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

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!!

three words for you:

last
action
hero

Whoah, best thing from that page:

Friends and family members of the cast and crew often provided the names of the doctors paged over the PA system. If you listen closely during several episodes, you can hear a page for Dr. Gwyneth Paltrow. Her father, Bruce Paltrow, was the series' executive producer.

I like all the Howie Madel stuff. And Coolidge.

"The Dick Van Dyke Show" - The pilot episode starred Carl Reiner as Robert Petrie, who was later replaced by Dick Van Dyke in the final casting. Carl Reiner stayed on the show as Robert Petrie's boss, Alan Brady. Throughout the series Rob is shown working on his memoirs, a retelling of his life after he met his wife Laura. In the series finale, Rob finishes the book and submits it for publication. When he is rejected, Alan Brady offers to produce it as a television series, starring Alan Brady as Robert Petrie. This brings the series full circle, as the pilot episode featured Carl Reiner as Robert Petrie. - Wikipedia

As someone who may not have been alive when St. Elsewhere was on; this is like that episode of Buffy where it turns out she is mental and there are no vampires... but a whole freaking tv series of it?

I just made a Joey Lawrence noise

The thing that gets me, is Faceman a fan of Battlestar Galactica? So therefore he knows that he looks like the actor who plays Starbuck?

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.

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 7:18 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wasnt this the usual conceit when novels were all written as found documents and letters and shit?? like, watson's sherlock holmes stories talk about things which would implicate innocent people and invade the privacy of the people talked about but watson specifically notes that he's changed names & details in the public accounting of holmes' real-life actual factual adventures

great thread btw

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? I think those early novels of epistles, ship's logs, oral histories, etc. just covered for the novel until people got comfortable with the novel as an existing format. (And it still took a while longer for writers to break out of recording things as if they were documenting a real history, and start taking real visible liberties with POV, tense, etc.)

What happens if Liz Lemon watches NBC at 9.30pm on Thursdays? What does she see?

MILF Island? TGS w/ Tracy Jordan?

I totally had this problem with Twin Peaks when I was a teenager. Mostly b/c my hometown sucked so much, probably, but I had a seriously unhealthy obsession with that show and saw eerie parallels due to the fact that I had a friend die in a car accident who sort of symbolized the Laura Palmer, town grieves over death of popular high school student thing. The thing is, I liked that universe so much more than my own at the time, that I think I was legitimately depressed b/c my reality wasn't more like it.

I later came to terms with this while on a trip to Seattle for a friends wedding, when I made a two-day sight-seeing excursion to various locales used in the series.

Not so much with television or films these days, but I still get like this sometimes with certain books.

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? I think those early novels of epistles, ship's logs, oral histories, etc. just covered for the novel until people got comfortable with the novel as an existing format. (And it still took a while longer for writers to break out of recording things as if they were documenting a real history, and start taking real visible liberties with POV, tense, etc.)

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 7:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well yeah dude im familiar with the history of the novel im just saying the idea that a work of art can be a representation of a real world - like, the reason why the sopranos characters played by actors who were in goodfellas dont realize they look exactly like the dudes from goodfellas is because there are actors dramatizing people in the "real world" who dont look like the dudes from goodfellas

didnt finish that thought

just that your stoner logic has a precedent in classic joints like sherlock holmes

Oh, I see what you mean.

Part of what's funny, visually speaking, is that while we're all fine with the thought that there is (for instance) a real-life person named Ray Charles who is only being approximately conveyed by Jamie Foxx, there is something slightly funnier-feeling about dwelling on the idea that there is (for instance) an independent fictional character named "Tony Soprano" who is somehow different from James Gandolfini portraying him. But there shouldn't be anything funny about this at all, given that we all constantly watch things where different actors portray the same character.

^^ Thinking about this makes it all stupider, I think, best to just be tripped out in the moment

do those geico cavemen on the tv show live in a world of talking geckos.

and richard greico

i had a similar problem with comic books (around age 8-10.)

The Tommy Westphall/Tom Fontanaverse

I embarrassed myself w/how crazy I went over Steve Carell in Knocked Up

great thread! had totally forgotten about that freakish Buffy episode

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

this is a great thread... this is the sort of thing i always always think about in passing but have never gone as insane as you guys about. and im glad you're out there doing it.

I've been watching the first season of The West Wing lately, and while it's initially no big deal to just accept that there's a whole fictional equivalent of the U.S. government and media, they do make reference to former U.S. presidents, including (for instance) Nixon.

Which makes me wonder: when did the alternative universe split off from the real one? The show debuted during Clinton's administration, and Bartlett seem like a stand-in for Clinton in some ways, so we can assume that Clinton has never been president during the show's fictional universe. But what about Reagan or Bush Sr.? This gets especially tricky if you think about members of Congress who served under Nixon, guys like Ted Kennedy or Robert Byrd: are they still in the Senate?

Another thing that hasn't been explained, although perhaps it will be: at the beginning of the show's run, Bartlett has been in office for a year. Assuming the show takes place in the current day (it debuted in 1999), that means he would have been elected in 1998, which decidedly is not a U.S. election year.

From what I remember of the West Wing, I think its election plotlines were shifted two years from real life elections. So the Bartlett re-election plotline ran in 2002, and they had midterm storylines in '00 and '04. But I don't know if these were the actual election years in the show's reality, or if the show was not meant to take place at the same time it was running.

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.