True Television Confessions

I'm just going to go ahead and admit it.

I'm out of the loop when it comes to the TV shows that everybody else is apparently watching.

This has always been more or less true I suppose.  I didn't get into Buffy (easy, Shriner...) until halfway through Season 7. I completely missed Friends*. I've seen maybe 5 episodes of Seinfeld**. I've only seen the first Season of Arrested Development and that was years later on DVD. And despite the Espenson connection, I still haven't gotten around to watching Battlestar Galactica.

*OK, that one was sort of deliberate.  I saw one episode in the first season and decided they were trying to imply that their Friends were cooler than my friends*** and got an enormous chip on my shoulder about it.

**This was definitely deliberate.  There isn't a single character on that show that I wouldn't cheerfully beat to death with a shovel, and I end up spending enough time with people who irritate me as it is without having to seek additional ones out.

***To be fair, they probably were.

So,with that acknowledged, here's my sum total of knowledge about what the cool kids are watching
Keep in mind - Much of it is probably completely wrong

Orange is the New Black

-OITNB apparently refers to this show.  A lot of the Internet is bewildering if you don't know this.
-Apparently Kate Mulgrew is in it
-Apparently it has more than its share of lesbian sex
-I'm desperately hoping there is no overlap between the previous two points.

House of Cards

-Kevin Spacey is The President.
-And Evil.
-Possibly the actual Devil, I'm unclear on this point.
-It's a remake of a British show, which makes the title make more sense
-Kevin Spacey sure does play a lot of bad guys, doesn't he.
-Except for The Ref.  He was a nice enough guy in that.
-What was I talking about again?  Oh... Right.  House of Cards.

Game of Thrones

-Sean Bean dies in everything.  As previously noted.
-Dragons are apparently the nuclear option if you're vying for power and territory
-We should all be a little more cautious while putting together our wedding guest lists
-There is still very little reason to think that George R. R. Martin won't die before finishing the series

TV is so much more fun this way

The other day I saw a post on Facebook which mentioned that the best possible ending for the show Breaking Bad would be for Walter to go into the witness protection plan and get assigned to the family from Malcolm in Middle, which would then be where that show began.

While we take a moment with the unrivaled awesome of that idea, I would humbly suggest that ALL TV characters played by the same Actor should be viewed as the same character - regardless of the many ridiculous mutually exclusive details of said characters.

For Example - Who wouldn't watch a show about a Young Witch who - despairing over a breakup with her new and not as interesting lesbian lover after averting yet another Apocalypse - Casts a memory spell on herself and takes up with a specially created Sex-Robot who thinks he's a Lawyer and their wacky friends in NYC?  (Note:  How I Met Your Mother is much more interesting if you take this as the premise.  Particularly if you wrap movies into it and have to reconcile why S.H.I.E.L.D. has one of their top agents infiltrating the gang)

But watch out...

Because Rogue Demon Hunter Wesley Wyndam-Price - killed by Cyrus Grail, had his body appropriated by the Dollhouse Corporation and after an unsuccessful attempt at making him a congressman now have him infiltrating Agent Maria's confidences as occasional Dalliance-Partner, News Man Sandy Rivers!

Or what of Holland Manners?  

After being killed by his Arch-Foe Angel, the Senior Partners chose to punish him by exiling him to a poorly explained Island-Hell-Dimension, where he was stranded by a plane crash and separated from his newly assembled wife/construct?  Plus whatever the Hell else Sam Anderson got up to on Justified, Hawaii 5-0, Criminal Minds and like 40 other things.  Seriously, the guy's been on freakin' everything.

And Canton Everett Delaware III! 

Denied the ability to Marry his true love in the Nixon era, he sold his soul to the devil, eventually becoming King of the Crossroad Demons and then King of Hell?  Who can Chronicle his many faces and adventures* - all that is known is that he ends up in the far future working under the name of Badger.

*I certainly can't.  Because again, Mark Sheppard has been on every TV show known to mankind.  I'm not kidding.  IMDB him.

And how about that time that Maude made her stupid best friend into a Ho', at the same time turning Mary Tyler Moore's Sue-Ann Nivens into a complete moron - All as some sort of horrifying Florida-Based Eugenics Experiment?  

Once we get into the British shows things get a little trickier as there are really only 6 character actors working in Britain since 1960.   Fortunately, they've pretty much all been on Doctor Who - so you can use that to iron out most of the kinks in their timelines.

I'm telling you - TV gets so much weirder, so much scarier, and so much better, when you put a little effort into it.

If this becomes a thing, I totally want credit for coining the term

The thing about the history of television, when you stop to think about it, is that there isn't actually a tremendous amount of it. (The first commercially available sets coming in 1928, 1934 or 1936, depending on how pedantic you are about what qualifies as a proper television set and how comfortable you are giving Germany the credit- although to be fair, 'Telefunken' is a freakin' awesome name for a company)

It's even more recent that we stopped thinking of television as being something other than just happening and then being gone forever. (I'd insert an obligatory rant at this stage about how the BBC destroyed more than half of Doctor Who made between 1963-1969, but then I'd have to get into the whole thing about rumors that they've found most of them in Africa, and honestly I really am trying to focus here.)

I had a whole section here about the way TV changed into marketable product, but I've deleted it (see how it feels, BBC?)  so that I can skip ahead to the chase.  The landscape of television is nearly always still heading into uncharted territory simply because it hasn't been around long enough for it not to.

The reason that I bring this up is that I've noticed an increasing occurrence lately of a phenomenon that I'm going to dub 'Gen2 Cameos'.  (Dear Internet, please remember where the term came from.  Unless its existence leads to some sort of war atrocity, in which case please disregard this request.)

What I'm talking about here is when an actor makes a cameo appearance on a sitcom* solely because they co-starred on a previous sitcom with one of the cast members.  Like when John Mahoney shows up on Hot in Cleveland (He was Martin Crane on Frasier alongside Jane Leeves and later Wendie Malick for those of you who don't follow the reference.  And some of you are in Morocco, so that's totally understandable.)  In the past this wasn't particularly common, simply because it was much less common for someone to have more than one sitcom, Lucy Not-withstanding.

*It also happens on drama programs, but not in quite the same way.  See: Alexis Denishof's guest run on Dollhouse versus his guest appearances on How I Met Your Mother to see what I mean there.

One of the notable points of interest with the phenomenon of Gen2 Cameo (gonna keep hammering in that term until it sticks people) is that it often is more telling for who doesn't get invited to make a cameo than who does.  For example, I notice that both Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow have appeared alongside Courtney Cox on the show Cougar Town, and yet none of the guys from Friends have.  And Courtney is one of the Producers, so it's not like she couldn't make it happen if she wanted it to.  Sure, maybe the guys have just all been busy.  I suppose that's possible.  I still find their absence to be interesting.  Much like the way I find it interesting that Sarah Michelle Gellar has yet to appear as a Gen2 Cameo on... um.. .anything.  With anyone she's worked with before.  I'm just sayin'...

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that it's only a matter of time before Melissa Peterman drops by on Malibu Country.*

*For the sake of Morocco - she played Barbra Jean on the sitcom Reba, which starred Reba McEntire, who now stars in the sitcom Malibu Country.  I mention her here almost entirely as an excuse to shoehorn in a mention of the fact that I happen to know her.**

**As a Friend, <Facebook>, if nothing else, although if we bumped into each other I'd give it a 63% chance that she'd remember my name.  And as much as Vizsla = Knowledge, Vizsla even more = Gratuitous Namedropping.*** 

***I'll refer you to next weeks 'Famous Dans that I know' column, where I plan on bathing lovingly in the reflected glow of mentioning 20-30 times that I know Dan Harmon.  I'd totally send him unsolicited spec scripts for Community, but I suspect that Facebook has an 'unfriend' button for just that sort of situation.****

****I wonder if Dan and Melissa know each other....*****

*****I no longer have any idea what I was talking about before I started footnoting footnotes..