Series / Billy on the Street

Billy on the Street is a satirical game show starring Billy Eichner, who also created and executive produced the show.

Every episode sees Billy running down the streets of Manhattan and stopping random passersby to ask them questions. These questions often pertain to celebrities or pop culture, but rely entirely on Billy's subjective opinion. Billy also picks random people, as well as celebrity guests, to partake in rapid-fire quizzes such as "Old or Gay?" The celebrity guests also sometimes join him in asking people questions, which often poke fun at them or their career.

The series premiered on the Fuse channel on December 18, 2011, before it hopped to truTV in 2015 for the fourth and fifth season. It continued as an online segment on the Funny or Die YouTube channel. The second to fifth seasons are also available on Netflix.

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For a dollar, name any trope:

• Adam Westing: Billy Eichner plays a very angry and campy version of himself.
• Anviliciousinvoked: Parodied with the "Whack-a-Joel" game, a version of Whack-a-Mole where John Oliver hits his viewers over the head with his opinions just like he does on Last Week Tonight.
• Bathtub Scene: Rachel Dratch clumsily recreates a sexy scene of Margot Robbie in the bathtub from The Big Short as part of the "Escape Margot Robbie's Moment" obstacle course.
  Billy: Jump in the bathtub and make me hard while you talk about the recession in layman's terms!
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Exaggerated as part of the "Escape Margot Robbie's Moment" obstacle course, where Rachel Dratch has to climb through a huge replica of Martin Scorsese's big bushy eyebrows.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • Billy accuses a woman of having bad taste because her favorite show is Impractical Jokers, which shared a network with Billy on the Street at the time.
  • In the episode with Aziz Ansari, Billy thanks Aziz for returning to non-streaming television and makes a crack at the show's host network: "Some call it truTV, I call it obsolete."
  • When John Oliver guest stars, Billy remarks that he's probably the smartest person to ever be on TruTV, tied with the host of Lizard Lick Towing.
  • In the Jacob Tremblay episode, Billy interviews a woman who's on her last night visiting New York City, and he remarks, "You're capping it off by being on a segment on TruTV. You win some, you lose some."
• Call-Back: In the Lupita Nyong'o episode, Lupita references the Anna Kendrick episode where Billy awarded Anna the apostrophe in Lupita's last name, explaining that her mom (who lives in Kenya) watched that bit.
• Camp Gay: As part of his Adam Westing, Billy plays up his homosexuality on the show, gossiping about celebrities and frequently referencing gay culture.
• Carried by the Host: Most of the comedy comes from Billy's theatrical personality as he badgers passersby with bizarre questions, then hams it up at their responses.
• Comically Small Bribe: The recurring segment "For a Dollar" involves Billy offering people one dollar for answering questions quickly. Justified, since most of the questions are very simple ("For one dollar, name a woman") or entirely subjective.
• Cosplay: In "Do Gay People Care About John Oliver?," Billy and Elena dress as C-3P0 and R2-D2 respectively to ask people if they're excited to see Rogue One.
• Double Standard: During the anti-Billy protest in "Curbside Conga Line with James Corden," a black man yells at Billy, "If a black guy ran up in the street asking about Diane Keaton, he would be shot!"
• Fag Hag: In the episode with John Oliver, Billy encounters a young gay man with a bunch of female friends, one of whom refers to herself as his "homo honey."
• Game Show Host: Billy Eichner asks all the questions and awards the prizes.
• Gayngst: Billy references the media trend towards this in his Aziz Ansari episode: "If you're gay on TV, you're either funny or suicidal! What if you're both?!"
• Has a Type: In one episode, Billy interviews a bisexual man named Kevin and asks what his type in men is. As soon as Kevin admits that he's attracted to men like Billy, Billy runs away disgusted.
• Leslie Nielsen Syndromeinvoked: Parodied in the episode with Lupita Nyong'o, where he told people that the 12 Years a Slave actress was going to have her own comedy special, and had Lupita recite jokes from comedians like Louis C.K. and Andrew "Dice" Clay.
• Lethal Harmless Powers: In the Andy Samberg episode, Billy pitches a superhero film about the Starbucks mermaid, where her power is the ability to put caramel in anything...which she uses to make her opponents so obese that she can easily destroy them.
• LGBT Fanbase: invoked Billy often references his guest stars' gay fanbases, such as running around the street with Debra Messing shouting, "It's Debra Messing, you gays!" at random people's faces trying to find her gay fans. In one episode, he tries to find out if John Oliver has an LGBT fanbase by asking gay people if they care about John Oliver. (Many of them don't seem to care very much.)
• Literal Metaphor:
  • The segment "What does Michelle Rodriguez Bring to the Table?" has actresses wearing masks of Michelle Rodriguez and Amy Adams competing to carry food items to a table, so Billy can remark on whether either actress brings anything to the table despite what their critics say.
  • Rachel Dratch receiving "backlash on the web" for lip-syncing "Fuck the Police" during the Margot Robbie obstacle course is illustrated by Rachel literally getting caught in a web.
  • To illustrate how Last Week Tonight hits its viewers over the head with messages, Billy sets up a whack-a-mole game where John Oliver literally hits his viewers over the head.
  • The "Can You Separate The Art From the Artist?" game has the player try to take DVDs of a problematic actor's work out of giant statues representing the actor — literally separating them from their art.
• No Indoor Voice: Billy is a very loud individual. In the Jacob Tremblay episode, he challenges a woman who claims she was a loud singer to see if she was louder than him.
• Political Overcorrectness: The mock protest in the James Corden episode has people screaming at Billy for enforcing stereotypes about gay men and calling him sexist for using the terms "sir" and "miss."
• Race Lift: Parodied: Billy plans to make a reboot where the Sun-Maid Raisins girl is Latina, but plans to cast either Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson (two white actresses) to play her.
• Rapid-Fire Comedy: Especially in lightning rounds. Because Billy is constantly moving and often doesn't give people much time to answer questions, the comedy from the questions and answers is very fast-paced.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: In one episode, Billy goes around telling people that Seth Rogen just died...then reveals that Seth is standing right behind him, holding the camera, so he can see their reactions.
• Roger Rabbit Effect: Subverted in the Adam Samberg episode. Billy says that because animated movies are so popular, he's going to ask people to interact with an animated squirrel (or mouse), which they'll add later using CGI. Billy tells people to react to the squirrel wanting to run away and supposedly climbing all over their bodies. The joke is that they never actually edited in a CGI animal, so the people just interact with an invisible space.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Billy often abandons people mid-conversation because they said something that frustrated or bored him.
• Stepford Smiler: One of the Undesirable Prizes Billy offered was a stamp book of Mario Lopez expressing emotions like happy, sad, scared, tired, dying, and fine...with the same smiling face in every image.
• Suddenly Shouting: He'll often be having a very calm interview with somebody on the street, then burst into yelling because they said something that excited or enraged him. One example when discussing superheros with a guy named Kevin:
  Billy: Was Green Arrow funnier than Deadpool? Because that's impossible.
  Kevin: No, it really is hard to beat Deadpool because I saw the film five times in thea—
  Billy: [throws his head back] OHHHHH! I KNEW I LIKED YOU!
• Take That!: The show pokes a lot of fun at various Hollywood personalities:
  • In one quiz show, Billy uses the game "Fox News Anchor or Pilgrim?" to make fun of the names of various anchors on the Fox News Channel.
  • During the "new rebooted characters" sketch, Billy asks somebody if they should cast Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Lawrence to play a Latina Sun-Maid girl, poking fun at their whitewashing controversies.
  • Another of his ideas for a rebooted character film is a story about the Spotify logo, where its weapon is a very pathetic royalties check.
  • Billy repeatedly makes fun of the way James Franco talks about his sexuality. He even does a quiz show called "James Franco or a Real Gay Person?" where he contrasts Franco describing himself as gay under certain circumstances with gay people just saying things like, "I'm gay. I'm 100% gay," or making it very clear that they don't use being gay as a public persona.
• Transatlantic Equivalent: The Russian channel Che created the series Begushchy Kosar as the Russian equivalent to Billy on the Street. It features Alexey Zhirov offering random passersby the chance to win 1,000 rubles by answering quick questions.
• Waving Signs Around: The anti-Billy protest in the James Corden episode features people with picket signs like "Bully on the Street" and "Rachel Dratch is NOT a prop!"

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He's making dreams come true, Billy on the street!