tv shows within tv shows: an ocd thread for jaymc and nabisco

but I'm saying it is actually Brad Pitt

haha the thing with the actor-recognition and girlfriend-annoyance is that I am occasionally entertained by it, like "omg look it is so-and-so in this," and I get back a look that says "you realize these people are actors who do various kinds of work and appear in various projects over the courses of their careers, right?"

it surprises me comedies never play on it - i'm sure the 30 rock writers could write a good joke about jennifer aniston playing someone else, post-friends/brad etc. and that the boundries are never fucked with.

but* the boundries etc.

nabisco, there is only one correct answer to that look, and it is "YAAAAAAAAAAAAH TRICK YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"

When Schwimmer was on 30 Rock, Donaghy immediately referred to him as whatever his character-name was (Jamie?), and I interpreted it as a joke about how Donaghy can't be bothered to learn Schwimmer's name. (I think that one was just weird because NBC was hiring him as a national spokesperson: when NBC unveils a spokesperson and it's David Schwimmer, how are we NOT meant to assume that's intended as actual David Schwimmer?)

there was some ludicrous apotheosis of this on uk tv recently when the main actors in the british civil war were detective mcnulty, alastair campbell, and him out of life on mars/doctor who

Well because Schwimmer wouldn't be some nobody who does adverts for whoever ran against Hillary? Although that could have worked even better knowing it was Schwimmer and he just decided to make some crazy ad, like if Extras was funny.

xpost - Wait, how does that count? Were they watching Dr Who during the war?

I don't understand that sentence, hoy

no, it was just them acting, no intertexuality. it was shit, and it was impossible watching mcnutty play oliver cromwell (tbh i only saw bits of it tho)

xpost - But I think the issue is that Schwimmer is an actor who has appeared on and done public service for NBC, and in the 30 Rock episode he was playing ... an actor who appears on and does public service for NBC. It's too close. If he'd been playing some random guy from accounting, it wouldn't have jumped out as weird.

my bad. Schwimmer couldn't be Schwimmer because the character is written as a nobody actor who took any work, including a batshit political ad (I tried youtubing it but couldn't find it.) If it was Schwimmer, the joke would have been totally different. (Like in that shit Ricky Gervais show Extras that was always "haha actors aren't like how you think they are.")

"Hilary Clinton wants an all homosexual army. How will that affect my family?"

I am so glad I am rewatching this episode. It's the one with Kenneth's party!

i want bow- wow to play himself on Entourage like all the other celebrities

which shows were spun off of Supercomputer, again?

Argh, now you bring it up. Real life Melinda Clarke playing her character from the OC Julie Cooper but married to fictional character head-of-Aris-old-company in Entourage! That pissed me off.

Oh, hoy, sure, it wouldn't have worked if it was SUPPOSED to be Schwimmer, but that's not really the point here -- the point is that it's weird to cast Schwimmer as not-himself on a show in which real-Schwimmer basically used to work for the company the show's about!

I know. I was just saying that it could have worked if he was just Schwimmer playing himself as crazy.

("Do you even bother to compost your own faeces?" I love this show.)

geez how do you guys cope with Curb Your Enthusiasm?

One I thought was funny was on Studio 60, which obv. had tons of actors from The West Wing and Sports Night. one episode had Felicity Huffman hosting the show-within-a-show, and made no mention of SN, which made sense because it's not really her most famous project. But then a few weeks later the host was "Allison Janney from The West Wing" because I guess they really wanted to have her on the show but couldn't pretend she'd be on there for any other reason.

There's an episode of The A-Team where a woman asks George Peppard, "Are you George Peppard?". Oh and I've just remembered this - the lolness of Dirk Benedict, as Templeton Peck, recognising a Cylon in the title sequence.

AD played with this all the time.

Like Justine Bateman constantly saying how weird it is that she's dating whats his name and then turns out to be his sister. And Dr. Dan Castallaneta saying "d'oh" all lazily and then mom goes "I knew it!"

That all being said it was a LITTLE weird with all the Sopranos/Oz/Wire actor crossovers

also, awesome joke Scrubs, was even funnier when i saw it on the Simpsons.

The Larry Sanders Show had me wondering these same things--well, wondering in an idle, bored way. Ben Stiller appears as himself, so one assumes that Ben Stiller exists in that world, yet Bob Odenkirk and Janeane Garofalo, who worked on The Ben Stiller Show, appear as fictional characters. I'd always wonder if this meant that either a) those characters just happened to look a lot like JG and BO, b) to everyone else in that world, maybe their characters look completely different and look to us like JG and BO simply because we see the actors or c) in that world, some other fictional characters fill the role that BO and JG did. (So, Mr Show is created by David Cross and, I dunno, some guy named Gary Jenkins who just happens to have the exact talents and life path that our BO did).

Christ, that is too much thinking.

isn't he an undercover actor in the a team? which is, you know, a whole other barrel of fish (if you want to catch a professional actor to arrest him, why not just turn up to the movie site?) but i know its the a team, and reality isn't a big factor.

I've only seen the first two series of the Larry Sanders show, so I can't talk about that, but it is odd seeing Alec Baldwin being a bastard to Larry and Artie as himself and then becoming Jack Donaghy. Not really going anywhere with this point but that's pretty much the point of the thread...

yeah on the sopranos don't they talk about 'goodfellas' here and there, and four or five of the main/supporting cast in the first couple seasons was actually in that movie?

geez how do you guys cope with Curb Your Enthusiasm?

haha geez how do you cope with not reading the thread

(xxxpost) Well, Hannibal is a bit part actor who is usually dressed in some kind of monster costume, so it would be difficult to catch him.

yeah on the sopranos don't they talk about 'goodfellas' here and there

actually no I don't think they do (I'm about to the end of Season 2 right now). They reference the Godfather movies a lot tho.

i'm probably remembering stuff like imperioli shooting that dude in the foot

lolz sorry nabisco I missed that in the first post

yeah on the sopranos don't they talk about 'goodfellas' here and there, and four or five of the main/supporting cast in the first couple seasons was actually in that movie?

Ok, not to get too philosophical about it, but this is the kind that trips me out, because it makes me start thinking that there's this whole other level of artifice to TV where the characters we're seeing aren't those characters and aren't what they look like, but are some other level of representation of the fictional characters, who look like something else entirely, and when they watch Goodfellas the actors in it don't actually look anything like them.

I realize this is a ridiculous bonged-out way of even beginning to think about the obvious and uncomplicated realities of how actors portray characters on television, but still.

yeah, they reference the Godfather and Dominic Chianese who plays Junior Soprano played Johnny Ola in Godfather Part II. But I don't think he's in any of the scenes in which they mention the Godfather.

xposts.

xpost to a hoy hoy: Yes, and then working for Rip Torn as Don Geiss!

^ Ok, apparently that never happened with Sopranos, but still, it does on other shows, where there is a full world of popular culture that doesn't include the show itself

The final line where shows respect this is that you will never see a non-meta not-joking thing where characters in a show talk about an actor who is on that show, and never see an actor on a show refer to him/her-self as an actor outside the bounds of that show. Obviously.

ha, i can't believe rip torn/don geiss went over my head when i got so caught up in 1 baldwin cameo.

(xxxxxxxxxpost) ...and the episode where the woman asks him if he's George Peppard is a scene where the woman is obsessed with George Peppard and is asking most of the male cast and extras if they are George Peppard. Her husband actually says that she "has George Peppard on the brain". So I guess that George Peppard, playing the role of Hannibal, within the confines of the show's "reality", doesn't look significantly like George Peppard to be mistaken for George Peppard by someone, unless that someone was so obsessed with George Peppard that they were prepared to ask every white middle aged male of a particular height and build whether or not they were George Peppard.

What about made-for-TV movies where they eventually get to the point where they're making a made-for-TV movie about everything, and one of the characters says "They should get so-and-so to play me!" and it's really so-and-so playing the part of the character.

Thanks, now I have George Peppard on the brain.

But this is the same "reality" in which you can shoot an entire machine gun full of bullets at someone from ten yards away and not hit them, so I suppose all bets are off.

I know recognise that the end of Blazing Saddles was just written to annoy the hell out of a small select group of people on ilx.

you fuckin guys

Guys, this is an aside from a very early David Foster Wallace essay about television and fiction and irony:

8/05's St. Elsewhere episode 94, originally broadcast in 1988, aired on Boston's Channel 38 immediately following two back-to-back episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that icon of seventies pathos. The plots of the two Mary Tyler Moore Shows are unimportant here. But the St. Elsewhere episode that followed them partly concerned a cameo-role mental patient afflicted with the delusional belief that he was Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He further believed that a fellow cameo-role mental patient was Rhoda, that Dr. Westphal was Mr. Grant, and that Dr. Auschlander was Murray. This psychiatric subplot was a one-shot; it was resolved by episode's end. The pseudo-Mary (a sad lumpy-looking guy who used to play one of Dr. Hartley's neurotic clients on the old Bob Newhart Show) rescues the other cameo-role mental patient, whom he believes to be Rhoda and who has been furious in his denials that he is female, much less fictional (and who is himself played by the guy who used to play Mr. Carlin, Dr. Hartley's most intractable client) from assault by a bit-part hebephrene. In gratitude, Rhoda/Mr. Carlin/mental patient declares that he'll consent to be Rhoda if that's what Mary/neurotic client/mental patient wants. At this too-real generosity, the pseudo-Mary's psychotic break breaks. The sad guy admits to Dr. Auschlander that he's not Mary Richards. He's actually just a plain old amnesiac, minus a self, existentially adrift. He has no idea who he is. He's lonely. He watches a lot of television. He figured it was "better to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody." Dr. Auschlander takes the penitent patient for a walk in the wintery Boston air and promises that he, the identityless guy, can someday find out who he really is, provided he can dispense with "the distraction of television." At this cheery prognosis, the patient removes his own fuzzy winter beret and throws it into the air. The episode ends with a freeze of the aloft hat, leaving at least one viewer credulously rapt.

This would have been just another clever low-concept eighties TV story, where the final cap-tossing and closing credits coyly undercut Dr. Auschlander's put-down of television, were it not for the countless layers of ironic, involuted TV imagery and data that whirl around this high-concept installment. Because another of this episode's cameo stars, drifting through a different subplot, is one Betty White, Sue Ann Nivens of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, here playing a tortured NASA surgeon (don't ask). It is with almost tragic inevitability, then, that Ms. White, at thirty-two minutes into the episode, meets up with the TV-deluded pseudo-Mary in their respective tortured wanderings through the hospital's corridors, and that she considers the mental patient's inevitable joyful cries of "Sue Ann!" with a too-straight face and says he must have her confused with someone else. Of the convolved levels of fantasy and reality and identity here - e.g., patient simultaneously does, does not, and does have Betty White "confused" with Sue Ann Nivens - we needn't speak in detail: doubtless a Yale Contemporary Culture dissertation is underway on R. D. Laing and just this episode. But the most interesting levels of meaning here lie, and point, behind the lens. For NBC's St. Elsewhere, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show before it, was created, produced, and guided into syndication by MTM Studios, owned by Mary Tyler Moore and overseen by her husband, later NBC Chair Grant Tinker; and St. Elsewhere's scripts and subplots are story-edited by Mark Tinker, Mary's step-, Grant's heir. The deluded mental patient, an exiled, drifting veteran of one MTM program, reaches piteously out to the exiled, drifting (literally - NASA, for God's sake) veteran of another MTM production, and her ironic rebuff is scripted by KM personnel, who accomplish the parodic undercut of MTM's Dr. Auschlander with the copyrighted MTM hat-gesture of one MTM veteran who's "deluded" he's another. Dr. A.'s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a "distraction" is less absurd than incoherent. Therd is nothing but television on this episode; every joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, metatelevision. It is in joke within in-joke.

St. Elsewhere:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083483/trivia

xpost!!

https://io9.gizmodo.com/infinity-war-puts-adam-wests-batman-in-the-marvel-cinem-1825657160

How the hell did he manage to completely misspell “Frasier” three times in one run-on sentence

on the bright side, not misspelled three different ways

Least it was just misspelled and not bad Grammar.

Ayyy

good work pp

Abbi and Ilana referencing The Good Wife to a character played by the guy who played Howard Lyman on TGW in a Broad City subplot in which Alan Cumming is guest starring as himself

— Oriana Schwindt (@Schwindter) March 1, 2019

This blew my mind https://t.co/QPjX2J1HKV pic.twitter.com/i7wfyL2qfL

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) July 20, 2019

Stan Lee exists in the Marvel comic book too. There, he runs a company called Marvel that publishes fictional comic books based on the lives of real superheroes. (For example, at some point Steve Rogers, who in the comics is a talented artist, was drawing a Captain America comic for Marvel.) So presumably the MCU Stan Lee does the same, and is famous for that.

"Stan Lee exists in the Marvel comic book universe too."

The article covers that in detail, though comes to a different conclusion to you.

The Last O.G. features Method Man who, in a conversation about Ole Dirty Bastard, names all of ODB's nicknames, but is playing some separate gangster character named Green Eyes

In Six Feet Under S03e13, "I'm Sorry, I'm Lost," Nate is grieving, drinking and blankly watching TV while the old dude who has been banging Nate's mum for six weeks and is marrying her tomorrow makes himself at home in Nate's living room.

"What are you doing?" asks the interloper.
"Watching Babe." mutters Nate, to this new character played by James Cromwell, the farmer and main human character in Babe.

In a recent episode of The Bold Type, Jacqueline Carlyle (played by Melora Hardin) is seen holding a mug with the logo of Dunder Mifflin, the company in The Office that employs, among other people, Jan Levinson-Gould (also played by Melora Hardin).

Rewatching Larry Sanders and noticed for the first time that the episode where Paul Mooney plays Beverly's cousin is followed shortly thereafter by an episode where someone makes an offhand remark about booking Paul Mooney on the show.

Oh hi
https://www.avclub.com/browse-threat-level-midnight-and-sick-sad-world-in-this-1847469398

very apropos!

https://nestflix.fun/

ha, thanks forks.

oi!

Really impressed with the amount of work put into that, getting an image, blurb and quote for every show etc.

Was just going to suggest Mr Banana Grabber from Arrested Development but the creator has already had to suspend submissions due to overload

My all time favorite is still Monsignor Martinez

This is great but no Rochelle, Rochelle or Prognosis Negative :(

I was confused by that, but apparently the site requires that we see "actual footage" of the fake movie/show ("not just mentioned in dialogue or seen in a poster"), which I think rules out all of the movies in Seinfeld.

The pilot of Jerry should be in there, though.

Pretty sure we got like 2 seconds of "Cry, Cry Again"

https://i.imgur.com/3gHTNPi.jpg

Or maybe...

Red Dwarf is on the iplayer and I’ve been watching it for the first time. It’s great, but I found it odd that Series 9 is missing. That is until I looked it up and it’s partially set on itv’s biggest show:

Back to Earth Pt 2

Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and Cat appear on contemporary Earth and discover that they are fictional characters from a television show called Red Dwarf. They find a DVD box for "Back to Earth" and discover that they are to die at the end. They decide to track down their creators to plead for an extension, in a parody of Blade Runner. The DVD box also refers to a series X that does not actually exist yet. Katerina arrives via a second portal, but is quickly killed by Rimmer after she makes the mistake of telling him that taking the life of a hologram is not murder as they are already dead. A discussion between Lister and two children on a bus reveals that Kochanski may not be dead.

Back to Earth Pt 3

Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and Cat use the car they take from the President of the Red Dwarf fan club, made out to resemble Starbug. They go to the set of Coronation Street, where they question Craig Charles about how much time they have left. Charles tells them they are down to their last episode, as well as giving them the address of "the creator", before joking that he needs to go back to the Priory (a reference to the actor's real life drug problems).

They find the creator, in a scene heavily referencing Blade Runner. He tells them that their deaths cannot be undone, but they will at least die gloriously. In a struggle Lister manages to kill him, before finding that this was scripted by the creator. Lister then burns the creator's script and rewrites their own ending. They then discover that the typewriter is not determining their actions.

The small origami sculptures left by the Cat turn out to be squids, leading the crew to realise that they have been drawn into an alternative reality by another squid capable of inducing hallucinations with its venomous ink - however, in contrast to the previous specimen the crew encountered in "Back to Reality" that brought on despair, the hallucinations of this squid induce joy, almost euphoria, in an attempt to prevent its prey from fighting back.

Rimmer, Kryten and Cat have formed resistance through their previous meeting with the squid during the SSS Esperanto incident, but Lister chooses to stay in the false reality where he gets together with Kochanski, despite the knowledge that she isn't real. After a period of time with Kochanski, Lister decides to head back to his own reality, with a renewed sense of his own self-worth, determined to find the real Kochanski and win her back. The episode ends with the four laughing at the fact that the fans of Red Dwarf created by the Despair Squid's hallucination (i.e. the viewers) will think that their reality is the real one, and the Red Dwarf reality dependent on it, as opposed to the other way round.