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

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.