Thursday, March 15, 2012

DEJA VIEW: BUCKLAND HAUL



Poor old Ted Buckland.......

You'd have to feel sorry for the lawyer representing Sacred Heart Hospital... if you weren't too busy laughing at him.

In the 'Cougar Town' episode "A One-Story Town", Ted was passing through Gulfhaven with his a cappella homies, on their way to an audition with Disney. And while crashing at Jules' house (since they met last season in Hawaii), Ted suddenly had an attack of "deja view"......


It certainly dramatized a question that has plagued televisiologists over the decades - how come TV characters don't recognize when other characters look exactly like people they've met before?

Actors were always being re-used on TV shows, sometimes several times over in the same season. Back in the early days, the producers probably didn't pay much attention to such a detail. (The same with trivial details and script continuity.) At the time they had no conception of the future in DVDs and syndicated reruns.

But it could make you question the eyesight of 'The Rifleman' - how could Lucas McCain be so blind not to notice how so many visitors to North Fork looked like Dabbs Greer or Royal Dano or John Anderson?

And why didn't 'Columbo' ever notice that a good percentage of his murder suspects looked like Robert Culp, Jack Cassidy and Patrick McGoohan? And that's not even taking into account all those characters who looked like Vito Scotti or my buddy John Finnegan!

And yet they don't notice such things overall. So when a character like Ted Buckland comes along who can see the resemblances, it must be due to them having a touch of tele-cognizance - the knowledge, sometimes only a sub-conscious level, that the world they live in is being televised.........

BCnU!

No comments: