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Show Within a Show - TV Tropes

  • ️Thu Jun 14 2007

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShowWithinAShow

Show Within a Show

(aka: Film Within A Film)

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Show Within a Show (trope)

A fictional show that takes place within an actual show; or, occasionally, a fictional installment or incarnation of an actual show.

Shows-within-a-show are usually of low quality. This is intentional: the low quality of the show is part of the joke or the misery of the characters involved. As a general rule, the more central the Show Within a Show is to the actual show, the better — or at least higher-gloss — it will be. On the other hand, Finagle's Law dictates that The Show Must Go Wrong, so don't expect to get through it without at least one catastrophe.

Many comedies have short one-off gags where they parody existing shows. Most of the following examples are recurring and they come in up to four varieties (which can be overlapping):

  1. The characters are involved in the production of the show.
  2. The characters are fans of the show, or only see it occasionally.
  3. The show-within-a-show is a plot point.
  4. The internal show, in either variety, is eerily similar to the real show.

Sometimes these shows can be shown as Separate Scene Storytelling.

For the pre-television history of this trope, once again we must go back to William Shakespeare, who featured plays within plays both in comedy — The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe within A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew actually is one by means of a Framing Device — and in tragedy (The Murder of Gonzago within Hamlet).

If producing the show is important to the plot, see Hey, Let's Put on a Show. If the story baits the audience into thinking the Show Within a Show is the actual show, brace yourself for the Proscenium Reveal. If the Show Within a Show ends up being produced in reality as a Spin-Off, see Defictionalisation; while if the creator introduces one of their other works into the show as in-universe fiction it's Creator's Show Within a Show.

Super-Trope to Game Within a Game, One-Joke Fake Show, Prisoner Performance, School Play and Soap Within a Show. Sister Trope with Fictional Document and Fictional Video Game. Overlaps with Set Behind the Scenes.

Compare with Framing Device, Mutually Fictional, Plot Parallel, Postmodernism, Pushed in Front of the Audience, Recursive Fiction, Recursive Reality (of the "nested stories" variety), and Who Would Want to Watch Us?. May be used to reference a "Clichéd Villain" Accusation.

Nestflix is a Netflix parody site dedicated to these "nested" films and shows.

Please note that tropes existing within the fictional work should be placed in the work page of the actual, extant work.

Examples:

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Arts 

  • Seven Virtues: There are paintings within the painting, those on the ceiling of the church choir-like structure behind the woman more precisely.

Asian Animation 

Films — Animation 

  • The Disney film Bolt is about a dog who's convinced he has superpowers, because he's actually the star of a TV show whose director believes strongly in Enforced Method Acting.
  • Cars 2 has The Mel Dorado Show, which is a talk show hosted by a brown Cadillac who for some reason wears glasses over his windshield (eyes) and Tire Talky, a Japanese talk show sponsored by a purple truck who constantly carries a giant Jumbotron on his trailer (the episode shown on the truck's screen is one where Francesco Bernoulli is shown demonstrating his soccer skills in front of the show's host (a Scion XB)).
  • Or in this case, a Movie Within a Movie, according to Chicken Little (2005). Once originally a story about the title character and his "sky is falling" incident, it was eventually remade into an action-packed science fiction flick.
  • In The LEGO Movie, Emmet and the other citizens of Bricksburg are all fans of a show called Where Are My Pants?. Later on, Wyldstyle "cancels" it when she hijacks the channel to broadcast a message, flinging a pair of LEGO legs at the male actor as she shoos him away.

    "Honey, where are my paaaaaaaaants?"

  • The Disney animated 101 Dalmatians has two. The dogs watch the dog-hero show Thunderbolt, and the criminal sidekicks watch What's My Crime?
  • Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars: Sunny Love Beach is an in-universe television series starring the character of Roger Peacock, which John happens to be a huge fan of. The show soon becomes important, as it’s established as the only thing that can cure the Martian King of his “Tummy Trouble”.
  • In TMNT, Master Splinter is shown to be a fan of an unnamed soap opera.

    Splinter: If anyone needs me, I'll be watching my stories. Cody is going to break up with Donna, I just know it.

  • Toy Story
    • Co-hero Buzz Lightyear has his own show, as well as a film, that was Defictionalized. The show's pilot movie starts with the toys getting the movie to watch, and the opening credits of the series feature Buzz rushing to get to the TV to watch the show.
    • Woody, Jessie, Stinky Pete, and Bullseye from Toy Story 2 are all merchandise of the main characters of an old puppet show called Woody's Roundup.
  • In Turning Red, Mei and her mother Ming are seen watching a Chinese drama called Jade Palace Diaries on TV.
  • In Planet 51, the Humaniacs movie franchise is hugely popular. Several characters, especially Eckle, are fans, and the premiere of a new installment comes in handy when the cast needs to hide an actual alien among costumed moviegoers. It also draws attention to the main movie theme, although more in a foil way than foreshadowing way.

Music 

  • The song "Movie in a Movie" by Tony Goldmark is about a ridiculously big set of nested movies.
  • Selena Gomez's Love You Like A Love Song has a video where she is in a karaoke bar, with her singing in and out of the bar's TV.
  • The Michael Jackson music video for "Thriller" opens with Michael Jackson on a movie date with Ola Ray...which features Michael Jackson and Ola Ray in the lead roles.

Pinball 

Podcasts 

  • The DJ in the Dark episodes on Hi Nay, where callers recount their experiences with the supernatural, often either foreshadowing events or revealing something in the background.
  • Trials & Trebuchets has the Diane Danger adventure novel series, which Player Characters Mira and Integrity are fans of, as well as the "Weenie Hollow" episodes, which are framed as horror stories being read by characters In-Universe.

Professional Wrestling 

Puppet Shows 

  • Dog City (the cartoon) in Dog City.
  • The Mr. Potato Head Show: This is actually the basic premise: the main cast films episodes of a TV show (not all of which we get to see) for a pair of network executives. However, what this show is or even its genre is different in every episode.
  • The Muppet Show on The Muppet Show.
  • In an episode of Dinosaurs (the early '90's animatronic puppet show), Earl watches a sock-puppet show where a woman refers to some skanky-looking characters as "cheap hose/ho's." (See Parental Bonus.) He says something close to, "I love this show. It's got one meaning that's funny for grown-ups, and one that's funny for kids!"
  • Up Late with Miss Piggy on The Muppets (2015).
  • In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance episode "It's Time To Make...My Move", skekGra the Heretic and urGoh the Wanderer exposit the history of the Skeksis, Mystics, and the Dark Crystal through the ancient art of...puppetry. ("Yay.") So, in short, we have a puppet show performed by puppets for other puppets.
  • The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss has a home improvement show called "House and Home".

Radio 

  • Classic British radio comedy shows made by the BBC did this routinely. A stellar example would be sketch comedy show Son of Cliché which featured, as one of its many Shows Within A Show, a scifi comedy serial called Dave Hollins - Space Cadet. After the demise of the parent radio show, the scriptwriters rejigged this for TV as Red Dwarf.
  • The numerous parody serials put on — in every sense of the word — by radio satirists Bob & Ray, as part of their own radio programs. The duo went so far as to invent fictional writers, producers, announcers and cast members, all of whom would frequently argue amongst themselves in the course of an episode.
  • The Firesign Theatre: "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" involves Former Child Star George Tirebiter watching some of his old movies on late night TV, such as the Archie Comics pastiche High School Madness and the war movie Parallel Hell.
  • Played with by Evermore's song "Hey Boys and Girls", from the concept album Truth of the World: Welcome to the Show. As part of the album's plot, it's a broadcast by the eponymous radio station. But it was also released as a single, and when it's played alone on the radio, with the opening line "We're interrupting transmission... welcome to the show" - it looks like Truth of the World just took over your radio station. The show-within-a-show has broken out of The Show and is now running the show...
  • The '60s ensemble comedy show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again had a long-running Show Within A Show called Professor Prune And His Electric Time Trousers, which featured an eccentric old buffer and his intrepid young assistants, travelling through space and time in the aforementioned Time Trousers.
  • The radio series of The Mighty Boosh briefly features Colobos the Crab, a televesion program of which Vince appears to be a fan, although the content is left both vauge and suitably absurd.

Stand-Up Comedy 

  • "If you ever find out what you're watching is a show within a show, sit back and hang on for the ride of your life." — Jack Handey

Tabletop Games 

  • GURPS:
    • GURPS Technomancer:
      • GURPS Magical Items 3 includes a brief description of a setting where The Fair Folk battle with Magitek Humongous Mecha in the chapter describing such mecha. The vignette for an earlier chapter on magic toys suggests that this setting is a popular kids' TV show in the world of Technomancer, with its own line of living action figures.
      • The opening vignette of Technomancer has a police mage channel-surfing while on stakeout. What she finds are mostly news and commercials, but there's a trailer for a show where FBI agents Cat Morrigan and Dara Skuld investigate rumours of The Fair Folk.
      • A Pyramid magazine article on combining Technomancer with GURPS Action has a worked example called El Paso Vice, with an explanation that in the regular Technomancer verse it was a popular cop show in the 80s.
    • Transhuman Space:
      • Many InVid shows are mentioned in the text. The two that get the most attention (or at least a write-up of the fandom) are the space opera Starburst Station and the Arabian technofantasy The Golden Jihad. Starburst fans (described in High Frontier) have created a replica of the station in Earth orbit, where they live according to the (poorly defined) philosophy of the lead characters. Jihadis (described in Toxic Memes) are more into creating fanvids (which the original copyright holders encourage) and are slightly contemptuous of the Starbursters and their devotion to The Original Work.
      • The Pyramid article on combining Transhuman Space with GURPS Action uses the characters from Personnel Files: Martingale Security as an example. As with the Technomancer equivalent, it's explained that you can think of this as an action-adventure InVid series called Martingale!
  • This is part of the meta plot of Sentinels of the Multiverse, with the game being supposedly based on comics created by fictional publishing company, Sentinel Comics. An entire 60+ year publication history has been created for the fictional company with copious amounts of non-existent comics to draw card art and flavor text from.
  • Mention is made of a popular holoseries in Warhammer 40,000 called Arbitrator Foreboding, a member of the Adeptus Arbites who hunts down mutants and heretics with relish and a very big gun.

Theme Parks 

  • Universal Studios:
    • The former Disaster! attraction at Universal Studios Florida was based around the fictitious Disaster Studios, which created "films" such as "Apocageddon", "Das Schurke", "Baboon!", and "300 Knots Landing"; with their upcoming production being "Mutha Nature".
    • The premise of Hell's High from Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights 1998 was that the actors of a horror movie being filmed at a school were possessed by murderous ghosts and started killing people for real when the director yelled "Cut".

Toys 

Visual Novels 

  • Buried Stars is all about a reality show of the same name, and a disaster at a live filming of the show which cuts the top five contestants and one of the staff members off from the outside world.
  • In Dream Daddy, Long Haul Paranormal Ice Road Ghost Truckers is Amanda and her dad's favorite reality show. Amanda even pretend plays the show with Daisy at the cookout.
  • South Scrimshaw:
    • 'The Adventures of Seabun and Monaco' is a popular series of kids stories. Plots typically consist of Seabun's appetite for eating anything damaging a piece of underwater infrastructure, Monaco panicking about a terrible imagined outcome, a repair crew comes by to fix the damage, Seabun recognizing his fault and helps to fix it, and ending with Seabun returning to his burrow with a souvenir and sleeping until he gets hungry again.
    • Another of the optional lore sections mentions a second documentary team is creating their own multi-part documentary called 'Building Bugs', focused on the insects of the planet. The title refers to both the types of insects that build structures and what forces caused them to evolve that way.

Web Animation 

  • The Academy of Magic: The play “Fire and Ice” that Dezi’s class performs is an example. In it, the Adventurer Rebecca and her pet dragon Fireball are hired by a mysterious stranger to retrieve a gem called the Flaming Ruby from a cave in the mountains for her leader. But when they arrive, Fireball meets the Dragon Princess Lunar, and discovers that all the other dragons have been hiding away in the cave, kept alive by the Flaming Ruby. Rebecca and Fireball then follow the stranger back to the King of Ice, who wished to rid the world of dragons, and defeat him.
  • It's pointed out by some of the contestants that Algicosathlon Camp is a reality show, and Season 2 Episode 2 calls the of why it was made.
  • The Debbie and Carrie Show has several examples.
    • The Paul and Vicky/Blazing Beauty Show was originally created by Mary Bliss peanutcat1977 years before Dale Husband started his own series. The two creators became friends and began using each other's main characters in their respective series. The Vicky Jones of the Debbie and Carrie universe is actually the producer and star of her own show, much like Lucille Ball was of I Love Lucy in the 1950s.
    • Debbie and Carrie helped make a horror movie titled "Trick or Threat".
    • They also helped one of Carrie's grandmothers make a movie about her early life as a rock star.
    • Debbie and Carrie also made their own web based news podcast, The America for All network.
    • Debbie and Carrie also teamed up with Vicky Jones to make "Trick or Threat 2".
  • The Cheat of Homestar Runner stars in a parody of G.I. Joe called Cheat Commandos. Also, another character, Stinkoman, has his own anime series.
  • Episode 77 of Bonus Stage has Joel and Phil optioned by G4 to create their own cartoon for the network. The show is unfortunately ruined by Phil's endless suggestions. Much of the episode is a Take That! to G4.
  • Two back-to-back episodes of GEOWeasel feature shows starring the main characters. The first features The Nar Show, which Nar wins in a contest (the flier for which says, "millions will enter, 2.5 will win") and Weas tries at every turn to stop. The second is a dating game that is meant to introduce only one female character to the show.
  • The Most Popular Girls in School: In Episodes 19 and 20, the high school characters star in a reality show called "Babes Having Babies".
  • Red vs. Blue: The Sarge movie trilogy, produced by Red Team until the final installment. Only trailers for said movies are shown, but given that it's Sarge writing the scripts, they're predictably centered around him being a grizzled action hero and the Blues being the antagonists... save for the second movie, which managed to be overdosed with different genres.
  • StarStarSpace in Japanoschlampen, both actually produced by coldmirror. Not only are Wake, Chao and other characters big StarStarSpace fans, but it turns out that Frau Lehrerin is the actress behind Captain Captenne Capitanöse.
  • In the Flash series Banana-nana-Ninja!, "Kikyotushi: The Suburban Ninja" is a live-action show about a guy who dresses like a ninja and kills people on the street in Candid Camera Prank fashion.
  • Smosh Babies has "The LePrawn James Show", featuring a prawn caricature of LeBron James.
  • Homestar Runner:
    • A few cartoons mention a comic Soap Within a Show called Caleb Rentpayer, which involves the Zany Schemes of the title character and his long-suffering manservant Tucksworth. It's never shown, only heard, except for a few seconds when Homestar guest-stars (and is the only one onscreen).

      Tucksworth: You can't marry your guitar, Caleb!
      Caleb: I can try.

    • In the Strong Bad Email "best thing", Strong Bad claims the best thing he's ever seen, done, or eaten is Limozeen: But They're In Space!, a One-Episode Wonder Band Toon about his favorite hair metal band, Limozeen.
    • "Happy Dethemberween" opens with the gang gathered around Strong Bad's television, watching a pastiche of Rankin-Bass stop-motion animated specials called Brundo the Decemberween Yak and the Sword of St. Olaf.

      Strong Sad: Can someone please explain again what a mystical sword has to do with Decemberween?
      Homestar: You hear that nasty ol' puppet! The magic of Decemberween is inside all of us!

Web Video 

  • Dream Machine: West Chesterham, the Downton Abbey parody that brought Leah to prominence, and then Outlander, the Outlander parody that becomes the main project the crew works on.
  • Nightmare Time: The episode "Honey Queen" revolves around the titular Honey Queen pageant, and two contestants, Zoey and Linda. Parts of the show appear in the episode, namely the introduction, Zoey/Linda's talent segments, and the announcement of the winner.
  • On Cinema features Tim and Gregg working on the web series, and later a TV show, Decker. It also has the production of Eecker sometimes impact the plot of on cinema, especially if production has, in some way, created tension between the Tim and Gregg.
  • The Peter Engel-style series Hall Pass, starring characters Cassian and Elijah, features heavily in the second season of Pretty Dudes.
  • Stampy's Lovely World:
    • The Helpers put on a play in the Theatre in Episode 69, "The Show Must Go On", for Stampy's 4,000 subscribers special. The stories for the Halloween Episode "Secret Stories" (Episode 458) are shown through plays at the Theatre as well.
    • The TV shows on the Telly Box television broadcasting studio, as the characters are involved in producing them.
    • The films Renna, Block of the Dead, What Is This? and Beyond The Blocks: Far From Lovely are premiered in the Movie Magic cinema.
  • Minor character Lakitu is the news anchor for Mushroom Kingdom News, a news show in There Will Be Brawl.

Alternative Title(s): Show Within The Show, Story Within A Story, Play Within A Play, Film Within A Film, Shows Within A Show, Work Within A Work