A swing and a miss: Channel 5 in the UK was a Simon Baker fest for a while and I thought “Man, that guy’s busy”. It turns out that when they bought the rights to show The Mentalist they also bought his older series The Guardian (which hadn’t previously been aired in the UK) and would show them back to back.
I wondered at the time if he had just bought a house or something and wanted to pay it off quickly, so he just told his agent, “Say ‘yes’ to everything.”
Diego Klattenhoff is appearing in The Blacklist on NBC and Homeland on Showtime. If I hadn’t looked up the cast of Blacklist because of that feeling that he looked familiar, I never would have known his name.
Joel McHale hosts The Soup and stars in Community simultaneously.
And The Soup Investigates. But shows like that are closer to voice work in that they require a very small fraction of the work week.
The other interesting thing about that is that during the 1977-1978 season those two shows were on ABC and NBC respectively, so Richard Anderson was playing the same character simultaneously on two different networks.
Not to mention Martin E. Brooks as Rudy Wells, who also appeared in both shows. In fact, they were on different networks. The Six Million Dollar Man was on ABC. The Bionic Woman started on ABC, but moved to NBC midway through its run.
Edit - Ninja’d! D’oh! :smack:
Donal Logue was on Sons of Anarchy and The Vikings and Copper until the Vikings started taking too much time. His character on Sons was killed off. Guess that happens when one films in California and the other in Ireland.
Iain Glen was Jorah Mormont on Game of Thrones and Sir Richard Carlisle on Downton Abbey simultaneously. A check of IMDb shows he was on two other shows overlapping with Game of Thrones, but I never heard of either before: Prisoners’ Wives and Breathless.
Giancarlo Esposito - Gus Fring, Breaking Bad; Sidney Glass, Once Upon a Time; and Capt. Badguy-forgot-his-name in Revolution.
That reminds, me, Jerome Flynn was in Game of Thrones (Bronn) and Ripper Street, as an even bigger cast member, Sgt. Drake, at the same time.
Joanne Kelly is on Warehouse 13 (which will end next season) and the new show *Hostages *(which isn’t going to be renewed).
Katee Sackhoff wrapped up her run on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA as Kara Thrace; her last seven episodes were in February and March of '09. Also in February and March of '09: her four-episode recurring role on NIP/TUCK, as Theodora Rowe.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan was in Supernatural, Greys Anatomy & Weeds in the same season. His characters died in all three shows
In the first three episodes of the current LAW & ORDER SVU season, Pablo Schreiber continued his recurring role from last season; said third episode aired on the same night and network as his appearance in the pilot episode of IRONSIDE, sure as he then spent the rest of the month appearing as a castmember in episode two and three and four, at which point the show was of course put out of its misery.
Note, too, that during the summer of '13, he was George “Pornstache” Mendez on ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, which maybe also counts.
[EDITED TO ADD: the roles on SVU and IRONSIDE were different characters; a spinoff on the same night would be unremarkable, but this was just weird.]
I’m at home catching up on some of the week’s television, and just noticed another one: Khandi Alexander is currently appearing in new episodes of both Scandal and Treme.
Ashley Williams had a recurring role in E-RING – that show with Benjamin Bratt and Dennis Hopper, about life at the Pentagon – starting in September and October of '05, and continuing on to January of '06.
From January to April she did six episodes of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER – at one point appearing both there and on E-RING during the same week in March – before returning to E-RING in May, by which point she’d already been in four April/May episodes of HUFF, with four more yet to come in June.
I think the granddaddy of them all was Leo G Carroll, who played Alexander Waverly on both The Man from UNCLE and The Girl from UNCLE in 1966–67.
Jim Backus did precede him, but playing two different characters (Thurston Howell III and Mr Magoo) in 1964–65.
LeVar Burton hosted READING RAINBOW before, during, and after his seven-season run as Geordi La Forge on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, which (a) I figure deserves at least half a point – plus another half a point, since it (b) overlapped his hundred-plus episodes voicing Kwame on CAPTAIN PLANET, squaring off against everybody from Meg Ryan to Jeff Goldblum to Martin Sheen.
For those who are interested, “Magoo!” means “I can do it!” in Russian. 