I was just thinking how much i love it when shows feature inside jokes or break the fourth wall in some way. Examples:

Martin:When a women has baby by shooting it out of her across the room and Martin's explanation is "We dont need no embilacle cord,this is tv".

Roseanne:When the first Becky shows up after the second Becky left Darlene says "Where the hell have you been". Major inside joke.

Fresh Prince:When Uncle says a line about how rich they are Will says "If were so rich,why we aint got no ceiling" And the camera pans up to show the set lights.

Anyone remember these moments or have any of your own please post away.

One of the masters of this was "Moonlighting". Breaking the fourth wall was a technique they used frequently, whether by referencing the fact that they were only a tv show, using in-jokes that referred to Cybill Shepherd's previous career/life, or directly addressing the audience.

One example I remember fondly is a suspect shouting, "You can't just burst in here like that!" and David [Bruce Willis] telling him to "Tell it to the writers".

Certain breaches in the fourth wall on that show seem to have been developed as filler for when episodes were running short. For example, in the season-ending "Camille" [a memorable guest shot for Emmy-nominated Whoopi Goldberg], they stopped mid-confrontation for David to wrap up the plotline [virtue rewarded, greed short-circuited, Judd Nelson's character gets approval over who plays him in the movie], and then had a few minutes of the actors stepping out of character to say an awkward goodbye and wish each other a good summer. Many episodes started with the fourth wall breach, as when Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis explained that the episode about to air was filmed in 3-D but the special glasses weren't sent out in time.

At the beginning, it was generally very clever. By the end, this device, like everything else about the show, had been exhausted and misused by the writers.

I've only ever seen one break in the fourth wall, but it's stuck with me for nearly fifteen years: On the original TMNT, there was one episode where a rampaging beast of some sort (a dinosaur, IIRC) was wreaking some sort of havoc. Michelangelo and Donatello were forced to give chase, causing one of them to complain why they had to follow it. The other replied with, "Otherwise there wouldn't be a show." The first just said "Oh," and they kept going. Cracked me up, even at the tender age of five.

"The L.A." episode of the O.C.

It was an entire episode devoted to a show within the show.

A little inside joke in Angel is that Angel loves Barry Manillow. It was funny at first...but they just killed it by referencing it over and over again.

Who remembers the Growing Pains episode where Ben dreamt that he was in a sitcom and he was freaked out that he didn't have a 4th wall and his "family" members were all actors? That's about as much as I can remember (if correctly) because it was a lo...o...ong time ago.

And when, years in the future, a grown-up DJ is in therapy, rocking himself and saying "They say she's the same, but she's not the same. They say she's the same but she's not the same...."

Soaps recast all the time, and frequently end up recasting a role, then eventually getting back a previous actor. On one memorable occasion, the producers/writers of OLTL allowed themselves an inside joke. James DePaiva, after creating the role of Max Holden and playing it successfully for many years, left the show and was replaced by Nicholas Walker. When Walker left, the show wooed back DePaiva. His re-introductory line? "I feel like my old self again."

Love it.

That's the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.

Wasn't there an episode of Hercules or Xena set in the present day that was like this?

One of my favorites was in the final episode of the sitcom I Married Dora -- I forget the exact details, but, the final scene was at an airport, with Dora leaving the country forever. The romantic leading man was left forlornly at the gate, and then, Dora came back out of tunnel looking dazed. He asks her what happened, and she says, "We've been cancelled." I don't remember if they kissed, or just stood there looking at each other, but I think the camera pulled back to reveal the set & audience.

Living Single had the episode in which the viewing audience voted to see which of the girls would go on a date with a character played by Morris Chestnut. When he turned out to be a big jerk, Queen Latifah turned to the camera and said, "You did this to me."

There was an epi of Happy Days toward the end of the series when for some forgotten reason, everyone gathered to wrap up the crisis de jour outside a movie theater. Everyone goes their separate ways except for Howard and Marion Cunningham, and Howard says, "Well, what now?" Marion persuades him to go in and see the movie showing, even though they've already seen it before, because "I just love that little boy--he reminds me of Richie at that age." Howard agrees and they enter the theater as the camera zeroes in on a Now Playing poster of "The Music Man" with a picture of a very, very young Ron Howard (who of course was also Richie Cunningham).

There was a show on g4tv called 'Portal'. It was about a gamer, Dave, and his talking computer VAL and how they go around playing MMORPGS and saving the universe. On the last episode, Dave is talking to VAL and no doubt feeling crappy (for one thing, he's a tree, but that's another story).

"VAL, what if we were a TV show?" he asks. "Would people remember us, or would we just be cancelled?" (It's longer than that but I can't remember it. The show only lasted 2 seasons.)

"We'd be cancelled," VAL says flatly, and then the episode ends.

Two from my teenage years that I remember were Growing Pains, when Ben was grounded and a blue screen popped up that said "Growing pains won't be seen for a month due to Ben being grounded off of tv" or something like that.

There was a scene that I believe was on Blossom that talked about sitcoms being succesful if there was talk of a bathroom. They referenced All in the Family or something. Then after they talked about they made several refrences to using the bathroom, or there was the sound of a toilet flushing in the background.

An episode of Chicago Hope featured a moment where Aaron is asking his wife Camille to change her plans for the upcoming Thursday evening so that they can go on a double date with Jeffrey and his new girlfriend. This was the year that two hospital shows debuted, Chicago Hope was on Monday night and ER was on Thursday and the media had sort of pitted them against each other. Aaron is impatiently telling Camille that this thing with Jeffrey is important and she can watch "Anthony Whatever" another night and she corrects "Edwards" and he replies "Whatever."

Anthony Edwards
Thursday night.
ER/Chicago Hope.

A very quick bit that I found cute.

Homicide: Life on the Street had quite a few cheeky moments, but one I loved was a season premiere to explain the departure of one of the characters. The character, Brody, was an independent filmmaker who'd been hired on and off throughout the season to videotape crimes scenes. Near the tail end of the season, he showed a documentary to the detectives of their daily work lives. In the season premiere of the next season, Brody has left show and Bayliss, one of the detectives asks about his whereabouts. Someone informs him that Brody sold the documentary to PBS and won an Emmy for it. Bayliss gets this incredulous look on his face and says "Brody got an Emmy? They're just GIVING those away!" The inside joke was with how H:LOTS was considered to be the best series(acting, writing, directing) by FAR in those first 4 or 5 seasons but was constantly shut out in the acting and series categories at the Emmys.

Dallas had a couple good ones, like someone telling Bobby "You think you're the Man From Atlantis," and Bobby derisively referring to JR as "Major Nelson."

My favorite one from Moonlighting was at the start of season four or five, which had been pushed back and back for various reasons. The first episode started with Agnes doing one of her typical rhyming phone conversations, but instead of a client, she was talking with the latest in what was clealry a long line of irate viewers wanting to know when the new season would start.

IIRC, that was the episode where Jeffrey gets them to go to his first wife's wedding in the mental institution, an episode that contained another very funny inside joke: The ceremony was performed by another inmate [played by lanky, bearded actor Richard Libertini] who was under the delusion that he was Eva Peron. Mandy Patinkin, who played Jeffrey, had famously played Che Guevara in "Evita", winning a Tony for it. During the scenes before the wedding, 'Evita' kept looking at Jeffrey and saying "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?", then at the end of the wedding, he leads the guests in a rendition of "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina".

The granddaddy of breaking the fourth wall was Burns & Allen. George would keep the audience updated on what was going on. If Gracie was trying to surprise George, he would know, because he's been watching the show right along with us. I think it was the first show to break the wall.

Which leads us to the father of the fourth-wall breakers: Dobie Gillis. Every episode began and ended with Dobie in the park next to a Thinker-esque statue, often in same pose, either expounding on what will occur in the episode, or what lesson he learned during it. And there were a few to-camera solilloquies during the episode.

Back in the early days of Nick at Nite, there was a promo for Dobie Gillis that talked about all the different "walls" that Dobie broke over the course of the series. I think the count got up to the seventh or eighth wall.

One I remember from Quantum Leap: Sam leaps into an actor who's the understudy for the Don Quixote character in "The Man of La Mancha" and eventualy has to go on in place of the lead actor; Scott Bakula played Don Quixote in "The Man of La Mancha" early in his career.

areacode212, the forth wall was quite gleefully smashed on the order of once a season or so.

One of my favourite in-jokes from Xena was in the episode The Play's the Thing, where the much put upon Joxer declares "I'm gonna tell my brother." The actor's brother being Sam Raimi, one of the executive producers.

I liked the sly wink Homicide gave it's timeslot rival in year 5, I think.

Situation: Isabella Hoffman's character, Megan Russert, wasn't coming back (a real-life pregnancy, I think) and so the writers had her just up and marry a French ambassador she met through her 'cousin' Tim (yes, an NBC in-joke/nod).

Gee hears about all the "changes" in his squadroom, with Russert's leave last. Gee is all ,"She just marries a French Ambassador? That sounds like something from Nash Bridges." Very much like the Chicago Hope/er nod.

It's Garry Shandling's Show pretty much had no fourth wall to speak of. One of the best examples was an episode where they gave everyone in the audience an instrument, got them to wave back and forth for one shot, and Shandling said "Man this orchestra is fantastic. I hear it's the first time they've ever been together too".

Oh yeah, It's Garry Shanding's Show was 100% meta. The theme song:

This is the theme to Garry's Show,
The theme to Garry's show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song.
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's Show.

This is the theme to Garry's Show,
The opening theme to Garry's show.
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits.
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle.
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show".

[whistles]
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.

I remember an episode of Blossom that featured a shout-out to Sienfeld that featured them trying to recreate the rhythm of that show while saying "about nothing" a lot. Embarrasingly unfunny.

And I also remember an early episode of Northern Exposure with Maggie & Joel going on a quest that ended up involving cherry pie, finger snapping and the theme song to Twin Peaks - because for a bit the two shows were thought to be similar. It was cute.

I love Boy Meets World when Minkus suddenly reappears. When asked where he's been all that time he points to the fourth wall and says 'in the other part of the school. The best part is when Cory and Shawn look at the camera as if they're looking at some new place they've never clapped eyes on before.

IIRC, it was actually a cop performing an interrogation, and David walked in. My first meta moment. And my first soda spit at the television. Ah, memories.

The longest running inside joke in my estimation was on SNL.

Lorne Michaels appears on "Weekend Update" (first cast) to offer The Beatles $5000 to reunite on the show for a couple of songs (Side note: Legend has it that Paul and John were in town that night hanging out and watching the show, and almost decided to show up).

Later in the season, guest host Paul Simon is doing a sketch involving him walking backstage. We see Lorne talking to musical guest George Harrison, saying "Well, you understand, the money was for all four of you together...."

About two decades later (The Sandler/Farley/Meyers days), Paul McCartney is the musical guest. Another opening bit involving the host walking around backstage. Pan by Lorne talking to Paul, saying "Well, I don't know. I mean, I gave the money to George thinking that he'd take care of the rest of you...."

Of course, the final scene of Newhart owns the inside joke half of this thread.

This thread has been a lot of fun. The Gary Shandling reference above reminded me of one of my favorite episodes, which may have been Gilda Radner's last television appearance. Of course, she was getting wild applause, and Gary kept telling her to ignore the audience, but every time he left the room or turned his back, Gilda threw her arms in the arm and made the crowd go wild. I get all smiley just thinking about it.

On a more somber note, there was another nice "third wall break" in the first Muppet special following the death of Jim Henson. I can't remember exactly how they led into it, but toward the end of the show, it showed all the main characters (excluding Kermit) in a typical "backstage" scene, and they are actually discussing Henson's death, and the fact that there are puppeteers. In unison, the characters look down (as if to see their particular pupperteer), then back up again in horror. "Let's not do that again!" the all agreed. It was kind of sweet and funny, and hit just the right note for the tribute.

Saved by The Bell--Zach frequently broke the fourth wall to chat with the audience during his "time outs."

I loved the first episode of Reboot's third season, where they went inside an Evil Dead game. At one point Dot says something like, "What kind of sick person would play a game like this?" and then they all look accusingly at the camera. Given the kinds of games I played at the time, I always took that as a personal shout-out to me.

Babylon 5 had a couple during the gift shop episode-

Ivanona: "This isn't some deep space franchise, Babylon 5 is about people!" (Referring to rival show STDS9)

Then they shoved a teddy bear into space at the end. At that time series regular Bill Mumy was producing a SF kids show for Nick called Space Cases. There's an episode of that show where the kids on the ship recover a teddy bear from space, and discuss how anyone who shoves a teddy bear into space has to be a mean guy. (JMS reportedly got a chuckle out of that joke)

Great SNL mention, Eris Rising, but wasn't it $3000 instead of $5k? I think I remember that, but I can't be sure. And my favorite part of it was that Michaels mentioned that they could "give Ringo less" if they wanted to. And later, he upped it to $3200, which, as he pointed out, was "$50 more per Beatle!" Inspired....as was, as you pointed out, the follow-up with Harrison, later.

And Eris Rising, you also beat me to the Newhart mention. That's gotta be not only one of the best last-episodes of all time, but also the best in-joke.

But really, pop culture is always eating itself--TV perhaps moreso than others. Great thread.

Family Guy's episode Lethal Weapons. After a big huge knock-down, drag-out fight featuring all six family members, they're talking about violence in society.

Peter: "I think it's all the TV we watch. Why doesn't the government step in and do something to regulate it? And shame on the network that puts this junk on the air!"
Lois: "Uh, Peter, maybe you shouldn't say anything bad about the network."
Peter: "Oh, what are they gonna do, cut our budget? Heh. I'm gonna go get a beer."

And then he goes to the kitchen in extreme cuts; one shot standing still, one shot where he's tilted forward and placed a few feet ahead, one shot of him tilted back and near the kitchen, one shot of his head sticking out of the kitchen, etc. Heeee.

The Drew Carey Show also did a "time slot opponent" joke. When they were put up against Third Rock from the Sun, the DCS season premiere started with an extended fantasy sequence where Winfred-Lauder was invaded/attacked by aliens. At one point, Drew shouts, "18-34 year olds, follow me!" as he goes running up a staircase.

I was at a convention where Peter David (SF writer, did a few B5 eps) was telling the story about the bear. Apparently he and his wife gave it to JMS as a gift, but JMS wasn't really into that sort of cute 'n cuddly stuff, so he put it on the show and wrote the bear in space scene.

DS9 has one of my favourite 'in-jokes'.
Near the end of its run, Kira ends up acting as a surrogate mother for the O'Brien's baby, mainly because she was the only suitable person around after Keiko got injured while pregnant. A few episodes later she's complaining to Doctor Bashir that "[this pregnancy] is all your fault!"
In reality it was Alexander Siddig (Bashir) who was the father of Nana Visitor's (Kira) real life pregnancy which had necessitated the whole surrogacy plot in the first place.

I remembered another one. On Charmed's "Bite Me" episode (about vampires, go figure), there's some sort of quote from Leo that goes along the lines of, "No, vampires were cast out of the underworld. They're part of a whole different network now." (Emphasis mine.) Okay, Kern, we get the Buffy-switching-networks joke. Ha-ha-ha. Not.

I never really much liked Firefly until one scene when they were discussing the possibility that one of the characters (River) was telepathic. Wash looks dubious and says "That sounds kind of like ... science fiction." And Zoe says "Sweetie, we're living on a space ship."

Wow, it took a while for this thread.



Also, Cory and Eric's sister disappeared for a couple of years before coming back and saying she spent a lot of time in her room.

Oh, oh! When I watched "Boy Meets World," I remember one episode where Cory's older brother went to Hollywood to be in this television show. The show's name? "Kid Gets Acquainted With Universe" and the actors of BMW played the actors of KGAWU playing characters based on their characters.

Also, Stargate SG-1's 100th episode was about a television show produced called "Wormhole X-Treme!" which was based in the SG-1 team. There was a good reason for it, but at the end, there are these two guys walking down the set, discussing when the episode should fade out. One guy says, "Right about... now." And then the episode fades out. Also, after the episode aired, there was a "Behind the Scene of Wormhole X-Treme!" where the interview the actors playing the actors playing the characters based on other characters. It was hysterical. One guy was like, "What do you mean this isn't a real show? How can it not be a real show? I get real money, right?"

I'm going to date myself now, but in an episodes of The Monkees called "The Monkees at the Circus", Mickey Dolenz starts humming the theme song to "Circus Boy", a show he starred in back in the late 50's.

And that guy was played by the real brother of the actor playing the Wormhole X-treme director who was also the real director of many of Stargate’s episodes. My favorite part of that episode was when one of the Wormhole X-treme actors is talking to the director about an episode they were shooting where she’s hit by some energy ray/field and becomes invisible and can walk through matter. She asks him the eternal and pesky tv sci-fi question: why doesn’t her character fall through the floor?

Wasn’t there a scene in Brody’s documentary where two of the characters are chasing a suspect and run right into Barry Levinson shooting a movie on the streets of Baltimore? I thought this was somewhat of a double in-joke because not only was Levinson one of the executive producers, but, at one point during the shooting of Homicide, real Baltimore cops had chased a suspect into a scene they were shooting on the streets of Baltimore.

The way I remember hearing Belzer tell the story wasn't that the cops were chasing the guy, but that he ran out of a store he'd robbed and right into the H:LotS shooting location, and surrendered to the actors.

edited because "story" is not the same word as "store"

Normally the only way I find out about in-jokes is by someone else telling me about it; I'm rarely hip enough to pick up on them by myself. So I was prettty damned pleased with myself when I, on my own, noticed one in an episode of Quantum Leap. It was the episode where Sam leaps into a glam rock star, whose manager is played by Peter Noone (the former lead singer of Herman's Hermits). In one scene, Sam is talking to Noone in an office, and the Muzak in the backgrund is an instrumental version of "Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter," which was, of course, a hit for Herman's Hermits.

Family guy did it in another episode too. The one where Death sprains his ankle and Peter has to go kill the kids from Dawsons Creek. "What else am I going to watch on Wednesday night?" asks Peter. Then he looks nervous and says,"Except the fine quality programming on Fox, of course."

Best. Meta. Ever. was the X-Files episode 'Hollywood A.D.' that has a producer following the agents because he wants to make a film "loosely based" on their lives (of course it turns out to be practically identical). It would take much too long to detail all of the in-jokes in that episode, but for starters the 'stars' of the film are played by star David Duchovny's wife, Tea Leoni, and friend, Gary Shandling, who makes a reference to DD's numerous appearances on his show, the Larry Sanders Show (they always joked that they were lovers and Gary asks Mulder how he 'dresses' himself). Also, Scully says to Mulder that she thinks Tea Leoni has a crush on him. DD wrote and directed this episode and he has the film-Mulder and film-Scully hook up in a coffin, whereupon Scully confesses that she is really in love with Assistant Director Skinner--whom I believe gets the APA title for the film and later Scully jokingly says to Mulder that she is in love with Associate Producer Skinner.

The pitch by the producer is probably the most meta, where he descibes what his idea for the film is: Scully is "Jodie Foster's foster child on Payless budget" and the creator said that Scully was in fact modelled after JF in Silence of the Lambs; Mulder is "Jehovah's Witness meets Harrison Ford's Witness" and that question about HF is what Duchovny goofed on in Celebrity Jeopardy.

Also, Mulder's speechifying at the end about how they've been reduced to charicatures of themselves was pretty Duchovny-esque commentary on the X-Files fandom and subsequent crazy hype of the show, imo.

I won't go on. I think some people didn't like the cheeky extended in-joking but I thought it was hilarious.

Need I even mention The Simpsons?

Episode in which Homer becometh a missionary. Bart calls into a Fox telethon.

Rupert Murdoch: "You just saved my network!"
Bart: "Wouldn't be the first time."

Adding on to The Simpsons - the episode where Marge has road rage and ends up saving the day. They ask Marge how she figured out how to save they day and she goes on and on about NBC. It ended with something like, "Yeah you can check out NBC right now.." And the episode ends.

At the end of the Family Guy episode Da Boom it spoofed Dallas with the dream. "I dreamt there was this episode on Family Guy and [babble]." Bobby responds, "What's Family Guy?" And they stare at the screen. Creepy yet hilarious.

Great idea for a thread.

Towards the end of the second season, they started doing stuff like this on Mad About You during the credits.

One episode Paul was on the phone someone and he was narrating the credits. At the end he said: "Show the guy on the phone, then the sound of the race-track, do the thing with the hands, and then the stupid horse with wings."

Then there was another when they were reading fortune cookies. The last one was "When in doubt, cut to the skyline." Followed, of course, by a cut to the skyline.

And there was one more that I vaguely remember where Jamie and Paul are telling the viewers that Murray (the dog)'s mother on the show is actually Murray's mother. And then Paul Reiser's mother phones in.

The first ever Simpsons in-joke was actually in the first season, in Krusty Gets Busted. Marge complains that she doesn't get the appeal of Itchy and Scratchy, and Lisa responds "If cartoons were meant for adults they'd be on in primetime." I saw that episode when it first aired, when I was seven years old. I believe it was my first ever viewing of an in-joke.

The Pez's post made me look up the exact wording of Homer's apology for plugging NBC, because it was hilarious:



There's also a fake-out at the end of Part 1 of "Who Shot Mr. Burns?", when there was a huge promotional campaign for viewers to guess who shot him. Dr. Hibbert says, "Well, I can't possibly solve this mystery...can YOU?" and points directly to the camera, ostensibly at the viewer. There's an immediate cut to Chief Wiggum, who says, "Yeah, I'll give it a shot. I mean, it's my job, right?" Still cracks me up, all these years later.

To add another layer of inside jokiness onto this, Mitch Pileggi's wife was Gillian Anderson's stand-in. So one could say that Scully was in love with AD Skinner.