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

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

this reminds me of a review of the "psycho" remake i read that complained how unrealistic it was that the characters in the movie had apparently never seen "psycho."

did they mention specific horror movies in Scream or just general "horror movie" tropes?

It makes my head hurt when two programmes establish that the other exists in the world of each respective programme. For example, there's an episode of The Sopranos in which Junior and Bobby are watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and an episode of Curb where Larry and Cheryl are looking for a Sopranos DVD. So is the fictional version of Curb within the fictional world of The Sopranos exactly the same as the real world version except that the Sopranos DVD is replaced by The Wire or something in that one episode, and vice-versa?

Oh god, it's 4 AM and this is quite possibly going to keep me awake.

Set theory to thread!

For any formal recursively enumerable (i.e., effectively generated) theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true,[1] but not provable in the theory.

i.e. "This statement is false"

i.e. "I am not Fran Drescher"

in this roseanne episode, john popper of blues traveler plays a fictional musician named stingray who fronts a band that dan used to be in. however, jackie thinks that several of "stingray's" songs are about her, including one called "runaround." then when the band plays at the end, they play the blues traveler songs "runaround" and "the hurt."

I guess this is similar to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I was just thinking about this w/r/t Altman's The Player, where we are asked to imagine a Hollywood full of dozens of real-life celebrities but not Tim Robbins, Whoopi Goldberg, Lyle Lovett, etc. Looking at IMDB, I see that Susan Sarandon is one of the many celebs who plays herself; in the world of the movie, who is she romantically involved with?

i remember "possible worlds" theory giving me the vocab/tools to talk about this sort of thing in a postmodern/meta lit course, vaguely

I just found this board, but I think I'm able to take in the subject of what you are all making posts about.

One obvious show that you all have missed -- Saturday Night Live! They do this all the time! From Alec Baldwin confusing Sarah Palin for Tina Fey (who is doing her fantastic impression in the next room) (10/18/08) to the real Alex Trebek making an appearance on his famed Jeopardy! game show (5/18/02). How can the IRL Alex Trebek explain that there is another Alex Trebek hosting his own Jeopardy! game show? (With outdated answer board from the Art Fleming days.)

Then there was last week's episode (1/31/09) when Steve Martin invites Kristen Wiig to an orgy in his dressing room, but later, as a member of "The Introverts", does not join Neil and Jean for their traditional threesome!

There are many instances of this occurring on Saturday Night Live through out its stories 33-year history.

Tim and Eric do this pretty much constantly.

I don't have a particularly high standard of coherent-world realism with comedy/variety shows, though.

I mean, I don't get weirded out that SNL cast members are in multiple sketches as different characters OMG, or anything like that.

T&E's stuff with Ed Begley Jr. and Jeff Goldblum is pretty out there tho'.

Big fan of the Jeff Goldblue Man Group.

Tracy: Make fun of me all you want Liz Lemon. Do you know that they ruin anybody who they think are making black people look bad? They tanked 50 Cent’s movie. They blew out Terrell Owens ankle. And they cancelled Eddie Murphy’s Oscar, ‘cause he had ran out on Scary Spice. And now they after Tracy Jordan!

so in 30 rock's world what show did eddie murphy get his start on?

Maybe SNL was canceled after Ebersol's last season.