If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that one thing I harp on is getting the small details correct in my writing. That’s something I paid very close attention to when I wrote Holiday Heat, as well as my other books that are set during the (more or less) present day.

Recently I’ve been watching St. Elsewhere on Hulu. It’s a hospital show from the 80s, and one of the executive producers also EP’d ER. I can see where a lot of the stuff from ER started out by watching St. Elsewhere, although ER is a much grittier show. Anyway, I’m up to season 2, and I just watched the Thanksgiving episode. Several characters make references to Patriots games in the episode, and at one point one of the doctors goes into a room where the Patriots game is being shown on TV.

There’s just one problem: the Patriots didn’t play on Thanksgiving Day 1983. The Steelers, Cardinals, Cowboys, and Lions played.

I’m sure I’m the only person who notices that sort of thing these days, but I have to believe that St. Elsewhere watchers in 1983 were well aware of the fact that the Patriots weren’t playing on Thanksgiving that year.

Look, I get it: you want to localize the TV show, so you focus on Boston-based sports teams — Fiscus is always wearing a Red Sox hat, for instance. But you have to get the small details right so the big ones can be overlooked. And this small detail really bothered me for some reason — probably because it was an easy thing to get right. Except they got it wrong.