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

Sometimes when watching a TV show I get really bothered by the fact that the show take place in a world where the show and its actors don't exist.

― total mormon cockblock extravaganza (jaymc), Friday, December 12, 2008 4:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I have the same problem Jaymc does, though it's all just dependent on how shows handle things. Weird example: 30 Rock bothered me last season when David Schwimmer appeared as not-himself (even though the show is set at a "real" NBC where Seinfeld was Seinfeld, so surely Schwimmer was on Friends), but it didn't bother me when Jennifer Aniston was on as not-herself (because ... she's less tied to Friends in my head than Schwimmer is?).

But yeah, it weirds me out when popular characters/actors refer to real things in the entertainment world but they remain fictional, and some shows are really fast and loose about this -- I got a little vertigo once from two characters on some show talking about a real movie that one of the actors was in, and just ... I dunno, it's just weird.

(Note: I don't get all geeky-angry about this, I understand that it's fiction and doesn't matter, but it's just ... weird, sometimes, to think about.)

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 4:36 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you guys, dont ever see "jay and silent bob strike back" or your might have some kind of seizure

― beyonc'e (max), Friday, December 12, 2008 4:39 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Haha.

― total mormon cockblock extravaganza (jaymc), Friday, December 12, 2008 4:40 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I don't mind when it's done purposefully, just when the weird tangles show up on their own. Like a world where Brad Pitt movies exist but then Brad Pitt plays a guy named Lou, and nobody goes "omg Lou, you look exactly like Brad Pitt."

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 4:42 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Totally.

― total mormon cockblock extravaganza (jaymc), Friday, December 12, 2008 4:44 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

NB: Marijuana heightens these thoughts.

― total mormon cockblock extravaganza (jaymc), Friday, December 12, 2008 4:45 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is possibly a whole other thread.

I have never had those kinds of thoughts with certain things (e.g. Curb Your Enthusiasm seems to keep it very clean?), but then I'll be totally fascinated by, say, the SVU episode where future-ADA Novak is on trial for raping a guy.

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 4:51 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Why its annoying on 30 Rock... there are loads of Friends (in this case) jokes and references. In the first series, doesn't Baldwin go through a whole phase of watching Friends... and yet he sleeps with this woman who looks incredibly like Jennifer Aniston and doesn't seem to notice it?

i dont really care but i can understand why its annoying.

― a hoy hoy, Friday, December 12, 2008 5:01 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Ocean's Twelve had a gag about all this stuff, where Julia Roberts's character met Bruce Willis and he mistook her for Julia Roberts.

the 30 Rock/Schwimmer/Seinfeld thing bothered me too, though. but then i'm on record as being OK with celebrity walk-ons on that show and would prefer if people just played themselves since the show takes place in a TV studio.

― The strawman from the hilarious 'ilx' race threads (some dude), Friday, December 12, 2008 5:03 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wasn't the julia roberts thing like a major plot point?

yeah, this should probably be a new thread.

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan), Friday, December 12, 2008 5:04 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Please start it! (Please also note that I'm not "annoyed" by this stuff, I just wind up fixating on how odd it is.)

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 5:06 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you guys need to get STRAIGHT

i like how on arrested development the bigger name guest stars play roles but carl weathers is carl weathers. did anyone else play themselves on that show?

I have never had those kinds of thoughts with certain things (e.g. Curb Your Enthusiasm seems to keep it very clean?), but then I'll be totally fascinated by, say, the SVU episode where future-ADA Novak is on trial for raping a guy.

in the same vein, it drove me nuts when Jon Lovitz guested on "Newsradio" twice as completely different characters, then joined the cast in its final season as a third character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Richter

xpost

wow u guys are so fucking crazy

Hey this is kind of like on Scrubs where the main character recognized the janitor as having had a small role in The Fugitive (which the actor playing the janitor really did)

I'm sure there is a show out there where an actor has appeared both as a character and as him/her-self, the actor

oh shit at that Scrubs clip

Other OCD-ish things I do when watching TV shows:

1. When characters make reference to having been a certain age in a certain year (or having done something that gives their age away within a particular time frame, like being in college or giving birth), I always immediately calculate how old that makes them now, and if that's plausible. (Or vice versa, like if we already know they're in their 40s but then they say their son was 12 when "The Macarena" was a hit, etc.) I invariably miss the next minute's worth of dialogue because of this.

2. I know there are a million reasons, mostly having to do with contracts, why certain actors appear in the opening titles and others are relegated to "guest starring" or "with special guest star" credits -- but I still get really hung up on this stuff. The most egregious example being Seth Rogen being in the main credits of Freaks and Geeks despite having probably less overall screen time than the perpetually guest-starring Busy Phillips. Every episode I'd mention this, much to my girlfriend's chagrin.

^^ I don't do that latter, that sounds a bit annoying

Although I probably do some girlfriend annoyance with a whole lot of "where do I recognize that actor from" and "oh hey it's that actress from XXX," sometimes with DVR rewinding while I try and remember

1. When characters make reference to having been a certain age in a certain year (or having done something that gives their age away within a particular time frame, like being in college or giving birth), I always immediately calculate how old that makes them now, and if that's plausible. (Or vice versa, like if we already know they're in their 40s but then they say their son was 12 when "The Macarena" was a hit, etc.) I invariably miss the next minute's worth of dialogue because of this.

^^^^how has the simpsons not made your head explode?

I'm sure there is a show out there where an actor has appeared both as a character and as him/her-self, the actor

now i'm going crazy trying to think of an example

Andy Richter in AD, again.

haha on 1.: the last season of The Wire when they showed Omar's birthdate, I immediately went and figured out that either Michael K. Williams is 6 years younger than his character or that they were deliberately showing city's paperwork on him to be wrong.

Although I probably do some girlfriend annoyance with a whole lot of "where do I recognize that actor from" and "oh hey it's that actress from XXX," sometimes with DVR rewinding while I try and remember

Yeah, we do this all the time.

I don't mind when it's done purposefully, just when the weird tangles show up on their own. Like a world where Brad Pitt movies exist but then Brad Pitt plays a guy named Lou, and nobody goes "omg Lou, you look exactly like Brad Pitt."

― nabisco, Friday, December 12, 2008 4:42 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

one of my personal pet peeves IRL is people constantly going "omg you like just like so-and-so celebrity" when there really isn't much of a resemblence, so I think I'm going to start pretending that most movies and shows take place in some wonderful world where noone says that.

But somedude, it is the same person

I immediately went and figured out that either Michael K. Williams is 6 years younger than his character or that they were deliberately showing city's paperwork on him to be wrong.

I hadn't thought about that latter possibility, but I did definitely calculate the age.

but i'm saying, it'd be nice of character-that-looks-like-Brad-Pitt could coexist in a world where Brad Pitt is a famous actor and people aren't constantly talking about the similarity. xpost

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!!

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.

tbey must mention guys like reagan no?

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

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.

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

Ray-Ray's Mystery Garage, duh

in freaks & geeks, sam weir has a "1941" poster on his bedroom wall. one of the stars of "1941" was joe flaherty, who plays sam weir's dad

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

― harry s tfuman (and what), Friday, February 20, 2009 5:48 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i always thought it was insane that in that studio 60 on the sunset strip show SNL actually existed

ooh good one xopst

slocks - they're competing shows, on different networks, on different coasts...

so studio 60 is actually about mad tv

slocks - they're competing shows, on different networks, on different coasts...

― go back to ur game of Croquette ye posho's (stevie), Wednesday, February 25, 2009 3:20 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya it just made no sense.

i think it only made sense in the sense that it was also a world that had a different network called NBS which I think occupied a niche somewhere between NBC and PBS

which would explain why they thought Gilbert and Sullivan parodies were some next level shit

haha

it just seemed to be it was so obv supposed to be about SNL that actually having real-SNL in there was dumb. i mean their show was supposed to have this big proud history going back years... it was just weird that there were supposed to be like TWO shows like that

guys it still bugs me that eddie murphy is famous in 30 rock's universe

i guess just because so many other famous people referenced on the show who maybe hosted snl once or whatever eddie murphy in my head is inseperable from snl

aw yeah no doubt - i mean, that was the least of the show's probs, to be honest. i did really love it though, for all its many faults.

xp to slocki

isnt there some episode where jack gets really into friends--and schwimmer and aniston have both been on the show

guys it still bugs me that eddie murphy is famous in 30 rock's universe

Maybe Rick James just took Eddie under his wing and he became famous for "Party All the Time".

I don't think it's too far-fetched to imagine that one of the many late night sketch shows that cropped up in the wake of SNL in the late 70s and 80s survived, maybe as a more upscale 'intellectual' brand (rather than less, like Mad TV), and became an institution in its own right. I mean, the Tonight Show used to have no real competitors/equals, but it does now.

but the joke is his oscar nom for dreamgirls

although lol at a world where dude gets an acting career on back of party all the time

maybe Eddie got to movies from a sitcom instead of SNL

maybe he was Theo Huxtable!!!!

as an HBO watching youngster, i was always bothered by the scene in just one of the guys where the main character chick playing a dude is described as looking like "the karate kid" because william zabka is the high school jerk in just one of the guys, and yeah, also in the karate kid

I was bothered that the main guy in it looked like a 35 year old teacher instead of a student.

I guess something similar (maybe) happens in O Lucky Man, when Malcolm MacDowell's character Mick Travis ends up auditioning for a part in the first film, If..., implying a fictional If... in this universe. The other characters recurring from the earlier film complicate things further. Then Mick is shocked into a zazen acceptance of the circumstances by being slapped across the face with the physicality of the script for If..., by it's director. Even though it's a fictional script wielded by a fictional director hitting a fictional character, which all have real world counterparts, and the paradox-accepting hit across the face leads the film to descend, Blazing Saddles style, into a party which transcends the fiction of either film - maybe even becoming documentary of a real cast party for the film. I dunno, it seems somehow relevant.

Riddle me this: Does the movie Poor Cow exist in the world of The Limey?

did you just say "riddle me this"?

Ilx turning into gotham city.

http://www.posterpalace.com/images/stills/batman66penguinS.jpg
"i suspect FOWL play at the hands of that birdbrained andtwat!"

eddie murphy in my head is inseperable from snl

Huh -- I don't have this at all! Maybe because I became old enough to notice pop culture right around the same time he was getting big in movies instead?

I would get a little jolt if they ever referred to Martin Lawrence, though, given all the Tracy stuff in the first season

also tracy morgan was on the show martin

^^ Actually technically the train of thought there also has to do with all Tracy's ridiculous fat-suit movies, which ... hahaha it's not unreasonable to figure that if Murphy didn't do that stuff, then maybe Lawrence wouldn't, then where would Tracy be

i saw your train of thought i was just adding to the ocd

Hustle Man (portrayed by comedian Tracy Morgan): This character was the neighborhood purveyor of questionable products and services "at a discount rate! I don't do dat for erra'body! I'm just tryna help YOU out!" He always greeted Martin with his trademark "What's happenin', chief?" In one episode, one of Hustle Man's more outrageous items for sale was an 'appetizing' array of roasted pigeons impaled on a tree branch (as if barbecued on it), which he attempted to sell to Martin and his friends while they were snowed in and starving. In another episode he served as Martin's cut-rate "wedding planner," armed with a shopping cart brimming with chitlin loaf, plastic flowers and a 40 of malt liquor, in retaliation for Gina's choice of a more elegant and greatly overpriced wedding planner.

Tracy Jordan's movies have run the gamut from Martin to Eddie to Cuba Gooding so at this point I think it's fair to say he's just a composite or imaginary contemporary

"Let's talk about Fat Bitch 2..."

i know, cutty -- but wait, did they trade out "Brother Man" for "Hustle Man" at some point? cause Tracy wasn't the dude from upstairs who made the bootleg "WHITTY HUTTON" t-shirts, right?

(The main conclusion I'm coming to here is that we totally need Arsenio to do a 30 Rock guest spot, possibly as the amorous club girl from Coming to America)

(some dude, I'm thinking of the jokes around running through traffic in his underwear / sleeping on someone's roof, etc. -- the "straight-up mentally ill" part is pretty Lawrency)

i think the movies were very lawrency, the stuff you just mentioned came from morgan's own antics, no?

While filming A Thin Line Between Love and Hate in the mid-1990s, Lawrence had a violent outburst on the set and began taking drugs. He became increasingly erratic and was arrested after he reportedly brandished a pistol and screamed at tourists on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles.

^^ the crazy-on-highway bit was a direction reference to Martin for sure

While filming A Thin Line Between Love and Hate in the mid-1990s, Lawrence had a violent outburst on the set and began taking drugs. He became increasingly erratic and was arrested after he reportedly brandished a pistol and screamed at tourists on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles.

his discussion of this moment in runteldat had me in tears and i don't even like dude really

we totally need Arsenio to do a 30 Rock guest spot

Hall, or Billingham?

oh right!!! he is already enmeshed in the 30 Rock fictional space

ok this is an even more inane freaks & geeks issue, but on at least commentary track, david (gruber) allen does commentary in character as mr. rosso, which is a weird conceit to start with, but several of the actors are on the same commentary track providing commentary as themselves, the actors

"i was about to do that whole run to the airport thing, like Ross did on Friends, and Liz Lemon did in real life."

^^ I assumed that at that very moment there were at least 10 other people thinking of this thread

"Our relationship is like that relationship on Friends between Greenzo and that crazy chick I was banging"

xp that line made me wonder if someone at 30 rock reads ilx

Jack on 30 Rock confessing to a priest that he once declared "I am God" in a deposition.

"Call me crazy but child actors were much better back in the 80s."
- NPH in this week's HIMYM

In the world of Curb Your Enthusiasm, who played the library cop on Seinfeld if Philip Baker Hall plays Larry's doctor?

There was an episode of X Files which was presented as a COPS style documentary about Mulder & Scully, except in the documentary, Mulder & Scully didn't behave like they usually do in the show.

does that really fall under what this thread's about?

some element of this topic's themes in the mild disquiet I felt the other day seeing Frasier echo Sideshow Bob in singing Gilbert and Sullivan, yes?

there's a scene in Date Night where the 2 main characters are in a restaurant, and will.i.am is sitting at the next table and they're all "oh wow it's will.i.am let's take a picture!" and a minute later, Common, whose 2007 single "I Want You" was produced was will.i.am, walks up to the table, but he's not playing himself, he's playing a corrupt cop who tries to kill the main characters.

you know, if 'i want you' was playing on the soundtrack at that moment, some kind of logistical black hole might have opened up. [love that song btw]

in community there's one scene where abed hits on alison brie in a "don draper" style

yup, and then two or whatever weeks ago, in the season premier, talk soup told him "life isn't a tv show"

uh like 90% of all dialogue between those 2 characters is meta jokes about one comparing their lives to TV shows

Just watching the modern-day "Sherlock" show, and struck by the fact that these characters live in 2010 and yet would have never heard of the character Sherlock Holmes.

yeah I got a bit distracted by thinking that no-one can say 'no shit sherlock', unless they are actually talking to Cumberbatch. Holmes is a giant hole in the universe - everything from the decoration of Baker Street Tube to what a comic stereotype detective looks like (deerstalker, inverness). Can't remember - does any of this get mentioned? Seems like the sort of thing that Moffatt would enjoy messing with as a throwaway.

pretty sure it's just a plain ol' alternate universe identical to ours except there was never a conan-doyle holmes.

"wow, good catch. you're a regular.. uh, a regular... poirot"

right, I was thinking their stereotype detective signifiers would be Belgian accent, moustache.

Over at tvtropes.com, they have a whole article devoted to this phenomenon with loads of examples:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CelebrityParadox

Haha wow:

In a recent and amusing example, actress Jeri Ryan divorced her husband to play Seven of Nine on Star Trek Voyager (he refused to move to Hollywood with her). The divorce was contentious, and a lot of salacious dirt was spilled. When Jack Ryan ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, the release of the documents forced him to withdraw, allowing his challenger to win in a landslide against a last-ditch replacement. The landslide victory propelled the challenger, Barack Obama, to a position from which he could then launch a campaign for President, and... well, you know the rest. But it probably goes differently in Voyager's historical database.

wait didn't nabisco

best TV show with a TV show = The Magic Rabbits on Brookside (RIP)

this is perhaps not bang-on wrt this thread but i tried watching WILD PALMS again recently and the meta-in-retrospect intensity was cranking up the virtual reality techno tv brainwashing vibe so much it was quite hard to withstand.

if you don't recall the first episode: jim belushi plays the main guy, his wife is her out of desperate housewives, his son is the child ben savage from boy meets world. one morning a sexy old flame (samantha from sex and the city duh) turns up at his office unannounced. in the afternoon he discuss this over lunch at a restaurant with warden leo glynn from oz, and their table is served by his inmate beecher. etc etc etc! william gibson shows up later of course - as himself.

best TV show with a TV show = T&A in the Morning on Community or The Girlie Show on 30 Rock or The Larry Sanders Show... imo.

Or early Itchy & Scratchy.

If you were given the power to travel through time and Set Right What Once Went Wrong, what would you do to prevent the atrocities of the past? Well, for many, the answer is obvious: kill Adolf Hitler. This would prevent World War II, the Holocaust, and their myriad side-effects... right?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way.

First of all, it often proves near-impossible to kill the man in the first place — if you try to circumvent his security by targeting him before his rise to power begins, it will usually turn out to be ludicrously difficult simply to find him. (Oddly, few writers think of killing him while he was in the very dangerous position of messenger during World War I, when military records clearly state when and where he served and no one would have blinked an eye had he gotten shot during a run. Second, even if you do manage to kill him, something even worse will appear in his place; an even smarter and crueler leader who ''wins'' the war for the Axis, or an individual killed in battle who grows up to terrorize the world. If someone actually does stop Hitler, they'll almost always have to "undo" it to prevent this. And of course worst of all, if you manage to kill Hitler with no backfire, millions will be saved and the second world war will be averted. This will mean that you will have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler, which means you won't, which means Hitler will live, which means that millions will die in the world war and extermination camps, this means that you will go back in time and kill Hitler...

MIND = BLOWN

if you manage to kill Hitler with no backfire, millions will be saved and the second world war will be averted. This will mean that you will have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler, which means you won't, which means Hitler will live

Hitler will live, in a timeline in which Hitler is killed? I know time travel is tricky but c'mon.

the timeline where you decide to go back in time to kill hitler becomes "dead" the moment you actually kill him. it never ended up happening, because hitler then didn't need to be killed - he was already killed (by you). you would have never thought of it. therefore, logically, that means you didn't go back in time to kill him. therefore he lives. therefore you DO actually go back in time. etc. I believe this is also known as the "grandfather paradox" i.e. what if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather.

this website is sending me crazy and i cannot stop reading it.

xp it's all about multiverses, man

According to Word Of God, Saturday Night Live does not exist in the world of 30 Rock for this reason. Tina Fey has said that making reference to Eddie Murphy is about the closest the show could ever come to acknowledging the existence of SNL.

* In one episode, Liz and Tracy argue about Wayne Brady. A few episodes later, Wayne Brady appeared on the show as a character.
* In an early episode, Jack mentions watching Friends and asks about Ross and Rachel. Both David Schwimmer ("Ross") and Jennifer Aniston ("Rachel") later guest starred. And in an episode after Aniston's appearance, Jenna mentioned her (the actress, not the character).
* Not to mention the fact that Alec Baldwin once guest starred in an episode of Friends as an almost fourth wall breaking character. Constantly commenting on the characters almost as if he watched them on TV...

xp although then the point of killing hitler actually becomes moot...

recent example for me - Dick van Dyke appearing as a doctor on Scrubs. (high quality TV viewing all-round, there.)

# An episode of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter confirmed that Threes Company definitely exists in-universe, but Paul Hennessy's remarkable resemblance to Jack Tripper is never commented on. To make things even more bizarre, Paul then has a dream sequence resembling Threes Company wherein he plays the part of not Jack, but Mr. Roper.

# The Big Bang Theory has cameos by Wil Wheaton, George Takei, Katee Sackhoff and Summer Glau, all playing themselves, and all the characters make a big deal about them. But when Michael Trucco appears as a visiting physicist, no one mentions how much he looks like Sam Anders, despite being big Galactica fans.

* We're treated to an interesting take of this in the Summer Glau episode. Sheldon speculates that if Skynet were real, then the best strategy would be for them to copy and impersonate actors who have played Terminators on film.
* In one episode in season 1, the characters have a discussion about how Mayim Bialik and Danica McKellar are serious academics as well as actresses. It would've been weird enough if just one of them had shown up later in the series, but both actresses would end up playing fictional guest parts in season 3.

Like most rapper-actors, Method Man can most often be found portraying gang members and fictional rappers in his numerous television/film roles. Wonder if any of them listen to Wu Tang.

* In The Wackness he plays a drug supplier who gives the main character a copy of Biggie's Ready to Die AN ALBUM HE WAS FEATURED ON!
* Even more confusingly, RZA has a role as a detective in American Gangster. At one point, the Wu-Tang tattoo on his arm is clearly visible. Note that the film takes place in the 1970s.
* Considering how fond the Wu are of 1970s kung-fu movies, this could almost be handwaved away, but no dice...Shaolin & Wu-Tang, the film the group is named after, was released in 1981.
o Though the 1981 film's title comes from the opposing philosophies of wudang ("internal", after the eponymous Chinese mountain range) and shaolin ("external") kung-fu disciplines.

# Hook handles this quite nicely. J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan does exist, as do all of its adaptations like the Disney film. It was based on a true story that Wendy told him. Hence, everyone knows about Peter Pan but thinks he's a fictional character, including Peter himself after he grows up, so he's understandably reluctant to believe it when he finds out.

i think that's a diagetic version of what tvtropes calls the literary agent hypothesis - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LiteraryAgentHypothesis

(the non-diegetic version of which many authors used to try and pull, i.e. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym)

# In Gremlins 2 this was done several times — the Gremlins attack movie critic Leonard Maltin, who is giving a negative review of the first movie. In a later scene, the Gremlins appear to take over the cinema's movie projector room, using it to make shadow puppets and then show old black-and-white "naturist" movies. They are only stopped when an usher gets Hulk Hogan, who is in the audience at the time, to threaten to introduce the Gremlins to "The Hulkster". In the video release, the gremlins instead wander into a John Wayne movie, but then he shoots them all.

• An even more striking example from the Seinfeld universe comes from the episode "The Boyfriend," when Kramer and Newman express ire at Keith Hernandez having spit at them, Jerry reconstructs their story in a direct parody of the "magic bullet theory" scene from the movie JFK. Later in the episode, Keith Hernandez suggests seeing the movie JFK to Elaine, continuing the joke. The paradox lies in the fact that Wayne Knight, who plays Newman, also appears in the afforementioned scene in JFK. One can only wonder what would have happened had Keith and Elaine actually seen the movie…

Yes, we all can only wonder...

(And there's only one timeline that exists. You can't go back and save Kennedy because he's already dead. The most you could do is put a patsy in JFK's place and have his brains glued to Elm Street, as illustrated in the Twilight Zone episode, ''Profile In Silver''.)

how many twilight zone episodes are there? are they worth downloading or should i just read the wiki synopsis-eses.

in a 1991 episode of Growing Pains, Ben is trapped in the show Growing Pains — that is, a world where his family life is the subject of a trope- and cliché-ridden Sit Com.

speaking of "Seinfeld"...this is kind of an inversion of what the thread's about, but it always struck me as crazy how one of Kathy Griffin's first big TV appearances was on 2 episodes of "Seinfeld," first as a woman who has a bad experience with Jerry, then in the next episode she's in has a hit one-woman-show called "Jerry Seinfeld Is The Devil" and basically gets a cable special and becomes famous for talking shit about Jerry. now IRL, Kathy Griffin is famous for talking shit about celebrities she's met, and has a bit in one of her Bravo specials about how Jerry Seinfeld is a dick, but she never mentions or seems to notice the irony of the situation.

Boy Meets World also had a heavy-handed meta episode where the main character's brother becomes and actor and gets cast in a show called "Kid Gets Acquainted With Universe" and all the rest of the cast is the cast of BMW with different names acting like horrible caricatures of themselves.

Eerie Indiana had some 90s kid meta too:

In this self-referential episode, Marshall finds a screenplay in the mail and suddenly finds himself behind the scenes of Eerie, Indiana where his friends and family are the actors and actresses on the show and everyone refers to him as Omri Katz.

how many twilight zone episodes are there? are they worth downloading or should i just read the wiki synopsis-eses.

― hoy orbison (a hoy hoy), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 9:20 AM Bookmark

Lots of episodes. I'd read the wikis unless you've got a lot of TIME on your hands.

i do kinda. bordering on abed these days.

ha i couldn't parse that because I thought you were comparing yourself to Community character Abed

I haven't watched the 80s Twilight Zones in awhile, so I'm not sure how they hold up. They freaked me out as a 12-year-old.

The 00s ones are pretty bad. There's even one where Katherine Heigel goes back in time to - you guessed it - try to kill Baby Hitler.

She catches him watching an episode of "Grey's Anatomy", so it's really fucked up.

i was comparing myself to abed from community.

Twilight Zone is so worth watching.

oh, then I thought you were saying that you had so little to do that you were basically abed (i.e. in bed, like "asea")

I guess this is why capital letters were invented

Zack in Saved By The Bell could not only break the Fourth Wall but stop reality at will. This raises questions about the nature of Zack's existence. Is he a character, an actor, a first-person narrator, or...a deity? He extended the point further years later by guesting on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to promote "his" show Raising The Bar and explain why he used the stage name Mark-Paul Gosselaar.

In a fourth season episode, "The Monster at the End of This Book," the leads of Supernatural discover that someone has used visions of their lives as the inspiration for a series of horror novels. The books have the same titles as past episodes, and the writer's current manuscript is about what is happening to them right then.

* The title being a reference to a very Post Modern Sesame Street (!) book.
* When the Winchester research the books online, Dean is irked by fan criticism, intrigued by the "Deangirls" and "Samgirls"...and horrified by the slash fans.
"They do know we're brothers, right?"
"That doesn't seem to matter."

That meta stuff on Supernatural was pretty clever in the larger context of the show and that season's big story arc. (My wife kinda begged me into watching this show with her.)

even if i do like gilmore girls, i just can't find myself wanting to watch sn. the marty sue article on tvtropes also blew my mind and now makes me want to change my whole nanowrimo

also noticed they don't have an article on kayfabe or breaking kayfabe or 'breaking' kayfabe etc. in their sports storyline bit - may write to them if i get really bored.

Zack in Saved By The Bell could not only break the Fourth Wall but stop reality at will. This raises questions about the nature of Zack's existence. Is he a character, an actor, a first-person narrator, or...a deity? He extended the point further years later by guesting on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to promote "his" show Raising The Bar and explain why he used the stage name Mark-Paul Gosselaar.

Something I've definitely given thought to --what is the nature of Zach on Saved by the Bell? He not only could stop reality at will but he also could dress up like a woman and -- despite appearing exactly like Zach to his entire audience -- fool the entire cast of the show. Borrowing a plotline from Fallout 3, I'd like to suggest that Zach is actually both a character and the figure running a broad simulation where he gets to live in high school forever (and then college, but that college was essentially high school with the word college slapped on so idk, ymmv). Also of interest to scholars are the episodes where the team goes to Hawaii (iirc? the Bahamas maybe?) and Zach falls in love with the future Carrie Heffernan.

Something I've definitely given thought to --what is the nature of Zach on Saved by the Bell?

this is a thread to embrace such thoughts and not to mock, goole

Zach's always felt like kind of a Ferris Bueller ripoff and I feel like both of their addressing the camera works the same way -- for the most part it's just kind of a playfully elastic way to let them narrate their own story or provide their POV in a way that isn't voiceover but isn't really meant as part of the show's reality, just what's going on in their head. and there's an added layer of a Fonzie-type thing, they're so cool that they can stop time for a second and quip about what's going on.

also noticed they don't have an article on kayfabe or breaking kayfabe or 'breaking' kayfabe etc. in their sports storyline bit

That's because it listed under the category "professional wrestling", here's a direct link:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kayfabe

oooh never saw that

One of maybe three Supernatural episodes I saw had the bros interacting with the writer of that very episode trying to direct the turn of events. I couldn't work out if this was supposed to be way-post-shark-jump or kinda cool.

* The title being a reference to a very Post Modern Sesame Street (!) book.

this book is awesome btw.

Zach's always felt like kind of a Ferris Bueller ripoff and I feel like both of their addressing the camera works the same way -- for the most part it's just kind of a playfully elastic way to let them narrate their own story or provide their POV in a way that isn't voiceover but isn't really meant as part of the show's reality, just what's going on in their head. and there's an added layer of a Fonzie-type thing, they're so cool that they can stop time for a second and quip about what's going on.

totally had this hate-crush on zach for all of the above.

In the movie Empire Records, there's a poster for Dazed and Confused taped to the cash register in the store. Renee Zellweger was in both movies.

One of maybe three Supernatural episodes I saw had the bros interacting with the writer of that very episode trying to direct the turn of events. I couldn't work out if this was supposed to be way-post-shark-jump or kinda cool.

omg yeah seriously - that show's pretty flawed but i thought they pulled this off remarkably well.

spoiler: the brothers become the protagonists of a book series called "Supernatural" which are written by a guy who turns out to be a prophet. in the last season, it's implied that the prophet is in fact God dictating events.

The books becomes immensely popular within the show's universe itself - at one point, the bros attend a Supernatural convention where they're mistaken for cosplay fanboys haha. Also there's the scene where they encounter Sam/Dean slashfic...

lol me not reading anything above the last bookmark.

rory cochrane is also in dazed + confused and empire records!

(xxpost)

i don't think renee zellweger is in dazed & confused, are you thinking of joey lauren adams?

just sayin is otm though

In 'Dirty Harry', Eastwood's character is walking down a street and in the distance there's a cinema showing 'Play Misty For Me'.

naw she was in there n/a

http://eighties.weebly.com/uploads/7/4/6/1/746191/5882261.jpg

I loved the Cosby Show but I hated that they sometimes did this shit too.

like B.B. King was on an episode playing fictitious famous blues musician "Riley Jackson", yet Cliff was also once surprised on his birthday with a private performance by Lena Horne, who was playing herself.

I guess it's cuz they actually made "Riley Jackson" a character who did more than play his instrument, while Lena just appeared for the performance, but WHY COULDN'T HE BE B.B. KING!!!

here's also something I don't get.

Doug Heffernan from King of Queens and Ray Barone from the godawful Everybody Loves Raymond were supposed to be friends, and occasionally made cameos on each others' shows.

However, in a 1998 episode, Kevin James (aka Doug Heffernan) played a completely different character, Kevin Daniels, for SIX fucking episodes, who was a Mets announcer.

He appeared as Doug in three episodes, all of which occurred less than a year after he'd just played Kevin Daniels.

This bothered me a lot until I realized I was giving more thought than deserved to two of the shittiest sitcoms in recent history.

One thing I love about those crossovers is that the King of Queens writers write Raymond's character so differently than the writers of Everybody Loves Raymond. He's so unfamiliar, but he's supposed to be this well known figure from a different sitcom.

Zvookster I'm pretty sure that pic's of joey Lauren adams

oh i think you're right, but well she's in there somewhere

She's uncredited in Dazed and Confused. Which means it's possible that it's not Zellweger at all, but Zellweger's Empire Records character, and that's why the poster is in the store.

Did I just blow your mind?

http://www.moviemuser.co.uk/MovieImages/MAD-Dazed-and-confused/daz-renee-wellweger.jpg

i'm not convinced that's her

except then her character in Empire Records would have to be in her late 30s

I think Zellweger is the second girl who walks by.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo4kDrWBa6c

I watched Kick-Ass last night, and the movie's characters exist in a world where one of them can quote Jack Nicholson's Joker from the Tim Burton Batman, but none of them recognize Nicolas Cage.

xp

also jetpacks

nic cage was in batman?

that would be the shittiest Batman ever

who the hell wants to see a coked out looking batman w/ bugeyes

who the hell wants to see a coked out looking batman w/ bugeyes

REALISM

last night I went to the movies and saw a trailer for Cedar Rapids, which includes a scene of the actor who played Clay Davis on The Wire making a reference to Omar from The Wire.

except then her character in Empire Records would have to be in her late 30s

I'm not suggesting that Empire Records and Dazed and Confused are in the same fictional universe. I'm suggesting that the extra in Dazed and Confused was *played by* "Gina" -- who, let's remember, wants to be a rock star and would probably jump at the chance to be in a movie.

So you're saying it's Renee as Gina as an extra in a film?

That is kind of silly

yeah jaymc that makes zero sense, you're next level with this stuff now.

on the new show Episodes, Matt LeBlanc plays himself, but John Pankow plays a fictional character, which is a double violation because not only were Friends and Mad About You both NBC shows at the same time, but they existed in the same fictional universe via Lida Kudrow crossover twins

yeah jaymc that makes zero sense

Heh, well, it was fun to think about.

jaymc u r making perfect sense u r just so far ahead of the game it is ridiculous

don't let these H.A.M.s get you down

IN THE WORLD OF EMPIRE RECORDS gina played that extra

it is perfectly sensible and my mindstate is all bulhoone now

the solution to this riddle is to forget that the movie empire records was ever made

i for one will not be satisfied until we reconcile all fiction into one consistent universe.

It's been done already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Westphall_Universe#The_Tommy_Westphall_Universe_Hypothesis

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html

Has anyone ever played both him/herself AND a fictional character in the show/series/film?

Ben Affleck in Apatow-verse IIRC

Ooops I forgot "same"

tons, probably. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero and Ben Affleck in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back comes to mind. and there are some instances where the character's similarity to the actor playing them is remarked upon or, in the cause of Julia Roberts in Ocean's 12, used as part of the plot. (xpost)

Not Apatow-verse, but Affleck and Damon both did this in Kevin Smith's View Askew film world.

I don't think Last Action Hero is a good example, as there's an in-universe explanation given to why the fictional character played by Schwarzenegger looks like the "real" Schwarzenegger, and the "real" Schwarzenegger even comments on the resemblance, so the sort of ontological paradox we're talking about here doesn't really apply.

I haven's seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, does anyone in it comment that the fictional character played by Affleck looks just like Ben Affleck? If they don't, then it is a good example, as the "real" Ben Affleck is shown to exist within the same universe, and therefore someone should've noticed the similarity.

I think in principle it's kind of the opposite of an ontological paradox. Most TV and movies ostensibly exist in the 'real world', but it's actually a world that's incompossible with the real real world because it's a world in which, say, Nicolas Cage doesn't exist. To engineer the kind of situation that cancels out that setup makes its world all the more logically compatible with our world.

Tuomas, who cares if it's a "good example"? should i have not mentioned it because it doesn't satisfy some random criteria that has nothing to do with the question that was actually asked?

No, I just wanted to say "Last Action Hero" doesn't really fit the paradox this thread is all about, since it has an in-universe explanation that does away with the paradox. I didn't mean to say you shouldn't have mentioned it, as Stevie didn't specify his question.

last night I went to the movies and saw a trailer for Cedar Rapids, which includes a scene of the actor who played Clay Davis on The Wire making a reference to Omar from The Wire.

― some dude, Sunday, January 9, 2011 11:28 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Saw this, too. Weird how he says "Omar from the HBO program The Wire." I don't know if they had to throw that in there b/c most people have never seen The Wire, but it made the line seem a lot more wink-wink.

i think it was phrased that way because the idea was that's how his stiff square character would say it

Quizas.

I want a Wheels and the Legman spinoff.

Bow-chicka-bowbow-wackawackabowbow BUDADADA NADADADA!

Has anyone ever played both him/herself AND a fictional character in the show/series/film?

I was going to say The John Larroquette Show but John's character was named John Hemingway, not John Larroquette.

i think the question was referring to people playing 2 different roles in the same project, not Seinfeld-type fictionalized versions of the star.

Has anyone ever played both him/herself AND a fictional character in the show/series/film?

In one segment of Coffee and Cigarettes, Cate Blanchett plays both herself and her fictional cousin. (The whole segment is just a conversation between the two, done with special effects.) IIRC the similarity between the two was addressed in the scene, though Blanchett did a fine job making the two feel like different persons via mannerisms, voice, etc.

I loved the Cosby Show but I hated that they sometimes did this shit too.

Cosby Show Universe reused certain actors like nuts, especially if you count spin-offs. I mean, there's this older guy who's in, like, three episodes in a row as different minor characters. (I think he was slated to be part of the Tony Orlando's Community Center spin-off they never made.) And then pretty much half the cast of A Different World already existed up in Brooklyn: Kadeem Hardison went on a double date with Theo, Sinbad sold cliff a car, the guy who ran the burger joint was a janitor at the hospital, etc. I don't know how Denise could walk around that school without constantly being like "I MUST BE GOING NUTS, everyone here looks exactly like some random person I knew in Brooklyn!!!!"

Miami Vice used the same dude (can't remember his name) to play different criminal characters within the same damn season. that pissed me off.

lol nabisco, yea the Cosby universe must have had a population of less than 1,000

the reason MV pissed me off is that they weren't even small ancillary characters, they were large roles in both episodes

I assume they weren't shown in original transmission order, but one day I tuned into Diagnosis Murder to see the guy who got murdered yesterday playing a crazy murderer terrorist guy today.

A tangent re: The Wire. I was greatly confused recently when I noticed one of the actor credits at the end is for Jay Landsman. Turns out he -doesn't- play the character of the same name. Ooph.

Haha yes. That always threw me for a loop.

Alex in Baltimore wrote this on thread "The Wire" on HBO on board I Love Everything on Dec 14, 2007

Basically: Jay Landsman = actual Baltimore cop who Burns worked with and Simon wrote about in the Homicide book. Simon based Richard Belzer's Munch character in the "Homicide" series (later crossed over to L&O universe) on Landsman, as well as the Jay Landsman character in "The Wire." The actual Landsman auditioned to play himself but didn't get the part, and later ended up with a different, smaller role as Mello.

I just watched Dead Man on Campus on tv out of boredom and was surprised to see Jason Segel playing Linda Cardellini's boyfriend, three years before Freaks and Geeks.

okay no other tv show embraces the meta like Supernatural, right? Their latest episode has the winchester bros thrown into an alternate universe where they discover that they're actors named jensen ackles and jared padalecki in a tv show called Supernatural.

The scene where "Dean" reacts in horror when he sees Jensen Ackles (ie himself) in Days of Our Lives is pretty priceless, but also weird. Also Misha Collins as Castiel as Misha Collins is tweeting inside the show which turn out as tweets on his irl twitter account... aaand my brain hurts right now.

I never saw 'Til Death, but the AV Club makes a case for its fourth season being one of the most explicitly meta narratives on TV:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/nobodys-watching-the-strange-genius-of-the-fourth,42394/

Perhaps realizing that the role of Ally (Joy and Eddie's daughter) had been played by four actresses over the course of the series (including Krysten Ritter!) while the role of boyfriend/fiancee/husband Doug had been played by only Sharp, the series embarked on an astoundingly bizarre story arc: It had Doug realize he was a character in a sitcom whose wife kept getting recast, then sent him to psychotherapy to make peace with this fact.

...

The Doug story arc was one of the more unexpected things on TV last year, including the character riffing on the generic brands the other characters were using (and tossing in a tie-in to another storyline, no less), the other characters joking about how if they were a sitcom they'd be in a timeslot where no one would watch them, Doug slowly coming to realize he could neither swear nor have actual sex, and a whole episode where Ally was recast yet again and Doug had to come to terms with it before realizing the actress playing his new wife was much friskier in the bedroom (even as he realized that the camera would cut away before anything would happen).

But wait! There's more! Doug went to therapy with a therapist played by Mayim Bialik, who was gradually revealed to be the actress Mayim Bialik, who was filming a reality show based on her practice, all the better to further disorient Doug. And there were suggestions that she might actually have been the character Blossom, as well as a long, startlingly unfunny scene full of "Yeah, your career's dead, but so is mine!" jokes from some number of former Blossom stars and a fat man who thinks he's Joey Lawrence.

(That's in response to Roz. I clicked on the link to this thread from frogbs's thread and then forgot that Roz's post wasn't new.)

Tony Orlando's Community Center spin-off they never made

what the hell was this show and how could it have never been made?

hey. maybe my thread should just die as this one is way better

anyway i wanted to add; Arrested Development's final season constantly referencing FOX and how their episode count got slashed was pretty jarring

that's not really what this thread's about, though

Me, upthread:

When characters make reference to having been a certain age in a certain year (or having done something that gives their age away within a particular time frame, like being in college or giving birth), I always immediately calculate how old that makes them now, and if that's plausible. (Or vice versa, like if we already know they're in their 40s but then they say their son was 12 when "The Macarena" was a hit, etc.) I invariably miss the next minute's worth of dialogue because of this.

So in Moneyball, we're treated to a flashback of Billy Beane being scouted as a high-school baseball player. Caption reads "1979." So you figure he's 16-18, born in 1961-63. Then, in mid-2002, Beane claims he's 44 years old. So he was actually born in 1958? And was 21 years old when he was in high school? Argh.

The dialogue immediately after that scene was really great.

Ha...

Just had a major flash of this with a Gilmore Girls episode, where Lorelai describes someone as "sounding like a Kids in the Hall character." But then what does she make of her one coworker who's played by Bruce McCulloch?

in the Gilmoreverse, the Kids in the Hall are Seth Rogan, Michael J Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Mike Myers and Steve Nash

I think part of why that one's funny is that we talked upthread about looks, and how it's easy to suspend disbelief and imagine that characters have some independent appearance that the actor is only a vague approximation of, right? But in this case, Bruce McCulloch is totally doing a Bruce McCulloch character, and talking in that Bruce McCulloch voice, and you can't really suspend disbelief that the character you're looking at isn't acting the way the actor is acting.

I don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here.

Big Pet Peeve of mine are movies like Game Change where everybody looks like themselves except for the main characters. Seeing the real Wolf Blitzer standing in front of a big screen with Ed Harris' disguised face on it or the awkward blonde wig posing as Katie Couric interviewing Julianne Moore in character as Sarah Palin distracts too much from the story. Toward the end, when there is footage of Anderson Cooper interviewing the real Steve Schmidt edited with shots of Woody Harrelson portraying Steve Schmidt… I understand that not every movie can be American Splendor, but it's a little much in some cases.

There's this completely ridiculous scene in Nixon where Oliver Stone shows footage of the real Dwight Eisenhower with a CGI Anthony Hopkins as Nixon. How hard would it have been to find some bald guy to act like Ike for a five-second shot? I don't get it.

Bald actors cost money.

This was a lot of what squicked me out about Man On The Moon. Carrey as Kaufman reenacting Taxi scenes with the visibly aged original cast. I don't know how scenes like that can do anything but pull viewers completely out of the movie.

With Danny DeVito cast as someone else entirely….

This was a lot of what squicked me out about Man On The Moon. Carrey as Kaufman reenacting Taxi scenes with the visibly aged original cast. I don't know how scenes like that can do anything but pull viewers completely out of the movie.

― Soggy Cheeseburgers (Deric W. Haircare), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 1:06 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what do you mean by pull out of the movie and why is this bad

lol immersion

I mean "shatters all suspension of disbelief and makes me stop caring about the onscreen drama that I assume the filmmakers want me to keep caring about". It's bad because they made that flick 20 years after the events depicted onscreen. They should've waited, like, 50 years, so an octogenarian Tony Danza could pretend to be 30. Now that would be awesome.

lol ironic distance

so what you're saying is that you disapprove of the pull out method

I prefer for films to have a more consistent rhythm, if that makes sense? I like to feel excited and yet protected within the fertile playground of a film.

Party Down making me overthink stuff...Casey auditions for Reno 911 in one episode and has a scene in an Apatow movie in another, and Thomas Lennon has guested on PD and of course lots of PD people have been in Apatow movies.

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

that's ridiculous even for you

someone mentioned that somewhere before, didn't they? particularly alien and terrifying about this world is that the phrase "no shit, sherlock" can't exist.

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

Every time a character on "The Sopranos" mentioned one of the Godfather movies, I couldn't help wondering "Don't these guys realize that Uncle Junior is Johnny Ola?"

in "the pitch" episode of seinfeld there's a reasonable doubts (91-93 series w/ marlee matlin & mark harmon) poster on a wall of the nbc offices so matlin exists in that universe as herself but in a later season she shows up as laura the the lip-reading girlfriend.

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Monday, June 4, 2012 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3

Not sure how this fits in the thread but I found it interesting that the Facebook episode of South Park showed that Kyle was born in 2001, six years after the show premiered.

I always wondered how old Michael Bluth was supposed to be in Arrested Development - his son was like 15 or 16, and you wouldn't think that he (the responsible one) would have been married w/ children at the age of 21, so wouldn't this make him 40, at least?

http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb52/The_Playlist/movies/donowitz-basterds-true-romance.png

Tarentino says the film producer in True Romance is the son of the Bear Jew from Inglorious Basterds.

So (why yes I'm quoting a Cracked.com article), all the characters of QT's world - the Red Apple cigarettes, the Vega brothers, even the implausible theory that Beatrix Kiddo might actually be Mia Wallace starring in Fox Force Five - live in a historical context where Adolf Hitler SPOILER was gunned down in a movie theater, hence ending WWII just like that.

This explains why sudden violence and pop culture seems so ubiquitous in this QT world.

Kyle was born in 2001, six years after the show premiered.

Pedant alert. The show itself actually premiered in 1997, the viral video that launched the show was from 1995. Still, yeah, that is very interesting.

also one of the things I loved about the 21 Jump Street movie is that the lead actors were clearly in their late-20s or early 30s and NOT high school students and it got pointed out all the damn time

You can bust your head trying to make sense of cartoon logic.

http://cdn.pophangover.com/wp-content/uploads/lisa-simpson.jpg

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Monday, June 4, 2012 8:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had this exact thought

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

In one of the second season episodes someone mentions that a particular Sherlock case was "straight out of a Conan Doyle novella". So presumably in the Sherlock universe Doyle still was a famous mystery writer, only he wrote about some other character(s) than Sherlock. Kinda like in the movie-universe the kid in The Last Action Hero enters, the Terminator was played by Stallone and not Arnie.

The South Park example is a completely different phenomenon called floating timeline, or comic book time.

some prime fodder for this thread here
http://www.avclub.com/articles/scenes-from-the-munchiverse-21-links-between-unexp,83368/

Awesome. I wonder if Heisler Gold ale was one of the two fictional beers I noticed on S4 of Damages -- mostly drunk by John Goodman and Dylan Baker. Couldn't make out the label. I was watching S2 of Breaking Bad around the same time, and it was kind of jolting to hear Walt enter a bar and order a Fat Tire, since you hardly ever hear anyone mention a specific real-life brand on TV.

(And esp. not a New Belgium!)

Todd VanDerWerff @tvoti
Brad Paisley exists in the Nashville universe, yet his real-life wife plays Teddy's girlfriend. So who is Alt-Brad Paisley's wife?!

Also, re Heisler beer (which I mentioned a couple of posts up): One of the things I really like about New Girl is that it makes no attempt at all to hide the fact that its beers are TV-brand. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, a recent episode actually mentioned Heisler by name.

not the first time iirc

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Monday, June 4, 2012 8:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had this exact thought

― goole, Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:37 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, somehow the fact that it's all british makes it seem essentially sherlockish - a different version, myth- or comic-book style.

whereas on 'elementary' they pull the trick of displacing sherlock to new york (even though he keeps referring back to his time in london assisting scotland yard) and changing watson to lucy liu as 'joan' so that whenever someone refers to sherlock, or especially when he introduces himself, the fact that it's kind of weird to us that there's a modern-type person saying that he is a legendary fictional character just gets taken up into the general weirdness of the screen character, as whatsisname acts him.

I thought of this thread the other day when we were watching House Hunters, a show Liz Lemon mentions a few times ("why can't people look past paint color?"), and the person looking for a house was Keith Powell, who plays Toofer.

Thanks to this thread Sherlock just became difficult for me to watch

taylor swift makes a cameo in season 2 of new girl as a character named elaine but earlier that season zooey deschanel is heard listening to "22" and specifically says something like "i just want to listen to taylor swift" and this bothers me and i spent like a half hour searching for this thread to post about it ok thanks

We recently rewatched all the seasons of The Nanny, and it has an overload of "celebrity paradox". First of all, it has more than one case of a celebrity (Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, etc) appearing both as himself and as a fictional person without anyone noticing they look alike. With Fran's grandmother, there are recurring jokes how she reminds people of Millie from Dick van Dyke Show (she's played by Ann Morgan Guilbert, who also played Milly), and so on...

But the whole thing is taken to ridiculous extremes with Fran Descher herself. In one episode she appears as Bobbi Flekman, the character she played in This Is Spinal Tap. In this case, the resemblance between Fran Fine (the character she plays in The Nanny) and Bobbi Flekman is noticed, and Fran is able to succesfully impersonate her. Still, no one finds it a bit odd that the two woman look exactly alike.

Then, in the penultimate episode of the series, Fran Fine, the fictional character, runs into Fran Drescher, the famous actor, by chance. They have a brief discussion, and it turns out that within the universe of The Nanny Drescher is doing a series that's quite similar to The Nanny, and Fine is a fan of it! And apparently that show-within-a-show is about have its series finale (just like The Nanny was in real life), and Drescher even urges Fine to "tune in and watch it next week!". Yet no one seems to notice that Drescher looks exactly like Fine (and Flekman!), and that the events of Frescher's fictional series weirdly mirror the events of Fine's real life...

rewatched all the seasons of The Nanny?

^^Big in Finland, iirc.

It seriously was a pretty good show for the first two or three seasons! The quality drops during the second half (when the Fran/Max will-they-or-won't-they arc takes over the whole show), and the final season is pretty bad, but we needed some mindless Sunday night entertainment, and it's all on Netflix, so...

Tell us when you start rewatching "Coach". We can help you with the American football references.

Never heard of that one, is on Netflix? (Though I don't really care about sports-related shows or movies.)

I kinda teasing you (it's another cheesy sitcom from the 90s), but it does have a Dick Van Dyke connection, I'll give you that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkp7wsJc8MI

ha @ "where do you keep your Oscar?"

Obligatory jokes:

1. Tuomas spent several seasons thinking her last name was "Finn" rather than "Fine" and was feeling patriotic.
2. Show airs in Finland under the title, Hey! We're Babysitting!

Exit, pursued by Frans.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/taylorsimone/oh-mr-sheffield i'd never even heard of the nanny so i have no reaction to this besides 'too much time on ilx'.

speaking of that exactly ^ one of the things that bothers me is when characters in a sitcom wear a different outfit every single episode regardless of wealth

also something i noticed watching new girl, in which jess never wears the same outfit despite living on a teacher's wage

less believable than cartoon characters wearing the same thing every day imo

it doesn't bother me that much. i mean, a lot of episodes of sitcoms span a few days, but probably not all 7 days of the week, let alone episodes covering all 52 weeks of the year. it's pretty easy to assume they're rewearing all those outfits you only see once on the days when no televised hijinks ensue.

'sons of anarchy' (a show which features drea de matteo in a recurring role) had an episode where charlie hunnam reassures a terrified acquaintance he's met in a dark warehouse that he's not going to "do an adriana" on her.

"sons of anarchy" also has had katey segal. as herself, singing a song over a montage that her character featured prominently in.

At least in The Nanny they made a few breaking-the-fourth-wall type of jokes about how unrealistic it was for her to have so many expensive clothes, especially since being working-class was such a big part of her identity... But I guess they were still bothered by it, because they eventually had an episode where Fran explained she had a gay cousin who had managed to make it big as a fashion designer, and most of her fancy clothes were leftovers from him.

is that the episode where her cousin is Todd Oldham, playing himself?

episode 3.15: Fashion Show according to www.thenanny.com

Is Brandon Tartikoff appearing as himself on Saved by the Bell, Night Court, and ALF an example of this or am I thinking too hard?

wow brandon tartikoff was a big enough deal to make cameos on all of those shows?

god can you imagine nyc media blogs writing about brandon tartikoff in 2014

i thought it was an nbc-culture thing

yeah you are right

but even just the fact that "nbc-culture" was a thing

30 rock hasn't been off the air that long

30 rock always seemed like a throwback

just let me be nostalgic on the day that bill carter quits the ny times

We're just rewatching season 3 of Friends, and in one episode Ross mentions Magnum P.I., even though Tom Selleck played a recurring fictional character (Monica's boyfriend Richard) in the previous season. It's hard to imagine Ross wouldn't have noticed Richard looks exactly like the dude from that series, with the same moustache and all.

Though maybe in the Friends universe Magnum P.I. was played by Burt Reynolds?

then, who, may i ask, starred in Evening Shade in the Friends universe, Tuomas? use your brain!!!!!!!!!!

I don't think Evening Shade was ever referred to in Friends, so it doesn't necessarily exist in the Friends universe. IMO the "actor paradox" is a paradox only when Series X mentions another, lets call it Series Y (or Movie Y), where one of the actors in Series X played another role, since that means Series Y exists as fiction within Series X, and the characters in Series X should notice that one of them looks exactly like the famous actor in Series Y. If all the other roles the actors of Series X have ever played should also be accounted for, regardless of whether they're actually mentioned in Series X, that would mean pretty much every series is full of paradoxes. I think we can safely assume that if Series Y/Movie Y is never mentioned in Series X, then it simply doesn't exist in Series X's universe

Similarly, any celebrity that isn't mentioned in series X can't be assumed to exist within its universe. So, for example, no one in Friends tells Rachel she looks like Jennifer Aniston, because in its universe there was no hit series called Friends that made an actor called Jennifer Aniston famous. (Though sometimes the writers can do meta gags based on this, for example the Fran Drescher scene in The Nanny that I mentioned upthread.)

best example of this was in Scrubs when Janitor's past as a cop in The Fugitive was revealed, using the actual footage from him in the movie

The world in classic TV is always on reset - I mean, it's not just the TV show that doesn't exist in its own world - the world of the tv show itself doesn't exist in its own world, not as anything but a static backdrop that is. It's like they all have memory wipes every week except for certain "developments".

Nobody ever seems to have said "you know, let's NOT invite Jessica Fletcher for the weekend, you ever notice somebody gets murdered every time she shows up?" Obviously a brilliant serial killer. Did anybody on "Law & Order" ever refer to a previous case, "say, this is just like that time when....we should probably check that out!" And those shows where celebrities are always dropping in, the characters should be shown later bragging and boring their co-workers "you'll never guess who I got trapped in an elevator with." "Let me guess, a pregnant lady?" yawns the co-worker - sad, really, these delusional people...

I'm also fond of sit-coms where the characters refuse obviously advantageous promotions and life developments just in order to stay in their miserable little traps.

Trapper John M.D.: Hey, wait! You look familiar.

Runner #122: I don't think so. You know Col. Potter?

xp actually, Law and Order did that a lot! there were recurring cases and criminals who got away in previous seasons, story developments on the cops/lawyers backgrounds lives sprinkled throughout seasons (like Lenny's daughter, Munch and Cragen showing up on multiple series, the various crossovers of the Dick Wolf-a-verse that they're doing now with Chicago Hope/Fire/SVU), but it was usually kept to a minimum in L&O - no more than a few minutes per episode, compared to half-soaps like NYPD Blue

I think I only saw a lot of the early Law & Order so I shouldn't have used that as an example. How about the guy who loses to Perry Mason all the time?

As X-Files goes on, even with certain continuing plot lines developing, it becomes hard to understand how Scully could maintain her baseline skepticism, episode after episode. The writers couldn't figure out how to develop her character, or more likely didn't care.

"you know, let's NOT invite Jessica Fletcher for the weekend, you ever notice somebody gets murdered every time she shows up?" Obviously a brilliant serial killer.

oh how I longed for this to be the big reveal at the series finale

best example of this was in Scrubs when Janitor's past as a cop in The Fugitive was revealed, using the actual footage from him in the movie

― Nhex, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 9:49 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did they also reveal that he was a major league baseball player in Rookie of the Year?

this opens a whole new can of paradox worms

also Friends was so huge that a 90s/00s universe in which Friends doesn't exist is entirely unknowable and we can't even be certain if the human race would still exist without it.

re 30 Rock, in the final episode it was revealed to have all taken place within the immortal Kenneth's imagination as he was listening to Liz Lemon's granddaughter explain the concept for 30 Rock to him in the future, so Aniston and Schwimmer appear in it because Kenneth is just peopling it with guest appearances by stars of his beloved NBC shows of the past in his imagination

obviously

also Friends was so huge that a 90s/00s universe in which Friends doesn't exist is entirely unknowable

It's not unknowable, you can see it for over 200 episodes in Friends!

It wasn't Kenneth's imagination at the end of 30 Rock.. it was confirming the "Kenneth is immortal" gag they'd sprinkled throughout the series!

it could be both! anyway it's one way to square the casting paradox circle is all...

i get perturbed when i watch the us version of the office, because i don't get how we're seeing the footage. unlike an ordinary tv show, in which there's a mystical 4th wall that lets us peer into a different reality, everything we see on the office was shot by cameramen who exist in that alternate reality. all the footage exists in that reality. we're also not seeing the actual documentary series that was shown in that reality, ported wholesale to our reality, since that was a single season deal.

david brent from the uk version also shows up on the us version, which means both shows share the same reality. and since the respective pilot shows depict identical events, everything that happened in slough in the beginning also happened in scranton, detail by detail, and was recorded and broadcast. but nobody in that world seems to have noticed.

I think you can easily explain that away when you know that all reality/documentary shows are partially scripted.

that would have to be fully scripted, d'artagnan. such a scandal in officeworld.

I'm willing to overlook the pilot paradox since they finally addressed that there was actually a documentary being shot and involved one of the cameramen (in a subplot that I hated, but he was involved nonetheless) in the final season. Otherwise, it would have rubbed me wrong for the rest of my life.

Conversation between Gilbert Gottfried and Scott Aukerman on last week's Comedy Bang Bang is relevant to this thread (start at 26:08):
https://soundcloud.com/comedybangbang/399-gilbert-gottfried-james-adomian-anthony-atamanuik

Scene in S2E2 of the Netflix show LOVE:

"So, if on Friends, Ross references Die Hard, that means in the Friends universe, Die Hard exists as a movie, right? So then later, Bruce Willis shows up as Ross's girlfriend's dad on the show Friends, how come all the friends aren't like, Holy shit, this guy looks like Bruce Willis from the movie Die Hard."

in the friends universe, the role of john mcclane in the movie die hard is portrayed by s. epatha merkson

http://www.hopeofthefuture.net/references/lastactionhero-lahp.gif

https://i.redd.it/abnaxbr06rqy.jpg

ideally, every character who meets tej should initially mistake him for ludacris and then he has to say "why does everyone keep saying that, i look nothing like that guy"

This is also very much what happened when Glenn Frey guest-starred in the Miami Vice episode, "Smuggler's Blues".

the GOTG universe is walking a VERY fine line having a protagonist obsessed with 80s pop culture and then filling the cast out with notable 80s actors

does kurt russell not exist? he turns into david hasselhoff, who does exist, but why doesn't star lord ask his dad why he looks like kurt russell? and i don't think he ever came into contact with stallone's character but they're making a PRETTY huge leap here. are you really suggesting sylvester stallone doesn't exist in the GOTG universe? does this not drastically change the foundation of who star lord is, as a child of the reagan/stallone 80s?

also why wasn't debbie harry in it, debbie harry should totally be in the next one

don't give them idears!

I'm sure in the Marvel universe Stallone's roles were played by Schwarzenegger, in a reversal of that Last Action Hero gag.

http://www.filmsinfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Last-Action-Hero-3.jpg

And Russell's roles were probably played by Patrick Swayze.

So, the Doctor Who serial 'Remembrance of the Daleks' is set in November 1963, in the days immediately preceding the very first Doctor Who serial 'An Unearthly Child'. A tv is on in one scene, which trails "This is BBC Television, the time is quarter past five and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series Doc-" before being abruptly cut off.

There's also a bus in the background of the New Series 8 episode "Forest of the Night" with a poster advertising Series 8, but this is probably just a continuity error.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/chris-pratt-had-a-very-bad-idea-for-guardians-of-the-ga-1794818393

chris pratt had the same objection

germaine lusssier sounds like an idiot

lol someone made that point about a completely different article over the weekend

https://www.theawl.com/2017/08/forensics-franchises-and-fans

the grinder was great

I'd forgotten this thread. Obv Harry Morgan on MASH pre-Novaked Novak, by guest-starring as a jerk and coming on full-time as a lovable grandpa figure.

As my thoughts go deeper into this topic I remember an episode of Benson (bear with me here), in which René Auberjonois suffers an amnesic mental break in which he believes himself to be a black man. Robert Guillaume, as Benson, is trying to see if he can get Auberjonois's character back to earth. He asks R.A.'s character if he recognizes him (that is, R.G. as Benson). (Seriously, stay with me here.)

Auberjonois answers "yeah, Ben!" R.G. as Benson breathes a sigh of relief. Then R.A. adds, "Ben Vereen!"

This was only comprehensible - let alone funny - if you knew that Ben Vereen and Robert Guillaume looked somewhat like each other IRL. But the fourth-wall breakage was somewhat unusual in those days.

But then likewise, wouldn't Ben Vereen and "Benson" look alike as well? Where was the fourth wall broken?

I remember that episode too. Clayton even started wearing glasses on a chain and cardigans.

does the grinder ever confront the main characters' uncanny resemblances to actors fred savage or rob lowe OR acknowledge the divergence of a universe where these icons of the small screen do not exist

also does the awl always publish thesis papers for college pop culture classes, i have some shit i could sell

I came here specifically to see if anyone had noted the conversation from “Love” (which I just saw) and it feels appropriate that it was Jaymc who dropped it here nearly a year ago

Anyway who do we sue

(Also can someone get Leslie Grossman her own who show) (in which no one ever watched the various things she was a less-notable character in)

It occurs to me that there was a whole conversation on “Love” but like, I mean, “Love” presumably takes place in a universe where Chris Rock exists and yet everyone is just too chill to tell the character played by his brother “damn, dude, you bear a STRIKING resemblance to Chris Rock, you even talk and move your hands the same way”

So like it might not 100% want to pull threads

Oh, ha, I had no idea that that guy is Chris Rock's brother.

So, the Doctor Who serial 'Remembrance of the Daleks' is set in November 1963, in the days immediately preceding the very first Doctor Who serial 'An Unearthly Child'. A tv is on in one scene, which trails "This is BBC Television, the time is quarter past five and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series Doc-" before being abruptly cut off.

― Mud... Jam... Failure... (aldo)

true who nerds will tell you that this clearly takes place in an alternate universe because in our universe, while the first episode of "doctor who" was printed as airing at 5:15 in the radio times, its broadcast was delayed by about ten minutes due to coverage of the kennedy assassination.

Oh man, if that guy WASN'T Chris Rock's brother ... he'd be facing a long line of casting directors saying "listen, your Chris Rock impression is really good, but this audition is for just a regular guy. STOP ACTING LIKE CHRIS ROCK"

(There is another Rock brother who acts but he seems less similar)

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.