • Some tracks on the Here Comes Donkey Hodie album credit the wrong characters who sang the songs. For instance, in the series, "Dancing Under The Golden Rainbow" was sung by Donkey Hodie and Purple Panda, but the album says that Duck Duck and Bob Dog, who don't even appear in said episode the song is from, also sang in the song.
  • A PBS affiliate's description for "Cheesy Con" refered to the area where Donkey got injured as her foot. While this is where she gets injured in the episode proper, the feet of a donkey are refered to as hooves.
  • This article about a special Halloween programming block on Canal Panda says that the channel will air a special episode of Donkey Hodie's European Spanish dub about Halloween. The problem is that although a Halloween special for the show exists, it was not part of said dub, as only 40 segments were dubbed before Canal Panda ceased operations in Spain.
  • PBS lists the episode "Panda's Purple Break" as "Panda's Purple Party".
  • This interview claims Turtle Lou is a new for season 2 character, when he appeared in a few episodes of Season 1.
  • On the day "The Breakfast Bowl; Dancing Dandelions" premiered on TV, the Donkey Hodie social media accounts instead posted a clip from "Speedy Delivery; Ruff Night". This confusion may have stemmed from the fact that it's the second episode in production order of the second season.
  • The description most PBS affiliates provide for "Donkey's Bad Day" claims that Panda also suffers from a bad day in said episode, when it's only Donkey who has the bad day.
    • On the subject of that episode, this article on the educational themes of "Donkey's Bad Day" claims Donkey misplaces a toy in the episode. It's likely whoever wrote it confused it for the episode "Donkey and Panda Cheer Up", which also has a similar plot and a scene where Purple Panda misplaces a toy.
• One commercial for a Brazilian cable TV channel showed clips of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh saying it was a Disney Channel show.
• It's astonishing how many websites, reporting that James Frain will be appearing in Season 7 of Elementary as "Odin Reichenbach", described this original character, who is named after the waterfall in "The Final Problem", as a "classic Sherlock Holmes villain" or similar.
• One of the questions in Nul Points: The Unofficial Eurovision Quiz Book is "Which country won Eurovision in 1982?", with the options of Portugal, Norway, France or Malta. The actual winner that year was (West) Germany.
  • Another question is "Which three countries automatically qualified for the final in 2004, without competing in the semi-final?" Under the rules in use at the time, 14 countries - the Big Four, then-reigning champions Turkey and the next nine best placed countries in 2003 - qualified automatically, with the remaining ten qualifying from the semifinal. Presumably the author thought that, by voting, the remaining 11 automatic qualifiers hadn't actually qualified, despite the organisers calling them automatic qualifiers.
• In a review for Farscape, the reviewer inexplicably claimed that the show was set 500 years in the future. In fact, Farscape is set in the time in which it was made — just in a distant part of the universe.
  • On the back cover for the Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars DVD (at least one version of it) almost every detail is wrong.
    • It claims the evil Scarran Empire has engaged a full scale war against the Peacekeeper Alliance. There is no Peacekeeper Alliance (they're just called the Peacekeepers) and the war was started by a preemptive attack by Scorpius (a member of the Peacekeepers, who are by the way frequent antagonists).
    • It claims their only hope is to reassemble John Crichton; once sucked through a wormhole into the Peacekeeper Galaxy. They don't attempt to reassemble him (only finding out that he has been reassembled after the fact) and there is no Peacekeeper Galaxy (the show being set in the Milky Way).
    • They say Crichton's task is to recreate the invaluable wormhole weapon and flush the entire Peacekeeper race to safety before the last war of an era begins an end to the universe....Yeah, I'm not even sure how to touch that. Crichton was trying to avoid using wormhole weapons, one hadn't been built before so there was nothing to rebuild, no one ever suggested flushing the Peacekeeper race to safety (and how that would be possible is never made clear), there isn't even such a thing as the Peacekeeper race (the Peacekeepers is the name of a military organization; their species is called Sebacean) and there was never any suggestion the war itself would end the universe.
• The Radio Times Choices article for the Frasier episode "Caught in the Act" criticised the writers for inventing a previous marriage for Frasier that had never been mentioned before. Not only was Frasier's marriage to Nanette Gutzman first established in Cheers, but Channel 4 repeated the previous Frasier episode she appeared in ("Don Jaun in Hell") the same week "Caught in the Act" aired!
• For the Friends series finale, newspaper La Presse published an article on the series, complete with a photo of the main characters captioned: "The 7 friends".
• An infamous review of Game of Thrones seemed to believe that Tyrion Lannister was a Tolkien-style dwarf, rather than a human with dwarfism.
  • Another review, or possibly the same review, described "a warrior race with an Elvish-style language", implying that the Dothraki were a race of non-human Elf-like warriors, when in fact they are simply a nomadic tribal race of humans, comparable to a number of nomadic human tribes from our own past, such as Mongolians and Aboriginals. Somehow the mere fact that they spoke a made-up language was enough for the reviewer to dismiss them as yet another race of fanciful creatures.
  • It's not unusual for anti-gay pundits to claim that acceptance of homosexuality will lead to incest, pedophilia, and so on, but one such pundit has cited Game Of Thrones and how Jaime and Cersei's twincest is "celebrated" and "promoted" as a result of the current push for gay rights. Simply checking the show's wiki will tell you that Jaime and Cersei's secret affair is treated as no less than scandalous, to the point that an entire war broke out when rumors leaked that Cersei's children weren't fathered by the late King Robert. Plus, her eldest son Joffrey's insanity is implied to be caused by inbreeding, and Jaime has raped Cersei at least once. Their relationship is not the least bit healthy, much less "celebrated" or "promoted."
  • Many people proclaim that the show - and by extension, the books - is a prime example of Grey-and-Grey Morality. While there are certainly a lot of complex morally grey characters, quite a lot of the villains (Ramsay, for example) lack any redemptive traits, making it more Black-and-Gray Morality than anything else. And there are certainly characters with purely benevolent intentions as well, with the grey coming in when reality interferes.
• It's shocking how many PROFESSIONAL REVIEWERS mistake the second half of Glee's first season as the second season. To be fair, there was a DVD released after the first half, but still. Is it really that hard to fact-check?
  • And this was despite most media bloggers regularly referring to the nine Season 1 episodes after the long break "the back nine" AND the DVD sets released as "Season 1: Road to Sectionals" (minus the last nine episodes and less expensive) and "The Complete First Season."
  • Speaking of Glee, a fluff piece on Dianna Agron mentioned that she plays "ditzy cheerleader Quinn" on the show. Anyone who watches Glee knows that Quinn is a straight-A student and one of the most cunning, manipulative characters on the show. The writer might have mistaken her for fellow Cheerio and actual Dumb Blonde Brittany, though you'd think someone writing an article about an actress would know what she looks like. Or they only saw stills of the show and assumed she was The Ditz just because she's blonde and a cheerleader.
  • A major entertainment magazine did a full special issue (complete with several fold-out, full-size posters) to promote Season 2, where they refer to established Perky Goth Tina as Steampunk. Ironically, in a later season, after going through some emotional turmoil, Tina does embrace steampunk as her new look - which is promptly dropped before the episode even ends.
• Good Omens (2019):
  • Christian group Return To Order started an online petition to get Netflix to cancel the series for "blasphemous" content, which received thousands of signatures. The petition described the premise of the series pretty accurately...except Netflix couldn't cancel it if they wanted to, since the show is exclusive to Amazon Prime. The writers of the petition were apparently under the impression that Netflix is the only streaming service that exists. Both Netflix and Amazon had some fun with this on Twitter; the official UK Netflix Twitter account sarcastically announced they'd cancel the show, while Amazon offered to cancel Stranger Things in exchange.
  • Return to Order also claimed the show tries to make Satanism look acceptable. The only time Satanism is shown is with the Chattering Order of St. Beryl at the beginning. In fact, compared to the book, the show does considerably less to make the Satanic nuns seem normal.
  • Also, they demanded that no more episodes of the show be made. Which was fine, since the show was only a six-episode miniseries at the time.
• Fans of The Good Place know that Tahani Al-Jamil has an inferiority complex as a result of being overshadowed by her more successful sister Kamilah. This went meta for her actress Jameela Jamil when at the 2019 Golden Globes, E! News misidentified her in an on-screen graphic as Kamilah Al-Jamil. Jameela found it hilarious, and afterward E! even sent her a fancy bag monogrammed with her real initials and a note saying "Dear Jameela, we forked up - sorry!"
• There is a biography of Robin Williams by Andy Dougan. In the chapter about Mork's first appearance on Happy Days, Dougan describes the episode... or so he thinks. What he actually describes is the fake flashback created for the first Mork & Mindy episode to tie it to its parent series. Mind you, this was long before the actual episode could be seen by anyone by simply searching YouTube... but you'd think a biographer would do the research.
• A minor example occasionally still pops up in the synopsis of the season 1 Highlander episode "Bad Day in Building A". The synopsis usually says the characters went to the courthouse to take care of Richie's parking tickets, but they were all Tessa's tickets. A gag was even made of her getting one or two more on her car due to where it was parked outside the courthouse during the episode.
• iCarly actresses Miranda Cosgrove and Jennette McCurdy has been repeatedly described as Disney stars.
  • Miranda's character role is often called iCarly instead of Carly Shay.
• In Living Color!: The recurring sketch "Men on Film" featured a pair of Camp Gay men reviewing movies and tv shows of the day. It was a running gag that any time the show or film had a female lead, they'd say in unison, "Hated it." However, media with strong female leads are almost always a hit with gay men, and one of the shows the critics hated was The Golden Girls, which has a strong queer following to this day.
• Inai Inai Baa!:
  • On the 20th anniversary DVD, what's labeled as Kana-chan's first appearance is actually from the first time she gained her second costume and the first time that the puppet character Kuu appeared. This could have been intentional on NHK's part, as the actual first episode had tons of elements considered Early-Installment Weirdness, such as Kana-chan's poodle outfit and a different puppet called Penta being there instead of Kuu.
  • Many listings for pre-2003 merchandise of Inai Inai Baa! on sites like Mercari call Kuu, the puppet character at the time, U-Tan. Justified, as the show wasn't popular as it was before U-Tan debuted, and some people may have trouble identifying the character. One listing even called Kuu Jean Jean, a character who mainly appears in the Wan Wan Wonderland live shows.
• A South China Morning Post article criticized the casting of Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing in Iron Fist as another example of half-Asian actors getting cast in fully Asian roles, even though the character is mixed-race in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in the comics.^note Henwick is of English and Chinese descent while Wing has an American father and a Japanese mother. What's even more appalling is that the article's writer even calls Wing a Japanese character despite having a very English sounding last name.
• Kamen Rider:
  • An article about imitating cartoons calls Kamen Rider one, when it's actually a live-action show featuring People in Rubber Suits.
  • The December 2021 issue of Televi-Kun (published in end-October 2021), while covering Kamen Rider Revice features Julio's Wolf Vistamp as a "Jackal" Vistamp unique to Evil that he uses for his Jackal Genome, despite the Jackal Vistamp he uses actually being originally Revice's. Its description even describes the Jackal as a "wolf-like creature", for added irony.
• Just goes to show that even a show's own materials can do this: when Law & Order: Special Victims Unit got picked up by the USA Network, the USA website wrote full-on episode guides... sometimes with stuff that never happened in the episode. For instance, the recap for the episode "Taken" (where Olivia's mom dies in a fall down the stairs) had a description based on an unwritten plotline — namely, Olivia finds out her mom never was raped and told the story to cover up a fling with her college professor, who Olivia meets. There's a reason the folks at Television Without Pity called them "the Crack Monkeys."
• Some people, critics and articles really have no idea that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is based only on the Appendices from the Lord of The Rings because Tolkien State gave them no rights to the Silmarillion. While is only fair to critic and question the liberties the showrunners took from the lore, too many of them don't know this fact and jump on the "Why they don't just follow what happens in the Silmarillion and create their own it's fanfiction" bandwagon. And if they do KNOW, they spread false narrative about the show.
  • About the controversial Sauron/Galadriel pairing, people seem to get some things confused here too. Of course that Galadriel and Sauron never had this type of interactions, but people absolutely believe that the show turned JRR Tolkien's works into a telenovela. Apparently, Tolkien was never a romantic at heart, and was never interested in romance, only on writing friendships and inventing languages, never mind he wrote the story of Luthien and Beren and based it on himself and his wife, Edith.
  • Because of the movies, some critics on Youtube have this misconception that the Elves of the Second Age should already be this wise and dignified creatures, when in canon they were anything but that in the Second Age. The show certainly took a lot of things wrong about them, but them being proud and flawed is not a mistake.
  • In one of his videos, Shadiversity says that the Dwarves shown in the show, have no proper reason to wield axes, since they work with stone and metal, and not wood, and should be caring hammers, except the Dwarves of the source material did cut a great deal of lumber. They needed it to fuel their furnaces for melting the metals. The Ents were specifically created to protect the trees from the Dwarves. In Silmarillion, Yavanna and Aule ever argue over this.
  • After a report of a casting call for the series that stated the actors must be "comfortable with nudity", multiple articles breathlessly reported that the new series would be a sexed-up semi-porn similar to Game of Thrones. In fact, there were calls to boycott the series and numerous commentaries on the state of TV today that felt it had to inject sex into everything. In the end, the series had no sex scenes at all, and the only nudity involved an old man who fell from the sky and simply had not acquired clothing yet, but did shortly after. Even in that case there was nothing graphic.
• A Newsweek 2010 article listing the top 10 cultural predictions of 2010. Number 4 predicted that the characters of Lost, when inevitably facing rescue from the island in the final episode, will choose to stay instead. This is problematic since many have chosen to stay years before the finale, and a handful that left the island at the end of season 4 had to return.
  • Most Lost news articles sound like they were written in 2005. Outdated phrases like "deserted island" (which is outdated as soon as Rousseau and the Others are revealed in season 1) and "rescue" (see above) are common, but more irritating is the habit of mentioning "unsolved mysteries" that were answered years ago (as of the conclusion, some aren't, but they aren't the ones that are always brought up) to try and paint the show as needlessly complicated.
    • A baffling one is people still complaining about the polar bears, whose origin was answered early in season 3 and referenced again in season 6.
  • JJ Abrams stopped working on the show around the ninth episode. He came back to co-write the third season premiere, but has done nothing on the show since and only has a producer credit because he created the show. He's nowhere to be seen in production meetings and may not even have watched Lost. And yet every other article attributes everything on the show to him, despite how visible the people really in charge of the show are.
    • One comic basically said that the fifth season provided no answers until Abrams (busy with Fringe and movie projects) called up Jeffrey Lieber (the writer of the original script-which only has the setting of a island in common, and who has never done any work on the show despite a inexplicable 60% creator credit that even he doesn't believe he deserves) to tell him to explain DHARMA.
    • At least the folks at Cracked realized this when they included Abrams on their list of pop culture visionaries who get too much credit.
    • Bryan Fuller faces a similar problem with Dead Like Me, having stopped work on the series early in the first season. The real creative forces behind the later stuff are Stephan Godchaux and John Masius, but unfortunately if fans know them at all it's because the one place their names are front and center are the writing credits for the much-reviled TV movie.
• Russell T Davies was fond of celebrating the "Christmasness" of Doctor Who's Christmas Specials, pointing out the past BBC "Christmas Specials" had had nothing to do with Christmas. The example he always quoted was an episode of Lovejoy set in Prague. Someone finally pointed out that the episode saw the characters wrapping up presents for the children's ward of the local hospital and ended with Lovejoy and sidekick Tinker both turning up at the ward dressed as Father Christmas.
• When Syfy picked up Merlin, the character descriptions on their website seemed to bear no relation to the show: "If there's one thing Gwen might wish for, it's that she could be just a little bit prettier. With her wonky teeth, uncooperative hair and glasses, not even the most charitable person could call her beautiful." Glasses in Camelot, sure.
  • A description that also ignores the fact that Angel Coulby is adorable.
  • Another article stated that Anthony Head was the voice of the Dragon. In reality, Head played King Uther (until season 4) and the Dragon is voiced by John Hurt.
• The Netflix description for the Mighty Med episode "It's a Matter of Principal": "Suspicion runs rampant at school: Jordan is certain his new history teacher is really Captain Atomic and Stefanie thinks Skylar has a fake identity." There's just one problem: Jordan is a girl.
• At one point in time, the English description for Miitsuketa! on Netflix was the one for Resident Evil.
• Sitcomsonline.com has an entry for the The Munsters Reboot The Munsters Today, but the image for the page is from the the 1990's TV film Here Come the Munsters.
• The Muppets:
  • Overlapping with films, the image from Muppets Most Wanted that achieved Memetic Mutation in late 2016 had people believe Constantine is just "evil Kermit". Kermit addressed this on his Twitter.
  • The fact Kermit and Miss Piggy have split up in the set-up to 2015's The Muppets led to many comentators (and at least one angry petition) referring to them as being "divorced". The official position on how "real" the marriage in The Muppets Take Manhattan was has always been somewhere between Shrug of God and "Piggy says it was, but she's kidding herself", and the pre-publicity for the series fell firmly on the second side, with the word "divorce" never mentioned. The "fact" of the divorce was even one of the "hidden truths" in a The Unbelievable Truth lecture on puppets in 2021.
  • How to be a Complete Muppet was an official "fact file" book for Muppets Tonight that didn't know Bobo had a name, consistently referring to him as "The Bear".
• The 5 USA description of the Murder, She Wrote episode "The Days Dwindle Down" reads "Jessica discovers a link between a parolee who claims to be innocent of a 30-year-old murder and a movie he was in", apparently missing that the clips from the 1949 movie Strange Bargain were actual flashbacks in-universe.
• Mystery Diagnosis: One of the episodes, "The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Eating," when Conor Heybach is diagnosed with Prader-Willi Syndrome, even though he went through is therapy which is one of the treatments, the narrator says that in addition to no cure, also incorrectly says that there is no treatment.
• In the NCIS episode "Tribes", Gibbs and Ziva meet the resident imam in his mosque, and Ziva even mentions being aware of the importance of taking sensitivities into account, yet both they and the approaching imam can be heard wearing shoes.
• One issue of TV Week incorrectly claims Mrs Mangel from Neighbours died in an episode aired in 1988. In fact, she didn't actually die in said episode; she simply left Ramsay Street.
• A review of the pilot episode of The New Normal in Chicago's Redeye magazine not only refers to Nana as Goldie's mother (she's her grandmother), it also states that Gwyneth Paltrow has a cameo as a potential surrogate for Bryan and David's baby - she's actually the egg donor. This is significant, since the entire point of her cameo is to show Bryan and David freaking out over the fact that their baby might look like Gwyneth Paltrow, which wouldn't be the case if she was just the surrogate.
• The website TV Cream claims that Roy Kinnear plays a befuddled barber in No Appointment Necessary (1977); in reality, his character, Alf Butler, is a scheming greengrocer who merely owns a salon.
• The official website of PBS Kids calls the Odd Squad episode "Dance Like Nobody's Watching" "Dance Like Nobody Is Watching". TV listing site TitanTV makes the same mistake.
  • PBS Kids's official website has also made the mistake of stating that Odd Squad has a TV-Y7 rating; it has stayed at a TV-Y rating on television airings since its premiere in 2014.
  • Many articles have incorrectly listed Agent Olive and Agent Otto as the main characters throughout the entirety of the series. While they are two of the main characters in Season 1, the show goes through different protagonists each season, and they are absent in Seasons 2 and 3, being replaced by Otis and Olympia, and Omar, Opal, Oswald and Orla, respectively.
  • TV Guide and some PBS stations' synopses list the Season 3 episode "Portalandia" as being the Odd Squad Mobile Unit's first case. However, in the episode, Agent Opal states that the first case the group solved was in Berlin, not in Japan.
  • Every single closed-captioning error that PBS Kids's video app has ever made — and they've made a lot. Incidents can range from the absurd (names of gadgets like the Un-Fireplace-inator spelled incorrectly) to the completely insane (captioning what Jamie Jam says when about to attack one of the Sister Sallies in "Villain Networking" as her saying "damn" instead of "jam").
  • This article has a couple errors in regards to the show, especially for being published in 2019.
    • It talks about Precinct 13579 having tube operators that are all redheads, stating a possible theory that the reasoning behind this is due to, of all things, segregation. Not only does that go against the show's modus operandi of equality, but the reasoning was already explained in "Fistful of Fruit Juice", which showed Big Red, a citizen of Toronto with red hair who was a friend of Oprah and of Odd Squad, offering to dig up a new tube system for the precinct, which is why every tube operator since then has had red hair to some degree.
    • The same article also mentions that the year 1983 is referenced a lot. While it is significant, being the year that Oprah was promoted to the Management department and became an Odd Squad Director, and while it was the central focus of Odd Squad: World Turned Odd, it's not mentioned enough to be considered an Arc Number of any kind.
    • Another thing worthy of mention is #5, which states that there is a review at the end of every episode. This isn't necessarily true — there aren't recaps of the mathematical Aesops at the end of each episode, but there are Training Videos, which incorporate whatever mathematical aesop was in the episode that played beforehand.
  • This article mentions the show being a successor to, of all things, The Adventures of Pete & Pete (mistakenly referred to as "The Adventures of Pete Pete"), solely on the grounds that it's educational and has humor that can appeal to both kids and adults. While The Adventures of Pete & Pete was well-received and does have humor that resonates with people of all ages, it's not educational like Odd Squad is.
  • An article from USA Today incorrectly refers to the Season 2 finale episodes "Who is Agent Otis?" and "Odds and Ends" under the latter moniker as a new movie. This is false advertising on the end of PBS Kids — the finale isn't a full-length movie in the same vein as Odd Squad: The Movie and Odd Squad: World Turned Odd; it's a two-parter finale.
• This article says that Lana Parrilla plays the "Snow Queen" on ABC's Once Upon a Time. Parrilla actually plays Regina, who is sometimes called the Evil Queen, from the tale of "Snow White". The show does feature the actual Snow Queen in season 4, but she's played by Elizabeth Mitchell.
• This article about the spin-off Once Upon a Time in Wonderland talks about the Red Queen being a "playing card" (when everyone knows it's a chesspiece) and appears to say that she is named Iracebeth in the original novel, which is of course a name from Tim Burton's film adaptation. Through the Looking Glass doesn't give the Red Queen a name, and in Once she's named Anastasia.
• The Netflix description for Peep Show says "An Irish pub run by unapologetic narcissists. Get ready for infinite varieties of hilariously offensive behaviour". Almost none of this is correct^note Jez is an unapologetic narcissist. It appears to be thinking of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia which is a completely unrelated show.
• MTV Brazil had the show Os Piores Clipes do Mundo ("the worst music videos in the world"), which during the run of host Marcos Mion had him doing an Accentuate the Negative analysis of a video. Celebrity Resemblance was a running gag, such as in Michael Jackson's "Beat It" saying the gang leaders are Toninho Cerezo, a football player with a similar Porn Stache... and "John Connor from Terminator", when the resemblance to Michael Biehn means it's actually John's father Kyle Reese.
• To those who are not Toku fans but know Power Rangers, they will immediately point out that any non-Super Sentai tokusatsu hero is a "Power Ranger".
  • And even among the small pool of people who've heard about the Super Sentai, it's not uncommon to hear people talking about the "Super Sentai genre", including series like Garo and Kamen Rider in it, in place of "Tokusatsu". "Super Sentai" is the name of only one show, even though the cast is always changing from season to season.
  • Even pre-Zyuranger Sentai gets labeled as Power Rangers; though at least those are different parts of the same franchise. This most often seems to apply to Kousoku Sentai Turboranger, which might be because there is such a thing as Power Rangers Turbo.
  • During the murder trial of Skylar Deleon, much was made in the news of him having been a "star" of Power Rangers, thus leading many to believe he actually played one of the Rangers. In actuality, he only claimed to have been a guest star in an episode, but even that is false, when the casting sheets for said episode were discovered. However, it got taken a step further when some people misinterpreted the misinterpretation of the facts and thought that Austin St. John or Jason David Frank were the ones being accused.
  • Taken to ridiculous levels with Engine-Oh G12. A couple sites saw this clip from Engine Sentai Go-onger and thought it was a Transformers-ripoff series named "Engine-Oh G12". It took a lot of fan correction to get them to finally change their coverage. Not to mention the amount of comments talking about a Power Rangers ripoff — one commenter says it wouldn't ever fly in America. Except one year later...
  • And even crazier is when the entire series is mentioned in an encyclopedia of TV shows. Needless to say, there are a ton of mistakes: Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue were both omitted, the names of the characters, actors, and even an entire season were changed, plots were wrong, and Time Force was treated as something based on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (when, in fact, it wasn't). You can see the entire laundry list of mistakes here.
  • One continuity announcer for Channel 5 in the UK: "It's time for your Magazord wake-up call."
    • And when Megaforce premiered, it took 4 episodes for them to list the show by its title in the TV guide, rather than by individual episode title.
  • An announcer on coverage of the 2013 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade referred to the Super Megaforce Rangers by the names of the Samurai Rangers. For example, the pink ranger was referred to as Mia instead of Emma. Also, they referred to the gold ranger as a tech guy. This matches Samurai, but Super Megaforce has a silver ranger instead.
    • Then, the next year, when they introduce the brand new Red Ranger balloon, they end up calling Power Rangers "Power Ranjoes".
  • The German DVD box sets are full of errors, such as:
    • Kim and Billy's surnames being misspelled.
    • Kat's bio having Kim's name attached.
    • Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger being called "Super Sentai Zyuranger".
    • The Turbo set seems to think that it was the first series to be a complete revamp, when actually it was Zeo.
  • This Youtube video from Top 10 Nerd called "Top 10 Alternate Versions of the Power Rangers". Dubious title aside, the actual contents of the video are questionable at best. The two worst examples being Mystic Force being referred to as Mystic Warriors, and the presenter giving a detailed plot summary of Power Rangers Wild Prime, a series which does not exist. They confused a fanfic adaptation of Zyuohger with an actual show.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • It's not uncommon for some viewers of classic to believe that Steve Martin was one of the classic SNL cast members, due to his many appearances as host during the initial five years (and after). However, there was a radio broadcast where the DJ's discussed the funniest SNL cast members, not hosts, and specifically mentioned Martin. In fact, you can find many articles that discuss early SNL and name Steve Martin among those "future stars" whose career was launched by SNL, which is wrong on at least two levels.
  • A sketch from 1991, "Partridge Family vs. The Brady Bunch", seemed to confuse Mushmouth from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids with Dumb Donald from the same series: Specifically, the character is referred to as Mushmouth and is The Unintelligible like him, but he looks like Dumb Donald. Possibly justified for Rule of Funny - Mushmouth's gimmick suits the punchline, but the audience would be more apt to recognize Dumb Donald by appearance.
  • Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song" lists people with real and fictional ties to Judaism. However, in the original iteration of the song, Sandler mistakenly understated Harrison Ford's Jewish background, describing him as "one-quarter Jewish, not too shabby". Ford is actually half-Jewish, from his mother's side, something he personally corrected Sandler about himself. It helps that Sandler updates the song from time to time.
  • When Mike Myers hosted SNL in 1997, he talked about how exciting it was to be a former castmember coming back as a host, saying "I thought I’d never host. Nah. Then I thought, 'Wait. A lot of former cast members have come back to host. Chevy. Dan. Bill Murray. And now: me!'". However, Dan Aykroyd had been the only one of those three former castmembers that hadn't hosted SNL at the time, and wouldn't do so till 2003.
• In the Seinfeld episode "The Contest", Jerry talks about watching Tiny Toon Adventures on Nickelodeon. However, the show didn't air on Nick at the time, instead being broadcast on FOX Kids. Nickelodeon did air Looney Tunes, the show Tiny Toons was a Spin-Off of, at the time, so it's likely that the writers confused the two shows. In addition, Jerry sings "The Wheels On The Bus" when watching it, meaning the writers probably also mistook it for a Preschool Show.
• Two words. "Veggie. Monster". Oh, sweet mother of Jim Henson, "Veggie Monster". Basically, Sesame Street did a song informing Cookie Monster and the viewers that cookies are OK to eat, but that it's important to balance your diet. This wasn't the first time this had happened, or the second, and Cookie Monster has continued to live up to his name after the fact - but apparently, some news station or panicky Internet user latched onto it, and the rest is history
  • They even parodied it on the actual show
  • Occasionally, some shows (notably, Robot Chicken) will still refer to Mr. Snuffleupagus as Big Bird's imaginary friend, despite the fact that it's been revealed that Snuffy is real and has frequently interacted with the main cast since 1985.
  • One of the saddest moments in TV history is when Big Bird realizes what death is when the other adult cast members explain why Mr. Hooper can't come back. However, it's remembered as being a long, sad, humorless tribute episode, when in fact, the episode in question was very much a typical episode, only turning sad once the remembrance skit began.
  • Some Japanese fans of the show will confuse Teena for Abby and vice versa, being that the latter is not well-known in Japan because they look similar. For instance, sellers of Sesame Street merchandise in Japan have tended to label Abby Cadabby plush dolls as being those of Teena.
  • While Veggie Monster is one of the more prevalent widely spread misconceptions, one of the more infamous ones is regarding Kami, a Muppet introduced in the South African version of the show that happens to have gotten HIV as a baby...unfortunately media at the time thought she was made for the American version, leading to many conservative politicians lobbying against the show for "including homosexual propaganda to children". Thankfully the media circus calmed down quickly and, contrary to the threats, PBS's funding remained fine.
  • When the series was about to gain corporate sponsorship in 1998, consumer advocate Ralph Nader urged parents to protest the sponsorship while claiming the show was "exploiting impressionable children". What he didn't know is that the sponsor promos on children's programming on PBS usually don't promote the product itself, instead promoting values of some sort. For example, the three Post Alpha-Bits sponsorship promos made for Arthur, instead of promoting the cereal, promote good things that the alphabet does. Also, a CNN article that mentions the aforementioned incident makes it sound like the corporate sponsorship would be replacing the fake sponsorship by letters and numbers, but that "sponsorship" would continue until 2015.
• Shaun Micallef has done this intentionally with several of his own shows' episode descriptions, either on DVD releases or in TV guides. The first series of the sketch show The Micallef Program used nonsensical and humorous plot synopses based on The Dick Van Dyke Show Likewise, Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell is a satirical news programme with comedy sketches, but in the 2018 series, the episode descriptions were based on I Dream of Jeannie, such as "Roger finally discovers the truth about Jeannie, steals and takes control of the bottle without Tony's permission. He gets a 25 cent refund on it in Adelaide."
• The Netflix summary for season one of Stargate Atlantis says that the characters are "on an alien-formed base located in Antarctica, wherein lies the lost civilization of Atlantis. What's more, they've also discovered a parallel world of sorts in a galaxy known as Pegasus." Which is very untrue, as demonstrated by the first episode. Antarctica only contains an Ancient outpost (which probably shows up more in SG-1 anyway), and the characters go through the Stargate in Colorado to get to the lost city of Atlantis. Furthermore, Atlantis is in the Pegasus galaxy, which isn't any sort of parallel world, and not one episode in the first season deals with parallel universes at all.
  • The original TV Guide news when the show was in development said they discovered "a new universe".
• Stargate SG-1 had infamously bad descriptions and summaries on their season DVD box sets, at least up until the Season Seven release. These (official) summaries on their (licensed) DVDs get the military classifications of equipment incorrect, misrepresent the plots of the story and even describe the show as taking place on a ship which is crewed by the primary cast. These instances did not relate to misspelling the alien names for weapons or confusing individual ship-based episodes with the entire series, but included misnaming the F-303 fighter and describing a Bottle Episode which took place entirely within a mountain base as threatening "the ship."
  • The summaries in French also constantly refer to "the crew of the SG-1", and a summary for the original movie describes the Stargate as sending people to other dimensions (it's actually other planets).
  • All 10 seasons were sold together in a box featuring a picture of the Stargate... with only eight chevrons.
  • Another described SG-1 as exclusively a "rescue team", and refer to it as the longest running sci-fi show ever. Though at the time the box set was produced, it was the longest running American sci-fi show, others have run much longer.
  • Cracked called Daniel Jackson an absolutely terrible archaeologist for destroying artifacts of ancient civilizations. They apparently missed the part where A) many of those civilizations are still active and want to kill him and B) Daniel was regularly the person trying to prevent the destruction of the information and/or artifacts and advocating for learning more about the cultures than whether or not they were hostile or had useful goodies.
• Still Standing: In the episode "Still Bill's Dad": Bill tries to back out of a bow hunting trip with his father by telling him that he ordered a Professional Wrestling Pay-Per-View called WCW Slugfest. There are two things wrong with this: 1) The episode aired in 2004, WCW closed in 2001. And 2) WCW never had a PPV called Slugfest.
• In the premiere episode of the Nickelodeon reality series The Substitute, when The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie was mentioned, they showed what appeared to be a poster for a Pooh's Adventures take on the film instead of the original poster.
• Netflix has a "Characters" tab that lists separate descriptions for shows talking about a character from said show. Their character tab for Strange Hill High states that Becky Butters goes on adventures with her friends Mitchell and Tanner. Her friends are Mitchell (whose last name is Tanner) and Templeton.
• The Sky One continuity announcer, introducing the Supergirl episode "American Dreamer", said "Supergirl is pretending to be a journalist called Kara so she can clear her name". "Pretending" isn't exactly the right word; Supergirl is a journalist called Kara Danvers in her civilian identity, she's had that identity for many years before the episode in quesiton, and her Kryptonian given name is Kara as well.
• It's not uncommon for a Supernatural episode description in the news to refer to the Monster of the Week as a "demon". Demons are only one specific type of creature in Supernatural: they appear as black smoke when bodiless and they possess people, manifesting black eyes (occasionally red, white or yellow) when provoked. Monsters in general ≠ demons, unlike in, say, Buffy and Angel, where there are many different species of demons and most monsters fall into that category.
  • The Supernatural Wiki had episode 8 of Season Seven listed as "Time For A Wedding", under an admin's pet theory that the title "Season 7, Time for a Wedding!" was a typo in the CW press release. This is despite the fact that the title appears onscreen in the episode itself after the funny wedding cake animation is over, confirming it as the correct title. Attempts to point out the mistake were met with hostility before it was finally fixed.
• The AV Club recaps of The Terror have an odd tendency early on to refer to James Fitzjames as Sir James, and at least once describe him as "dour". Not only does Fitzjames spend a lot of his early screentime making (somewhat painful) jokes and complaining about Crozier being dour, he's not knighted- and couldn't be, as he's illegitimate.
  • A few reviews have referred to the creature in the series as a Wendigo. The creature is called Tuunbaq and is an original creation of the novel that the show is based on, having little in common with the folkloric Wendigo other than being a monster in a far north region.
• In-universe example in That '70s Show when Jackie wanted to go to a Led Zeppelin concert, saying that she thinks "Led is hot."
• After Top Gear (UK) gave a horrible beating to an Italian car, the CEO of the company that made it demanded that the company pull all advertisement on the "channel that Top Gear is on" in retaliation. Top Gear airs on the advertisement-free BBC.
• A voice ad on BBC after a program shown before Torchwood: Children of Earth said, "Coming up next, it's Captain Jack versus the Children of Earth". Um, no. The antagonists are the 456, and the crux of the season is the fate of Earth's children.
• TV total had a special episode where Stefan Raab and Elton played tennis with two former professionals. Elton had been part of the show for several years at that point, but that didn't prevent a TV guide from announcing that Elton John would be participating in the match, complete with a stock image of the latter. Elton was given his nickname because he resembles Elton John, but only vaguely, so they must have simply thought there was no other Elton besides Elton John, even though it's an actual given name and surname.
• Whenever Michael Brea (the guy who infamously killed his mother with a sword) is mentioned in news articles, it mentions that he was an actor on Ugly Betty. In reality, he was an extra in a single scene. They likely do this because it's juicier if he played an actual named character with lines, or better yet, a main cast member.
• Happens a lot to the Ultra Series, particularly in English media; likely due to the difficulty of finding non-Japanese information on the franchise:
  • The most common one you'll see anywhere you read about the franchise is to call any and all entries just Ultraman, under the assumption that they are the same as the original 1966 series. In reality, Ultraman only ran from 1966-1967 for 39 episodes, and the long-running show people always talk about is actually a franchise consisting of numerous sequels, spinoffs, and remakes of the original series. It's common for people to show pictures of heroes or monsters from other Ultra Series and talk about them as if they were from the original show (ie: saying just "Ultraman" when they should be saying "Ultraman ___" or "Ultra ___"), even though it would be like saying Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation are the same show or that Torchwood is a season of Doctor Who. It even happens on This Very Wiki.
  • One newspaper article covering the 50th anniversary of the franchise in 2016 mistakenly stated that Ultraman came to Earth after his home planet was destroyed (adding that this was inspired Superman). The problem is that, unlike Krypton, the Land of Light in Nebula M78 has never been destroyed; Ultras still regularly come from and go to their homeworld, and it's even been shown on-screen several times.
  • This article discussing Ultra Series creator Eiji Tsuburaya credits him as the mind behind Ultraman, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and Gamera. He was most certainly involved with the creation of all except Gamera. Tsuburaya never worked with Daiei on any Gamera movies, though a number of people on his Toho SFX team did.
  • Ultra Q: A number of English-language sources will say that this sci-fi horror series debuted in 1965. It was Ultraman's predecessor, so it had to come out before 1966, as that would make sense, right? Well actually, Ultra Q debuted in January 2, 1966, with Ultraman coming on about July 17 of the same year. Due to the way Japanese TV schedules work, all 28 episodes of Ultra Q were aired in the span of 28 weeks (although the last one was delayed to December), with Ultraman starting two weeks after Ultra Q's 27th episode (with the week in-between showing a "pilot" stage show called The Birth of Ultraman).
• One newspaper called Colin Mochrie the host of the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. In one of the episodes of the US series, host Drew Carey brought in a copy of the newspaper and read the section of the article that made the glaring mistake.
  • In an American game of "Press Conference", Colin was Batman announcing he's out of the closet. Brad Sherwood, who was playing a reporter, tried to clue him in on his identity by saying "I Marvel at everything you have been doing up until this point." Drew pointed out afterwards that Batman belongs to DC Comics, not Marvel.
  • Wayne Brady does a number of impressions, including a passable Cartman from South Park. The problem is that he often does this impression while singing an off-key version of the first two lines of the refrain from "Blame Canada," which was the song led by Kyle's mom, Sheila Broflovski, who is Cartman's nemesis. Cartman's iconic song from the movie is actually "Kyle's Mom Is A Bitch"—obviously they wouldn't be able to get that past the primetime censors. Chances are Wayne chose "Blame Canada" because it was the most well known song from the movie, due to controversy over being nominated for the Academy Awards that year, and because it's rather difficult to mistake the lyrics for those of any other song.
• At Paraguayan singer-impersonating talent show Yo me llamo, a contestant performed the song "Jueves" as La oreja de Van Gogh's frontwoman Amaia Montero. Who actually had exited the band and been replaced by Leire Martínez long before "Jueves" was released.
• ITV managed to do this with one of their own shows: A continuity announcer introduced the drama Quiz (about a cheating scandal on the British version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - a contestant won the top prize with help from a person in the audience coughing when the right answer was read out) said that one of the stars was Martin Sheen. The actual actor in the show - Michael Sheen - changed his name on Twitter before calling ITV out on their error.
• The description for the Big Time Rush episode "Big Time Rescue was laden with errors: "Kendall and Logan volunteer at a dog shelter and end up adopting 12 dogs, but a sneaky heath inspector is on their case. Meanwhile, Carlos and Jennifer’s puppy love is sickening and it’s up to James and the other Jennifers to rescue them." First of all, Kendall was the one who tried to help Carlos out of his Jennifer problem, while James was involved in the dog shelter plot. Secondly, the other Jennifers did not appear in the episode at all.
• There exists a toy playset based on Ultraman X where players can fire a plastic minifigure of Ultraman X into a miniature city and target three kaijus - Demaarga, Bemstar, and Rudian. The last one which is wrong, because Rudian in the show is actually an ally of Ultraman X and the humans. Tsupro's toy department literally had a dozen other monsters they can use and they picked the one monster which is an ally of Ultraman. Go figure.
  • Although it makes sense if players were, in a way, meant to specifically target the hostile monsters, while trying not to hit Rudian by accident. Yeah, that must be it.
• Polygon's review of the 2020 American remake of the British tv series Utopia, describes it as being "adapted from a BBC series". The original show was created by Channel 4.
• The text on the back of the French DVD set of The Office (US) seasons 1 and 2 refers to Pam as "the newly hired receptionist". During Pam's very first scene in the pilot, Michael makes it known she's been working at Dunder Mifflin for at least two years.
• Screenrant released a video titled "25 Things You Missed About The Wheel of Time" that includes an egregious error: the narrator praises the show for removing a scene from the first book where Perrin's wife is brutally killed, as it could be seen as an outdated example of "fridging". This is not only wrong, it's backwards: at this point in the books, Perrin has no Love Interest whatsoever, much less a wife, and the character is added and killed off by the show. The really bizarre part though, is that this "fact" is narrated over the scene where Perrin's wife dies. The video has since been made private on YouTube although it is discussed here by Daniel Greene.
• The Sandman (2022):
  • The Sunday Post review of the show claimed that Burgess was attempting to capture Dream's brother Death, rather than sister.
  • One repeated complaint among certain reviewers is that the show features too many LGTBQ characters where there weren't any in the comics, claiming that it's a betrayal of the original work to feature so much "forced diversity." In reality, most of the LGTBQ characters in the show were taken straight from the original comics - even Constantine, who is canonically depicted as bisexual; the only two characters who did undergo Adaptational Sexuality were Gary and Bette in "24/7".
    • On a similar note, some commentators claimed that LGBTQ relationships were "glorified" and made to seem better than heterosexual relationships, which supposedly all ended up being tragic or toxic. Apparently, they missed Joanna Constantine breaking Rachael's heart, Judy confessing to Domestic Abuse, the Corinthian basing his relationships around manipulation and eventual murder...
  • Deadline's report on the show's renewal for a second season refers to "Morpheus (Tom Sturridge)" and "Dream (also Sturridge)" as if they were two separate characters, rather than two names for the same character.
• In the British newspaper The Independent's review of the Sherlock episode "The Final Problem", they referred to John Watson's actor as Tim Freeman. It is unknown if they confused Martin Freeman with his brother or confused him with his character in The Office (UK) (Tim Canterbury).
• Young Sheldon: This promo from TVLine says "In this week's Young Sheldon, Mandy gave birth to their daughter, a precious niblingo named..." The word "niblingo", which was used in several different episodes, refers to Mandy (not the baby).

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