Shallow Parody / Live-Action TV

• Bob Hope parodied Shogun on one of his specials. The sketch writers assumed Anjin-san (Richard Chamberlain) was the title character.
• The Chaser's War On Everything had a sketch about rumours of a movie version of The Hobbit and imagining it directed by various people (Nick Giannopoulos, Woody Allen and Michael Moore). The first case had two Hobbits, obviously based on Giannopoulos and his The Wog Boy co-star Vince Colosimo, with a dynamic suspiciously similar to Frodo and Sam, and not a dwarf in sight.
• Done intentionally and fully admitted to on the "Movie Trailers That Are Destroying America" segment of The Colbert Report, where Colbert thinks of ridiculous reasons to consider movies offensive based entirely on the trailers.
• The Discovery Kids show Darcy's Wild Life features a parody of Dungeons & Dragons called "Wizards and Warlocks" and it's shown to be an incredibly complicated game that comes with four large novel-sized manuals to explain everything and it has a lot of prep work (including requiring players to write actual biographies of their characters) before the game even starts. Not surprisingly the girl playing the game immediately nopes out of playing when she hears about that. D&D certainly isn't that complex in real life. Also, the characters play the game outside while walking around in the woods as opposed to indoors, so it seems the writers assumed D&D involved LARP-ing. While there certainly are D&D campaigns done via LARP-ing, it's generally not very common (certainly not in the mid-2000s when this show aired) and most campaigns and tabletop games, in general, are typically played indoors.
• The early episodes of the Dead Ringers parody of The Lord of the Rings featured a bunch of basic errors, such as Gandalf sending Frodo on a quest to find the Ring. Later on, they were better researched.
• French and Saunders did a sketch about The Lord of the Rings, apparently without having read the books or seen the movies: Gandalf and Frodo repeatedly mention Frodo's quest to find the One Ring to rule them all.
• Get Smart usually does targeted parodies pretty well, considering its entire premise is general parody. However, its parody of The Avengers (1960s) falls into this. Donald Snead and Emily Neal are British, styled correctly, and have a lot of sexual tension, but that's where the similarities end. Snead bears very little resemblance to John Steed personality-wise, and Mrs. Neal's use of a deadly lipstick is particularly glaring, much more reminiscent of April Dancer than Emma Peel. The episode is funny, but it's pretty clear the creators are unaware of just how stylistically different The Avengers is from most other spy shows.
• Invoked in Nathan for You. Nathan comes up with an idea for a coffee shop that brazenly rips off Starbucks, but with the Loophole Abuse idea that it can pass legal muster by being a parody of Starbucks. So he doesn't bother to make it a good parody, he just makes it enough of a parody that it qualifies under fair use law: the shop is called Dumb Starbucks and every menu item is an actual Starbucks menu item prefaced with the word "Dumb". Not only is this unfunny (or at least So Unfunny, It's Funny), but it ultimately doesn't really have any connection to Starbucks other than being an inferior replication of it.
• The CBBC magazine show On the Waterfront had a regular sketch parodying Thundercats 1985 which seemed to know exactly two things: 1) They were Catfolk 2) Lion-O's name ended "-O", so in the parody all their names ended in "-O", as did nearly every word they spoke ("I've got to go-o to the shops-o.") The weirdest part? This sketch preceded them actually showing Thundercats.
• Many impressions seen in the Snatch Game challenge on RuPaul's Drag Race aren't necessarily "accurate" to the person being imitated, but inaccuracies and/or lack of depth are forgiven as long as Ru finds them funny. Conversely, an accurate impression doesn't necessarily mean it'll be funny, which results in middling to poor performances.
  • Averted (and discussed) by Season 4 contestant Chad Michaels. A professional Cher impersonator, he explains (in a talking head) about how he doesn't go for the usual mannerisms common in Cher impersonations that aren't accurate to Cher in reality. This is immediately followed by Ru doing a stereotypical Cher impression after Chad tells him he's doing Cher for Snatch Game.
• Zig-zagged in Saturday Night Live. Some of their parody sketches will be dead-on with what they're parodying; others...not so much.
  • On one side of the spectrum, there are shallow parodies that are just there to serve as the backdrop for an SNL recurring character to appear ^note (cf. The Mad Men parody on Jon Hamm's first episode quickly devolves to a sketch featuring Jason Sudeikis and Kristen Wiig's characters, "The Two A-Holes" [it was even retitled "Two A-Holes Visit An Ad Agency in the 1960s"], the Basic Instinct parody that has Julia Sweeney's Pat character, the Crying Game parody that also has Pat in it, the Glee parody that has Kristen Wiig's Gilly character) or are intentionally made shallow to deconstruct the work (as seen in the Digital Short Party at Mr. Bernard's or The Little Mermaid sketch with Reese Witherspoon as Ariel telling Eric [played by Will Ferrell] that she's an actual half-human, half-fish creature whose father had sex with a mackerel to create her) or shoehorn a political message or warped Aesop (as seen in their other parody of The Little Mermaid — this time with Tina Fey as Ariel trying to justify Osama bin Laden's burial at sea).
  • On the other side of the spectrum, you have the SNL parodies that are actually well-researched and spot-on, such as the Harry Potter parodies (which use characters that aren't featured in the movie trailers, use the first names of the Hogwarts teachers, and mention things like butterbeer) ^note including the one that has Daniel Radcliffe in it as a washed-up Harry Potter who still lives at Hogwarts ten years after he was supposed to graduate and the one-off parody of There Will Be Blood from the season 33 episode hosted by Tina Fey (which is a Food Network show called "I Drink Your Milkshake," in which Daniel Plainview [Bill Hader] travels to America's malt shops and literally drinks their milkshakes). Bill Hader's Daniel Day-Lewis is pitch-perfect, and the sketch references moments in the film that aren't Memetic Mutations, such as "I'VE ABANDONED MY CHIIIIIIIIIIILD" and Plainview's opening speech.
  • Intentionally used with the sketch "What Is Burn Notice?" from the season 35 episode hosted by Ashton Kutcher. The sketch is a game show in which the contestants have to tell the host (Jason Sudeikis) what the premise of Burn Notice is because he apparently doesn't know. The joke is that even though Burn Notice was purportedly one of the most popular shows on television at the time, no one you know had seen it.
  • The "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketches fall into this trope. The sketches always make it look like Jeopardy! packs its special weeks with A-list Hollywood stars, that they're too stupid to answer a single question, and that Alex Trebek spends the whole time groaning at their inane responses. Anyone who's watched the actual celebrity marathons knows that most contestants are second-tier TV stars, not royalty like Sean Connery; that the contestants do okay for someone who doesn't take the game that seriously; and that Trebek's attitude toward them is solicitous, if anything. Will Ferrell also loved playing Trebek as being borderline British (just as he did with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio spoofs), when in fact Trebek was Canadian and could easily pass for American. Of course, the real Jeopardy has acknowledged the skit a lot of times, and at one point Trebek cameos in one of the episodes. And that said, a lot of this can be chalked up to the Rule of Funny, as a skit about C-list celebrities doing sort of alright at a game show wouldn't be very interesting. Norm Macdonald admitted that the sketches weren't even really intended as a Jeopardy! parody, but as a Recycled Premise version of the Half Wits sketches from SCTV, done up in a Jeopardy! framework (since Half Wits already had a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Alex Trebek, played by Eugene Levy, as the host, it was easy to make that adjustment).
  • SNL's Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens trailer spoof tells us that everyone is too old by recreating parts from IV and V and adding in nonsense like using a walker/walking frame made out of lightsabers. The Force Awakens did face criticism for hitting too many of the same beats as A New Hope, but of course, the movie hadn't come out yet so there was no way the writers could have known.
  • A skit that riffs on The Walking Dead ignores the fact that the show's version of zombies are reanimated corpses to make it a metaphor for racism (the Zombie Infectee is played by Kevin Hart and supposedly "turns" after being bitten by a Walker, with the entirely white group of survivors ignoring the obvious signs that he's becoming a zombie because he's playing it off as them being racist, even after he kills one of their party). In the actual show, zombie bites are dangerous not because they turn people into Walkers (that happens to everyone who dies regardless of whether they're bitten), but because reanimated corpses are loaded with harmful bacteria... and the eating of people, of course.
  • There's a skit mocking the The Try Guys controversy with Ned Fulmer that has various research errors. The remaining Try Guys, Keith, Zach, and Eugene, are portrayed as simply being mad at Ned because he had a consensual kiss and didn't tell them about it. The reason Ned was fired was because he not only cheated on his wife and had a long-term affair, but had it with one of their employees, which would put the company in legal trouble. The skit also portrays them as using the situation to get attention despite the Try Guys waiting for weeks before making an official statement, the situation starting to blow up before they confirmed Ned's actions. There's also a joke about their disgust being superficial when the skit version of Eugene states that there'll be later videos that will have Ned in them. The Try Guys not only went out of their way to edit Ned out of future videos, but stated that for videos where that won't be possible, those won't be uploaded. Add in several more minor inaccuracies such as Eugene being characterized as the most overly emotional of the Try Guys when that's the opposite of how he behaves, as well as the skit portraying Zach and Eugene as the ones who eat weird foods when Keith would be the one that applies to most, and it results in a skit that gets pretty much everything wrong.
• One stand-up sequence preceding a Seinfeld episode jokes that crimes would be easy to solve in Gotham City as there's only a few criminals and everyone pretty much knows who they are. Anyone with even passing knowledge of Batman knows that street-level crime is a HUGE problem in Gotham and is in fact Batman's primary reason for existing.

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