DEAD TOOTH AND NOTHING BUT DEAD TOOTH

'Raising Hope' and 'It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia' both featured girls with a dead front tooth within the space of a few weeks. Greg Garcia, creator of 'Raising Hope' talked about the coincidence in this interview with "Culture Vulture":

Will we be seeing more of Shelley (Kate Micucci), the babysitter with a dead tooth and a crush on Jimmy?
Yes, she comes back quite often, but we took her dead tooth away. I watched the season premiere of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which I think is the funniest show on TV. And they had a woman with a dead tooth. And I was like, "Awww, shit! Ours hasn't even aired yet! How the fuck can you have two people with dead tooths?" So we shot an episode with her last week where we took her dead tooth away. I thought, What's the point? They did a dead tooth, I don't want to keep doing it.
How do you explain it?
Martha's character asks her, "What happened to your dead tooth?" And Shelley says, "Well, I thought it was unique and then I was watching a hilarious episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and a girl had a dead tooth, so I decided to have it fixed." I just figured, we got all our dead-tooth jokes out. And their dead tooth looked better than ours. That just bummed me out. Their's was all cool and gray. Ours didn't look as good. But Shelley has more to offer than a dead tooth.

So he solved his problem, but created one for me at Toobworld Central. The Chance Family and the gang at Paddy's Bar should be existing in the same TV dimension. But Shelley supposedly watched an episode of 'It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia'.

So here's my splainin:

What Shelley saw was an episode of Dennis Reynolds' video podcast, his "vodcast".

What's that, you say? You didn't know Dennis had a vodcast? Well, it's something he must do outside the parameters of the sitcom's half hour. Or during the commercials.

So Dennis must have done an episode of his vodcast about his quickie marriage and divorce to Maureen Ponderosa. Pictures of Maureen with her dead tooth on that vodcast prompted Shelley to rethink having one herself.

BCnU!