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

Unless I've missed it, they haven't so far (I'm like three episodes away from the end of S1).

Reading Wikipedia with one eye closed to avoid spoilers:

In general, The West Wing attempts to create an alternative reality, in which there is a subtly different set of historical truths in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the show tries to suggest that the last "real" president in its timeline is Richard Nixon, and to chart the careers of its principal players in the light of that decision. Nevertheless, there are occasions in which more contemporary presidents are implied.

Despite the attempt to establish a fictional timeline, minor evidence of real-life post-Nixon presidencies can sometimes be found in the show. In the second-season episode "Galileo," a portrait of Bill Clinton can be seen hanging on the wall of the White House Situation Room. Also in the second season, "The Stackhouse Filibuster" features a plaque identifying CJ Cregg's briefing room as the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which could imply the existence of a Ronald Reagan presidency. In the sixth season episode, "A Good Day", a picture of Jimmy Carter can be seen hanging on a wall in the White House.

Doesn't The West Wing have that episode where they parade their own fictional presidents at a funeral? Bartlett needs help and has to confide in them all, but gets stuck with him from rosanne and what seemed like the george bush sr. equivilant (this is just from my rubbish memory, so it could be way different)?

there's also a west wing episode in the second or third season where the bartlett admin needs tv time for something and someone mentions that NBC always has a hole to fill wed @ 8:00 or 9:00 - the time that in our reality the west wing was on. which i always thought was a neat example of tv show acknowledging the weirdness you guys are talking about

the oc did that well - when they used to watch 'the valley' at the time the oc was on in america. and even had cameos from that fictional show.

n I'll be totally fascinated by, say, the SVU episode where future-ADA Novak is on trial for raping a guy.

That has always bothered me. Like, wouldn't anyone notice that Casey looks exactly like the evil rapist lawyer?

Or was she a stockbroker? Either way though, it was just one of those little things that pulled me out of the story a little bit.

Re The Valley: I don't remember them saying it was in that particular timeslot, but yeah, that was clever. There was even Sherman Oaks, which was the fictional equivalent of Laguna Beach.

Although the idea of a fictional TV show within a real TV show serving as an ironic commentary on the latter probably owes something to Invitation to Love on Twin Peaks.

plato to thread

this is a great thread!

i like how futurama and simpsons are both fictional in each others universes, like bender finding the early 90s bart doll in the junkyard or the pimply teen on the simpsons depressed because "they cancelled futurama"

about the Allison Janney on Studio 60 ordeal, did they ever explicitly say "West Wing"? I only remember some line sort of like "bet this doesn't happen on your white house show?" which doesn't really imply she was on the same West Wing as the actor Bradley Whitford who is currently playing the showrunner of the show the real her is hosting

no, they definitely explicitly say "West Wing" at least once

Last time this bothered me was in an episode of Doctor Who where Martha made reference to the Harry Potter series, without once taking a look at the Doctor and noticing he looked not dissimilar to Barty Crouch Jr.

Last season of The Sopranos you have Tony and Christopher driving around listening to the soundtrack to The Departed.

This all goes back to His Girl Friday when Cary Grant describes Ralph Bellamy's character as "He looks like, uh, that fellow in the movies, you know, uh, Ralph Bellamy."

what does The Sopranos have to do with The Departed?

That the moment ground the episode in late 2006, but that the characters live in a world without The Sopranos (though a senile Uncle Junior in one episode thinks he sees himself when Curb Your Enthusiasm is on TV).

Curb Your Enthusiasm hasn't avoided this entirely - the actress who played Sue-Ellen Mischke turned up in the last season playing a doctor Larry went out with a couple of times.

Played Sue-Ellen Mischke on Seinfeld, I should say. The braless Oh Henry candy bar heiress.

Borges quote my professor brought up the other day:

"Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: “Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.” Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions."

I had one of these moments when watching an episode of Heroes that mentioned Star Trek just after George Takei's character had been onscreen. Woaaaaaah.

I think one of my favourite types of jokes to make is commenting on an assumed intertextuality between all fiction and reality (you can probably get a good idea of how unfunny I am from that). For example, John Mahoney starring as dad to a teenage girl? "Does she grow up to be Frasier then?" And so on.

I think those things just crept up toward the beginning of novels as a popular form because otherwise the novels didn't seem properly justified to people. Real information was real; poetry was clearly art; but what was the point of writing down a whole long story when everyone knew it wasn't true?

Surely people were familiar with plays, yes, knowing that those people weren't "real" nor the events "true?"

Oh, hey. It's not really a matter of people being unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. (Although keep in mind that if you go back a little way you honestly do get religious people who find the very idea of fiction to be a problem.) And plays are a performance, which gives them a somewhat different history. It's more that you had a time when books were mostly religious, or non-fiction, or poetry, or things like satire that were intended to have real propositions; and there weren't a ton of them; and the idea of writing whole prose texts claiming that real-sounding modern-day things happened, even though they didn't, was ... well, still sort of new and unusual, in certain places.

So I guess I phrased that badly -- it's not an issue of rejecting them as fiction, it's that the format was new, and it needed to kind of mimic the way true accounts looked in order to seem acceptable for a while. I assume that if an early novel did a lot of the things modern novels do with point of view and consciousness and whatnot, it would have seemed insane: it'd seem frivolously false because how would the speaker know all that stuff, and because there wasn't any general sense of the novel as a high art in itself.

If you go back far enough with plays, too, they become kinda instructive parables rather than just fictions, which is also true of prose stories -- parables and tales and allegories ... but the jump to the novel format is still one that takes a moment

This all goes back to His Girl Friday when Cary Grant describes Ralph Bellamy's character as "He looks like, uh, that fellow in the movies, you know, uh, Ralph Bellamy."

He also mentions having had dark dealings with an "Archie Leach*" who then committed suicide

*Grant's real name dont u kno

i just thought of a realllly weird example -- that movie 'the wackness' has a scene in which method man plays a jamaican drug dealer w/ an (over the top) accent, and hes chilling listening to Biggie's "The What" and Method Man's verse comes on and the kid asks him about what it is -- really bizarre

I haven't seen the movie, but I seem to remember reading that that was intentional.

well how could it not be??

I was always kind of bothered by Super Dave not playing Super Dave on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

If Larry wanted to invite Marty Funkhouser (presumably to entice a golf tip out of him) to a Super Dave show could Marty go?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096874/trivia

Many shows from the 1980s are featured on the televisions inside the Cafe 80s, including "Family Ties" (1982) and "Taxi" (1978), which originally starred Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, respectively.

wau

HOLY SHIT!

btw ws

How about an entire TV station within a TV show?

wasn'ty there an episode of mork n mindy where mork met robin williams?

Watched Coming To America the other day and was unexpectedly perturbed when Eddie Murcpy's character hands over a bundle of money to a homeless Don Ameche. No sir, didn't like it.

Coming to America!!

"The X Files" and "Millennium" had a complicated co-existence. At first the shows seemed to be in separate universes and used a lot of the same actors as different characters. But then Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) showed up on Millennium a few years after appearing on X-Files--and in the same episode Duchovny was pictured as a famous Selfosophist actor. Then Millennium was canceled and had to finish its story on an X-Files episode.

It wasn't Don Ameche but actually the character he played in Trading Places, Eddie Murphy's previous movie.

In which Eddie Murphy played someone else entirely!

A character from whom his character in Trading Places tricked out of his fortune. Hence "Randolph, we're back!".

Duh, he was about to say "wasn't that that same guy from ..." but didn't want to seem like a "they all look alike"-type bigot

^^ a sign that he learned his lesson from trading places

i just thought of a realllly weird example -- that movie 'the wackness' has a scene in which method man plays a jamaican drug dealer w/ an (over the top) accent, and hes chilling listening to Biggie's "The What" and Method Man's verse comes on and the kid asks him about what it is -- really bizarre

― K DEF FROM REAL LIVE (deej), Saturday, December 20, 2008 9:38 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

yeah this was my favorite moment of the movie

So I was just flipping past Star Trek: Generations and dude who plays Tuvok on whatever series that was is just a random human background ensign type. IMDB informs me that he was also on Deep Space Nine. Whoever it was that seeded all that humanoid DNA through the universe in that one Next Generation episode went REAL heavy on the "actor Tim Russ" genes.

i never watched st enterprise, but i would be pretty sad if they never made a quantum leap joke.

and who knew that Al was a cylon the whole time