So, I was at home watching Passions today (yeah, yeah, shut up), and there’s a scene where the evil demons in the basement give Tabitha a book on supernatural child rearing. She makes a comment that she’s been looking for a copy of this book everywhere and that “Even that wonderful ShopNBC, with their great selection, didn’t have a copy.” The show is, of course, on NBC.
I know the Simpsons often make comments about Fox, but they’re always jabs and never such selfish self gratifying remarks. Anyone else out there remember any interesting/stupid remarks like this?
Passions?! Dude.
One of the later episodes of Married…with Children, ‘Kelly’s Gotta Habit’, aired in October 1996 and had Al and Jefferson actually watching the Fox show Cops as an opening segment. They were channel-surfing and they stopped, you heard the theme song which they bopped to like the whitest guys in the world, and then Al commented on how he loved it. It was really really strange.
They often made snide references, a la Simpsons-style, to the Fox network, but the above was the most blatant thing I’ve seen.
Oh yeah, The Sopranos product placements are notorious. Some of them make sense; it really is classy to go to tea at the Plaza, and Mafia wives do buy Lladro figurines and Roche-Dubois furniture; but the Office Depot ones were ridiculous.
Oh yeah, Jefferson made a self-referential remark; in MWC’s 11th season, he said, “Can you believe that show is still on the air?!”
I caught a few minutes of some NBC sitcom I’d never seen before just tonight. . .and in those few minutes they managed to mention NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” twice!
In the same ballpark, all the CNN manages to work in plugs for AOL in their ‘news’ stories.
As much as I loved SportsNight, the episode where Dana went to see The Lion King on Broadway and it totally turned her around from her hatred of musicals, was such a shamelessly pathetic plug on ABC for another Disney property that I refuse to watch that episode ever again. Not on Comedy Central or DVD or anywhere else.
ABC is probably the most notorious for plugging its Disney properties on the network shows.
But NBC absolutely rules when it comes to cross-over appearances from one show to another.
Caroline in the City wanders into an episode of Friends
Frasier takes a flight on Wings
Dr. Susan Lewis flies from Chicago to meet the gang at 3rd Watch
And let’s not even get into Law and Order
And what about Arnold Ziffel on Petticoat Junction? Shameless.
Seinfeld did the writing a pilot for NBC thing, does that count?
I think that was more self-referentially meta.
The first episode of “Birds of Prey” made mention of “mutants in some small Kansas town” or something like that. Reffing Smallville wouldn’t be too bad, 'cept BoP is supposed to take place farther in the future, i thought…
Conan O’Brian often has guests that promote shows on his network. Jon Stewart mocked “Let’s Bowl” and his network on one ep of “The Daily Show.” The Simpsons gets away with a ton of Fox-bashing.
I can’t decide if the Sopranos ep where they shopped at Fountains of Wayne was a plug for the store or a plug for the very cool band named after the store…
The West Wing (NBC) often shows televisions tuned to a network that looks a lot like CNN Headline News, but they’ve referred to Meet the Press and Tim Russert several times.
This isn’t self-referential but Trading Spaces on TLC has to have the most blatent product placement going. Their major sponsors are Swiffer and Lowes and they are SERIOUSLY not subtle about it. I think they sometimes actually break stuff on purpose so they can say “Oh we have to run to Lowes for a new one!” There are gratuitous Swiffer boxes placed all over the set and the homeowners are instructed to Swiffer rather than sweep, tidy, dust or clean. They also now have big Swiffer and Lowes logo patches on their outfits so they look like NASCARs or something. I can’t believe they haven’t said “I need to go to Lowes to pick up a Swiffer” yet! It’s like watching that “Killer Tomatoes” movie with all the product placement gags.
Sipowicz (sp?) on NYPD Blue (ABC, owned by Disney) is forever talking to his son Theo about Disneyworld or the Lion King.
I remember when Johnny Carson had stars from the other networks, they would never refer the actual network. They would say, “such and such is in this and that on another network.”
Boston Public was mentioned on The Practice. Different network, same producer. (writer? director? whatever)
The strange thing about the “on another network” line is that Bill Maher was still doing that on Politically Incorrect when it was on ABC years after talk shows had quit doing that. ABC management or Maher being a smarmy asshole?
I had to share this link
And:
Do you remember when the castaways could win a Visa Card shopping spree? The camera lingered on a 5 second closeup of the card.
Not to mention:
Hold on to your seats:
The Office of National Drug Control Policy is also paying TV shows for anti-drug messages, accroding to Salon.com.
NBC caught a lot of flak back in the early 80’s for some “promos” they pulled during the Emmy’s one year. At that point in time, NBC was thought to be a goner. Even test patterns were pulling in higher ratings than 99% of their shows. However, at the beginning of the season they’d gotten a boatload of decent shows and tons of them were nominated for Emmy’s. The Emmy’s were also broadcast on NBC that year, and so some marketing genius at NBC got the bright idea to have “celebration party breaks” during the commercials which had some shill for NBC in a set which looked like a riotous New Year’s Eve party crowing over whatever show had won an Emmy during the broadcast before the break. Then next day, everyone in the media was talking about what a crappy idea that was!
This is a movie, not a tv show, but probably the most blatant incident of product placement I’ve seen was the whole Subway sandwich endorsement theme from Happy Gilmore. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the product placement actually blown up as a piece of the plot like that.
Also, all the HBO shows constantly reference each other all the time.
constantly…all the time…
way to reduntantly repeat myself.