Of the various renderings of real-life television series in fictional media, which did you like, and which did you dislike?
I cannot think of any that I disliked, but I do have a couple I have really enjoyed, both from the Ramona books:
–St. Elsewhere: In Ramona’s World, there was a fictional soap-opera-type medical series that Ramona and Daisy enjoyed that was entitled Big Hospital. The reason why I thought that St. Elsewhere was well-represented by Big Hospital was because, according to Cleary, Ramona wanted to “forget her troubles and lose herself in the corridors of the hospital where people in green pajamas fell in love if they weren’t too busy saving lives or comforting the lost and lonely.”
–Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest: In Ramona Forever, there is a passage at the beginning of Chapter 4 that states, “The house felt lonely when she (Ramona) let herself in, so she turned on the television set for company. She sat on the couch and stared at one of the senseless soap operas Mrs. Kemp watched. They were all about rich people–none of them looking like Howie’s Uncle Hobart–who accused other people of doing something terrible. Ramona didn’t understand exactly what, but it was all boring, boring, boring.” That passage describes all three of those series to a T (curiously, KL didn’t seem to be like that to me). Another reason is that these programs (Dallas and Dynasty especially) were widely syndicated in the 80s, so it would stand to reason that Ramona would have had multiple chances to happen across them.
In The Big Chill, Tom Berenger plays an actor who is obviously supposed to be Tom Selleck (who’s from Michigan, as the characters in the movie are all supposed to be). He’s the star of a TV detective series, called JT Lancer.- it’s obviously supposed to be Magnum P.I.
This is the opening of that show:
Selleck himself thought it was hilarious, and said he wished Kasdan had offered HIM the part.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. We didn’t see a lot of the show they were producing, but the “Nic Cage” recurring bit actually showed up on SNL a few years later. “Peripheral Vision Man” was about all that needed to be said about any recurring character on SNL I couldn’t stand or that got a movie made of it that I couldn’t stand.
Also, that awful telenovela on King of the Hill where the priest would blow some bad guy away and mutter “Vaya con Dios.” Years before that came on, I was in a Peruvian restaurant in DC with my mom and the show that was based on was playing on the TV, featuring a violent, unsavory Catholic priest. In the credits, it became clear that the telenovela was being financed by the (Mexican branch of the) Seventh-Day Adventist Church…
Murder, She Wrote had an episode where the head writer of “Buds,” a hit sitcom about six 20-something pals living in New York City, was murdered right after announced she was eliminating one of the characters to boost ratings. The cast of “Buds” was pretty much a one to one correlation to the cast of Friends.
IIRC, the Lisa Kudrow character did it, as the writer was going to reveal she was actually many years older than she claimed to be and kill off her character.
In the comedy*** Forgetting Sarah Marshall***, the character Sarah Marshall is an actress who stars in the TV drama series Crime Scene, which is clearly a spoof of CSI.
There’s another one that is not a true “series,” per se; it’s a news program. The short-lived late-90’s comedy Lateline was said to spoof Nightline w/Ted Koppel, IIRC.
Well, both ***The Dick Van Dyke Show ***and the movie ***My Favorite Year ***showed fictionalized versions of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows.
Dick Van Dyke’s character, Rob Petrie, was supposed to be Carl Reiner. Reiner himself played Alan Brady, who was a stand-in for the maniacal Sid Caesar.
In My Favorite Year, Joe Bologna played Stan “King” Kaiser, another stand-in for Sid Caesar, and the show was re-titled Komedy Kavalcade.
The second (I think) season of *30 Rock * featured the new NBC reality hit MILF Island, a kind of mash-up of all the *Bachelor/Bachelorette *type shows and the loathsome atrocity that was Temptation Island.
It was hilarious, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s actually done the MILF/Cougar thing on one of those shows by now. There are so many I can’t keep track.
At one point, Chicago Hope on CBS appeared opposite ER on NBC. One episode of Chicago Hope was about a commercial or promotional video that was being filmed to promote the hospital. The commercial was shown in the episode, and it was a shot-for-shot remake of the opening credits of ER.
Here’s a clip from Season 1 of Dynasty, from the episode called “The Chauffeur Tells a Secret,” 2/16/81, that I believe will explain how I made the analogy between Dynasty and that passage in Ramona Forever. The part I want to highlight starts at the 2:36 mark of this clip and goes to the 5:45 mark.
Thinking of fictional versions of Friends, IMHO the only remotely amusing bit in the really awful and unfunny “comedy” Sour Grapes was a brief parody of the Friends opening sequence. This comes up because a minor character in Sour Grapes is an actor who plays the Joey role.
There was an episode of Two and a Half Men that featured a show-within-the-show that was sort of a Baywatch-ier version of CSI called Stiffs. It starred a busty investigator who bent over a lot while wearing a low-cut top. This in and of itself wasn’t that funny, although it did do a pretty good job of parodying CSI dialogue, but I laughed out loud when the Stiffs title sequence began. As with the real CSI franchise, the show’s theme song was an old hit by The Who…Squeeze Box.
The show Stargate: SG1 had an entire episode about a character who has inside knowledge of the secret Stargate program and he’s helping produce a science-fiction television show called Wormhole X-treme that’s based on the ‘real-life’ SG1 team. So, basically, it was a chance for Stargate: SG1 to do a hilarious parody of itself.
The 2nd-to-last episode of The Nanny had Fran Shefield encountering Fran Drescher in an airport. Miss Drescher then reminded Mrs Shefield to tune in next week for the series finale of her hit TV The Nanny.
I think there was also an episode of The Lucy Show where Lucy Carmichael met Lucille Ball.