Fooled us

Last week my sisters and I went to a TV sitcom trivia night.

It was overall a good experience. We had fun, and it was well-organized, and I will do a full report of that in the travel blog Saturday.

There was one little snag. I think putting it in the review would be unfairly prejudicial, but it is interesting in its own way and I want to spend some time on that.

One of the questions was a show that starred Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and Kelsey Grammer, and gave its premier date. That date was in 1972.

That couldn't be Cheers. Without knowing the exact date off of the top of my head, Cheers was in the '80s. There was no way it was Cheers, but it was and we got it wrong.

We wracked our brains over this, resolved to look it up when we got home, and found the premier date of the show to be September 30th, 1982. I wrote to the people who do the trivia, and they were very nice and apologetic. Ultimately, it was just a typo from when they entered the data, which is a very simple explanation.

What interests me in retrospect are the mental gymnastics we put into it. A typo makes the most sense. I make them all the time, much to my chagrin, but we didn't think of that. We knew Cheers  didn't start in 1972, so maybe some other show did. Woody Harrelson would have only been 11 in 1972 (I did not know that exactly, but I knew he would have been a kid), so could it have been some kids show? There was a Bad News Bears television series. On looking that up, it didn't start until 1979, but that's what we put.

That is far less logical. If you watched a lot of television shows over time, you will see different faces pop up again and again. For example, I have seen Jane Leeves in Throb before Frasier, and Crystal Bernard in It's A Living, Happy Days, and Wings. Still, you don't usually see the same people work together (other than special guest appearances) unless there is some kind of friendship issue going on, like with Michael Landon and Victor French.

This may be one reason why everyone else just put Cheers, but we think part of the issue may be that it was a younger crowd. I would guess that most of the people there were around 28, so born well after Cheers started, maybe even after it ended. They may have still seen episodes - a lot of early adults now have a strong affinity for Friends - but it doesn't end up firmly occupying the same place in time for them. No one else even seemed to blink at the date, but we were there in the '80s, and we know that's when Cheers started.

But we didn't know it started in 1982 specifically. If we had known that, the possibility of a typo might have occurred to us more easily. Also, if anyone else had done a double-take that would have provided some validation. Everyone accepting the wrong answer was very disconcerting, and of course we couldn't look it up then because we were playing a trivia contest.

I realize I may be making too much of this, but I just finished reading a book about cognitive fallacies and things, and in that context I have found this interesting and pertinent.

Also I overthink things. Regularly.