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

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/