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

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.