MAXWELL SMART: Ah, yes. The old sauna trick. Second time this month!
I think there is an episode of Monk and maybe Psych that also use the same plot of the body in the sauna.
Last night, I watched a two-hour-long documentary on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Half an hour later on Funny You Should Ask, they wanted to know what the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World is.
(It’s the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt.)
They probably did that to Filmore time on the schedule.
Little moments like this crack me up. My wife and I were watching X-files the other day and I told her that the actor looked like “that guy from the show Review”.
It just finished and we put on a Conan clip from youtube. It was from the other night and who walked out as part of the sketch? Yep, that guy from Review. We both looked at each other and said, “Hey, we were just talking about him!”
It’s Andy Daly, by the way, that we were referencing.
He was one of the clues in Sunday’s Washington Post crossword. Not a TV coincidence, but a coincidence to me.
Noted in the Jeopardy! thread: “Falsetto” was the correct response in today’s episodes of that show and Funny You Should Ask.
I thought it remarkable that two episodes of Hawaii Five-O in which the “local expert” advising McGarrett turned out to be a bad guy (“The Finishing Touch” and “Anybody Can Build a Bomb”) should be aired back-to-back this week.
Checking IMDb, however, I see they were actually filmed and presented that way back in November 1973!
Perhaps someone on the production team was curious to find out whether viewers were actually paying attention to the plots.
Just remembered this: Back in the early 1980s, there was a show called Mr. Merlin, with Barnard Hughes as Merlin, still alive and practicing magic in San Francisco. It was on at 8pm, and whatever network it was on (CBS?) was also the channel, in my area, that showed reruns of All in the Family every weeknight at 7:30. So the night it premiered, I went from watching Barnard Hughes as the priest whose car Edith accidentally dents*, to watching him as Merlin.
*with a can of mmmm mmmm in heavy syrup
If you were paying attention, you’d probably assume they wouldn’t use the same twist twice in a role, so it was a double fake out!
Of course, back in the 1970’s they probably didn’t really worry much about things like that.
I’m curious to see if they do it as often in subsequent episodes.
Good point. My impression is that since the “golden age” began (with The Sopranos and other shows in which the writing has been recognized as central to shows’ appeal), people think more about plots and their originality–or lack thereof.
I guess a lot of shows, including the original H-5-0, are today receiving a level of scrutiny that the showrunners never dreamed of, back in the day.
Less of a coincidence than it might seem…
At the beginning of a Law and Order episode they were looking for someone named Freddie. I said, “Freddie’s Dead” and “That’s what I said” multiple times. They found that Freddie was dead and then they made a joke about Curtis Mayfield.
However, almost every time a Freddie is mentioned on a TV show I say Freddie’s dead. And at the beginning of Law and Order there is almost always a dead body and they frequently make a humorous comment.
The other day I was working a puzzle while having a PBS Great Performances concert on TV. One of the clues was “Dr Zhivago leitmotif”, and while I was thinking about it the orchestra started playing “Laras Theme” from the movie, which was the answer I needed.
Another case of keeping a corpse warm to establish a false time of death, this time in an overheated wine cellar, in the Hawaii Five-O episode “Try to Die on Time” (1973).
Thirty years on, this one still weirds me out:
I had come home from college one Saturday, to do laundry and get a decent meal. In the evening, I set out to make the seventy-mile drive back to campus, trying to get back in time to watch Doctor Who with my roommate, at 10:00 on PBS. (That time slot reveals the assumptions PBS made about the show’s fans; this was the 80’s, when American Whovians were a tiny niche fandom who could only aspire to being as cool as Trekkies.) Stuck in interminable lights in a crowded part of the state highway, I realized I wouldn’t make it back in time. Cue the deejay on the rock station I was listening to, who said “It’s 10:05. That’s alright, you didn’t want to watch that Doctor Who rerun, anyway!”
Creepy.
And a Columbo where the murderer was a wine connoisseur who was more broken up that he spoiled all his wine by locking his brother in the cellar with the air conditioning off than he was by the murder. 
In that episode, the body was dumped at sea and not found until several days later. Good luck in determining the ToD for that victim!
What really amazed me was the murderer stripping the corpse and dressing him in a wet suit after a week of lying in that overheated wine cellar. Yeccch! 
That is gonna kill yer wine, too!