Whats with Spence Kovak?
I was looking up Jeremy Piven and his character is in this but also in Drew Carey and Coach shows. Is it just a special character?
If I find a penny, You're going down
You are!
shareumm..ok lol
i noticed that too with Paige. her character was on a few other shows as well. i dont know why, but sometimes characters from one show will make an appearance on another show.
~*~Kristen~*~
Yea maybe, all the actors are friends with the producers and just had their character in ohter shows as just an in-joke.
If I find a penny, You're going down
Their was like a sweeps-nite or something on ABC, so on this night Drew Carey, Coach, Ellen (and one other show I think) all sort of crossed over into each other- they all had episodes set in Vegas, so on each show would run into each other. They did something like that with Elizabeth Taylor in 'The Nanny' and a few other shows on the same night appearing in every show looking her missing pearls.
shareo thats cool i guess
If I find a penny, You're going down
The other show was Grace Under Fire.
shareI forgot about that crossover stunt but I do remember the Liz Taylor "stunt" starting on The Nanny then Can't Hurry Love..Murphy Brown and finally High Society but it kinda fell flat because her appearances were shorter as the night went on and by the time High Society came on all you heard was her voice (probably because that show was about to be cancelled)
ABC tried the cossover again during the TGIF nites with Sabrina The Teenage Witch..and Salem and a "time ball" that turned each different show into a different decade incuding You Wish (a good show about a genie) Teen Angel and Boy Meets World.
These stunts never really worked that's why they don't do them anymore and the fact that networks change and move shows all the time would make this VERY difficult
NBC did one too with Friends, The Single Guy and Caroline in the City. I would say that it "worked". I would think they just don't do them a lot because it would get kind of tiresome and expensive to pay the actors to be on all of the shows, plus there just aren't that many sitcoms on anymore.
shareIt used to be a gimmick to get people who watched one show to watch another-- to get viewers for a popular show to watch a new, or flagging show. When Ellen was introduced, it was on after Roseanne, which was a huge hit at the time, and the ads for Ellen, before the first episode showed Ellen sitting on a couch, bouncing, kind of restless, and saying "I'm on after Roseanne!" Back then, having the right lead-in show was really important-- the main reason that ER caught on, and Chicago Hope didn't was probably because the previous hour before ER was Seinfeld, the most watched show on TV at the time, followed by Friends, which was new, but also a hit, while Chicago Hope's lead-in show was Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. Practically no one was watching Eye to Eye, and yet Chicago Hope still made the top 30 the first season. CBS finally did try not pitting it against ER, and giving it a better lead-in, but it was already a punch-line by then.
Because now people DVR shows, or watch them On Demand, instead of in blocks in the evening as they air, networks can't do this anymore. Also, back when Ellen was on, primetime pretty much meant watching one of the big three, or Fox. There were really no major cable shows yet that offered a lot of serious competition, and there were still a number of households that did not have cable, or that had a basic cable that included only 20 or so channels.
It's true that pretty much every household had a VCR, but once you started the VCR, you couldn't watch the show until it was done taping, so people still did try to get home for the original primetime airings, unless they were out all evening, and were going to tape the whole block.
There were, of course, people who only watched one show, or switched networks over the course of the primetime block-- that was the point of the running threads: to get people to watch the entire primetime block on one network.
It still happens. A few seasons ago, The Big Bang Theory had a plot line in which Raj was to be honored by appearing in People Magazine and was telling anyone who would listen. He speaks to a random stranger whose back is to us:
Raj: Hey, I'm going to be in People Magazine!
(The stranger turns and we see it's Charlie Sheen of Two and a Half Men.)
Sheen: Call me when you're on the cover.
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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
That was more of a cameo, than a running theme, or crossover. I watch The Big Bang Theory, although I have my DVR programmed to record it, and while I know it comes on Thursdays, I couldn't tell you what network it's on, or what time, and I don't watch Two and a Half Men. You could still follow either show without seeing one of them.
The running plots, and crossovers, we episodes where you either had to watch all of them, or else you had to skip your regular show. The networks forced you to watch extra stuff. It was a shark-jumping type of stunt. It usually got advertised heavily the week before, so people were prepared for it. Enough people DVR or use On Demand, and skip commercials, and might be oblivious to a crossover, or running block, and just DVR one episode, and get really mad about it. The end result would probably be a lot of file sharing for people who wanted to see the shows they missed, and the network wouldn't be in a very good position to complain about the file sharing, even though they'd probably post the shows on their own websites, but not for free.
It's still frustrating when crossovers come up in reruns. There's a Without a Trace/CSI one that never syncs up, and neither show is streaming anywhere (although, I think you can buy eps on Vudu), and there are two Law & Order/Homicide ones, and Homicide isn't running anywhere. You pretty much have to rent the DVD from Netflix. There are a couple of L&O/L&O: SVU eps, and they all seem to involve the episodes that are not streaming on Netflix right now.
Another example (with a twist) not previously mentioned was a story line in which members of the law firms from Ally McBeal and The Practice worked together on a murder trial. It made news at the time, because the shows were on different networks (that's the twist)! The only thing they share in common is their setting, but more importantly David E. Kelley is behind both shows.
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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
That shows how not-to-seriously the Big Three responded to Fox at first. Ally McBeal was on Fox, so the producers of The Practice, which was, IIRC, on CBS, thought of it as appearing on a little local station, and not a rival network. NBC also lent out Det. John Munch to the X-Files on Fox.
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