Reality Subtext / Live-Action TV

Reality Subtext for Live-Action TV.

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• Because of the intense, complicated nature of their storylines, this is often seen on Soap Operas.
  • On Another World, actress Judi Evans' Real Life struggle with losing her pregnancy weight was turned into a storyline for her character in 1997, with the actress admitting that many of the things her character Paulina Cory said were things she had said to her own husband (though her Real Life methods never became as extreme as her character, who turned to diet pills and eventually ran down her friend's son—who lived, fortunately—while high), while several others' decision to have plastic surgery was also played out on the show. But the most prominent example has been with onscreen romances eventually transcending to Real Life. Two especially eerie examples include two characters who were involved in an extramarital affair—the actors eventually left their spouses to marry each other, while at least two others had a couple's Real Life love story virtually parallel their onscreen one—meeting, friendship, dating, marriage, children... and divorce.
  • NYPD Officer John Perry had a recurring role as a police officer on One Life to Live. On September 11, 2001, he was at One Police Plaza (just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center) when he learned of the attacks and dashed to the site to help. He was killed when the South Tower collapsed. In September 2002, the first anniversary was commemorated when Llanview's Police Commissioner Bo Buchanan gazed at a photo of Perry and sadly commented, "I can't believe it's been a year" The in-universe story was that Perry had been visiting New York that day (the show is set in Pennsylvania), but died just as he had in Real Life. It's not hard to imagine that Robert S. Woods (who played Bo), didn't have to do much acting to convey his grief. Until the end of the series, Perry's picture was visible during scenes set in the police station.
  • In the spring of 1993, actor Clint Ritchie was badly injured in an accident on his California ranch. Storylines for his character Clint Buchanan were nixed and the character was written off for the summer as having been injured in the same manner. (Once again, it's highly likely that Robert Woods' didn't have to do much acting to convey his joy when Ritchie returned to the set after recuperating.)
• The "show about making a show" premise of 30 Rock gave numerous opportunities for this; a notable example is a Season 6 arc involving Tracy Jordan making offensive comments about gay people, which aired less than a year after a similar real-life incident involving the character's actor, Tracy Morgan.
• Following John Ritter's tragic and sudden death (he collapsed on set), his show 8 Simple Rules aired a sobering episode about his character dying in an accident and his family dealing with it.
• All Saints: The episode "Spinning Out", aired in late 2008, was the last one to feature Mark Priestley as Dan Goldman before the actor took his own life. The story arc involving Dan's wife disappearing had to be rewritten, ending with Erica being found dead offscreen and Dan leaving the hospital to deal with his grief. It's extremely clear that, in the final scenes, while the characters are reacting to the news of Erica's murder, the actors are still processing the loss of Mark.
• American Crime Story creator Ryan Murphy has admitted that he's wanted to do a season dramatizing the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton since the series began, but had to delay production on the season due to behind-the-scenes difficulties. By a complete coincidence, the season—titled Impeachment—finally began production in mid-2019, shortly before it was announced that U.S. President Donald Trump would be facing an impeachment investigation of his own.
• The last two episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos hosted by original host Bob Saget did not have him ad-lib a line to his wife. This was because his marriage was falling apart at the time.
• Angel:
  • Similar to breakup between Buffy and Angel on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see below), in the S1 episode where Angel becomes human and he and Buffy have 24 hours of perfect bliss before he voluntarily gives it all up ("I Will Remember You"), Sarah Michelle Gellar was so distraught by the plotting that viewers can actually hear David Boreanaz consoling Gellar (by name) rather than Angel comforting Buffy.
  • Cordelia's pregnancy in Season 4 coincided with Charisma Carpenter's real-life pregnancy, and also threw out an idea to have the season end with a fight between Angel and Cordelia.
• In Anger Management, Charlie threw away his baseball career during a fit of anger, and his work as a therapist is his attempt to get his life together again — this mirrors Charlie Sheen's infamous meltdown, where an argument with Chuck Lorre cost him his job on Two and a Half Men, with Anger Management being an attempt at a second chance. This was even referenced in Lorre's show: When Alan suspects Charlie is still alive (and bent on revenge), Walden asks "Did he ever try anger management?" to which Alan responds "He did it for a while, didn't work."
• Mr. Humphries of Are You Being Served? was eventually promoted to Senior Salesman because the producers were tired of casting elderly actors who subsequently died (Arthur Brough, Harold Bennett), retired (James Hayter), or just didn't work out (Alfie Bass, Milo Sperber, Benny Lee, Kenneth Waller). In turn, actor John Inman asked for Humphries' promotion not to be formally acknowledged, because he was superstitious about all those dead actors before him.
• Arrested Development loves these.
  • In Season 3, the Bluths' continual struggles to keep the family business afloat are reflective of the showrunners' continual struggles to keep the show on the air. Maeby's attempts to pitch a movie based on her family life are also reflective of their attempts to revive the show as a movie. One episode ("S.O.B.s") even features the Bluths trying to secure financial help from a rival real estate company, which is pretty blantantly based on the showrunners' efforts to get the show picked up by a different network—to the point of Leaning on the Fourth Wall.
    George: Well, I don't think the Home Builders Organization is going to be supporting us.
    Michael: Yeah, the HBO's not going to want us. What do we do now?
    George: Well, I think it's show time.
  • Bob Loblaw (Scott Baio) replacing Gary Zuckerkorn (Henry Winkler) as the family's lawyer—a nod to Baio joining the cast of Happy Days late in the show's run.
  • Season 4 had a subplot about GOB being unable to recognize his son, Steve Holt. The writers included this because in real life, Justin Grant Wade (the actor who portrays Steve) had put on weight and become nearly unrecognizable during the seven years between the show's cancellation and Uncancellation.
• Arrow:
  • Laurel Lance is walking with these. She has an alcoholic father, much like her actress' father having drinking problems. In the second season, she had a Self-Deprecation speech mentioning how people tend to stay away from her, alluding to her status as The Scrappy to most of the show's fandom. In the third, she becomes a Replacement Scrappy for her sister as the Black Canary, both In-Universe and out.
  • This gets twisted further in Season 4 with Laurel's death. Laurel continued to be a polarizing figure after donning the Black Canary mantle, only for many a fan's view of both Laurel and her previously torpedoed relationship with Oliver Queen to improve dramatically right before Damien Darhk kills her, though this is also tied to their wariness with the show's handling and shilling of Felicity Smoak—once a fan favorite whose romance with Oliver Laurel was pushed aside for—in the third and fourth seasons. Laurel's Love Confession to Oliver, Oliver's laudation of Laurel's contributions to Starling City, and his declaration of vengeance against Darhk all mirrored the majority of then-current Arrow fandom in some way or another.
• Babylon 5:
  • Vir Cotto got a lot slimmer halfway through the series, which fit with the character developing from mostly comic relief to playing a more serious role in the show. In reality, Stephen Furst had been ordered to lose weight after becoming diabetic.
  • Zack Allan's complaints about his ill-fitting uniform were based — in some cases word for word — on that character's actor, Jeff Conaway, complaining about his ill-fitting costume. (When he later gets a change of costume, it is a notably better fit.)
  • Delenn's scathing dressing-down of the Grey Council in "Severed Dreams" was infused with her Croatian actress Mira Furlan's own considerable fury with the European powers who failed to help as the Balkans went to hell.
  • Babylon 5 enjoyed that sort of thing. Word of God is that Mr. Garibaldi's occasional speeches in favor of the death penalty were put in because actor Jerry Doyle was a fervent supporter of capital punishment in real life (even Garibaldi's infamous "electric bleachers" line was taken from something J. Michael Straczynski had overheard Doyle say in absolute seriousness). Notably, the Season 3 episode "Passing Through Gethsemane" has a discussion between Garibaldi and Delenn on the matter that mirrors their real-life actors' viewpoints.
  • There have been heavy hints dropped by J. Michael Straczynski and others that the reason why Sinclair and Garibaldi have no scenes together in "War Without End", despite the characters having been good friends in the first season when Sinclair was a regular, was because of a serious falling-out between the actors.
  • It's easy to miss, but Commander Ivanova wears a single earring. One of Claudia Christian's brothers was killed by a drunk driver when they were kids, and she placed the other earring in his casket at the memorial service. Ivanova's reason for wearing the single earring was made explicit in the prequel movie In the Beginning, which shows that she gave the other earring to her older brother for good luck, only for him to die during the Earth-Minbari War.
  • The infamous "teddy bear meets airlock" and the annoyance over merchandising? Yeah, JMS had a lot of pent-up frustration, particularly at Kenner, over their interference with The Real Ghostbusters to make the series more Toyetic, so when he had an opportunity to take a clean shot at toy companies, he did so with glee.
  • Ivanova shows up in one episode leading a gaggle of Drazi with her leg in a cast. Reference to the rather... rambunctious nature of Drazi politics? No, Claudia Christian was in an accident and broke her leg. However, it was left in because it fit in hilariously well with what was going on in the character's life at the time.
• During the production halt observed for the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike, Battlestar Galactica's Michael Trucco (Samuel Anders) was involved in a near-fatal car accident. He miraculously survived the event with little lasting damage except for a rather large scar down the back of his neck. To allow him to recover but still be an active part of the show for its final season the writers came up with a scenario involving Anders being struck by a bullet and suffering massive brain trauma and being immobile for the remainder of the show but still an integral part of the final arc. By the time the post-script move The Plan went into production, he was back on his feet and back to doing the kind of stuff his character was known for.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • The breakup of Penny and Leonard was certainly not inspired by the fact that Kaley Cuoco and Johnny Galecki broke up in real life around the same time. Surely!
  • Also, several episodes featured Penny tending bar at work and not much of her being seen from the waist down. This coincided with Kaley Cuoco's leg being in a cast after she was seriously injured while horseback riding.
  • Similar tactics were needed when Mayim Bialik (Amy Farrah Fowler) injured her hand in a car accident. For several episodes, Amy's hand was always out of the shot, usually hidden behind things or placed beneath a tabletop.
• The main character of Bones is an anthropologist/writer named Temperance Brennan. She writes mysteries about an anthropologist named Kathy Reichs. In reality, Kathy Reichs is an anthropologist/writer who writes mysteries about an anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. Also, when actress Emily Deschanel was pregnant, her character was too.
• After Breaking Bad finished, writer-producer Vince Gilligan said that he belatedly realized that he had written a story about a man having the worst mid-life crisis ever, at a time in his life when he was probably due for one himself.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "Seeing Red", Warren Mears accidentally kills Tara Maclay. At the time, the actors, Adam Busch and Amber Benson, respectively, were dating, and Joss Whedon actually told Adam, "You're gonna kill your girlfriend," to which the reply was "Warren gets a girlfriend?" "No, I mean your real girlfriend."
  • Cordelia's fall onto a piece of rebar in "Lovers Walk" was based on a similar incident that occurred to Charisma Carpenter in real life.
  • When Angel breaks up with Buffy in the third season, the tears are real. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who considers Angel and Buffy soulmates, apparently cried for so long that the set had to be shut down briefly.
  • The Anointed One, a child vampire who was the Master's protege in Season 1, was initially planned to be the Big Bad of Season 2. He ended up being shoved into a cage and incinerated by Spike early in the season when it became apparent the actor was visibly growing up and wouldn't be able to remain convincing as a never-aging vampire for long.
  • "Conversations With Dead People" features four different subplots that share a common theme, but are different in tone mostly unrelated. This is because they were all written by different writers due to time constraints.
  • Giles Commuting on a Bus in Seasons 6 and 7 due to Anthony Head moving back to England.
• If one interview in particular is any indication, this was the result of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future breaking a number of taboos, including at least two instances of swearing, and an important good guy character being killed off onscreen. In the interview in question, J. Michael Straczynski reveals that he had known someone who had taken their own life despite his best efforts to stop them, which likely influenced his decision to write those certain episodes (possibly even more of the series) the way he did.
• Piper Halliwell was pregnant twice throughout the run of Charmed, the first time just the character, the second time both character and actress. Because the actress knew more about being pregnant and having children, Piper's second pregnancy was a lot more realistic than her first: she wasn't on her feet as much, she didn't fight any demons, she talked about breastfeeding and maternity more, and Holly Marie Combs was noticeably more maternal with her onscreen children.
• Community:
  • This happened a lot in the Season 4 premiere. Abed not wanting to graduate was rather bittersweetly reflective of the show's fans' reaction to the season, then rumored to be its last. The theme of coping with unexpected/unwelcome change also reflects the numerous behind-the-scenes shake-ups that had dogged the show since the middle of the previous season, chief among them the mid-season hiatus and the firing of Dan Harmon as show-runner. Abed's "happy place" is presented as a rather blandly cheery and formulaic sitcom — the same sort of sitcom fans worried that Community itself would turn into in an attempt to become more "mainstream" after the firing of Harmon.
  • Halfway through his guest stint as Robert Laybourne in Season 3, John Goodman unexpectedly had to grow a beard and ponytail for his role as a drug dealer in the movie Flight. Troy is surprised by Laybourne's shocking new appearance, which Laybourne claims is a result of "Going through some stuff right now".
  • In the Season 5 premiere, the gang discusses the disastrous final season of Scrubs, and how Zach Braff only returned for a handful of episodes. Troy reacts angrily to this and calls Braff a "Son of a bitch" for bailing on the show after it made him famous. In real life, it had been announced that Donald Glover (Troy's actor) was leaving the show five episodes into the season in order to focus on his rap career, which made the line a bit of good-natured Self-Deprecation.
    • The entire episode is this. It's basically an acknowledgment of the show's decline in quality, with Jeff pointing out that none of the characters have accomplished the goals they set out to do at the onset at the series, and have become flanderized parodies of themselves. There's even an Author's Saving Throw attempt to handwave away the events of the reviled Season 4.
  • Season 5's finale has a similar tone, as the show's future was once again uncertain. With both Donald Glover and Chevy Chase gone, some fans began questioning how much longer the show could go on, and to reflect that, Annie asks if Greendale is even worth saving now that Troy and Pierce are both gone.
• Criminal Minds
  • JJ's eponymous final episode is practically this. The cast and crew's sentiments about the decision to fire A.J. Cook were expressed very subtly and emotions of the other characters during JJ's farewell weren't just acting, they were real.
  • And the reason that JJ has to leave the BAU is extremely close to the reason that AJ Cook had to leave the show: mandates from those higher up.
  • Prentiss' departure was also forced by the same mandate, requiring the producers to fire Paget Brewster. Both ladies made it back after one season and a very aggressive fan campaign.
  • Matthew Gray Gubler injured his knee while filming (500) Days of Summer and so his character Spencer Reid had to be shot in the leg to explain this.
    • In fact, earlier in the show, a wrist injury on Gubler's part required Reid to go through the same.
  • The episode "Coda" centers around Reid and Rossi trying to communicate with a young autistic witness. One of Joe Mantenga (Rossi)'s daughters is autistic. (Interesting sidebar: His other daughter appears in the episode "3rd Life".)
  • Reid saving the day with a magic trick in "Derailed" way back in the first season was written in because Gubler is accomplished at sleight of hand. It's since become a recurring character quirk. In fact, fans often debate how much of what we're seeing onscreen is Reid and how much is Gubler as a profiler.
  • Jason Gideon left the agency due to emotional stress and growing pessimism due to the cases he was working. This reflects actor Mandy Patinkin's growing disgust with the show's grim content.
  • Hotch goes on a temporary assignment (off-screen) in the third episode of Season 12 before being revealed to be put in a witness protection system in a later episode. In reality, Thomas Gibson was fired due to an altercation with a co-writer.
• CSI:
  • Warrick Brown's murder occurred shortly after Gary Dourdan was released from the show.
  • Gil Grissom is absent from the lab attending a convention for four episodes of season 7 because William Petersen was performing in a play in Chicago.
• CSI: NY:
  • Lindsay got pregnant once because of Anna Belknap's real-life pregnancy. The first time, it was hidden, but the second one was the reason for Lucy's birth.
  • Adam was absent from one episode because A.J. Buckley took time off for his father's funeral.
  • Gary Sinise tore a leg muscle while filming a fight scene in a cemetery in Season 8's "Get Me Out of Here!" so Mac was written out of the scene where the victim is rescued, plus he spent the rest of that episode and most of the next one sitting down. ^note Incidentally, he had torn the same muscle in the other leg while filming a chase scene in the subway in Season 1's "On the Job" (on his 50th birthday, no less) although that one apparently did not affect his character.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David's divorce with his real life wife led to Season 6 onwards being about Larry and Cheryl's gradually worsening relationship. In Season 8, they actually get divorced, which considerably changed how the series might have continued.
• Dallas had to do this twice with the patriarch of the Ewing family. Jock Ewing was killed off in the fourth season of the original series after actor Jim Davis passed away prior to the season. Then, in an eerily similar situation, JR was killed off in the second season of the new series following Larry Hagman's death.
• Dad's Army:
  • Captain Mainwaring often stumbles and stutters while he's speaking, which enhances the characterization that he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to military matters. This was due to Arthur Lowe refusing to take the script home and learn his lines (which David Croft put down to Lowe previously having a photographic memory - which meant he didn't need to read the script at home - but this had declined with age he didn't change his habits), so he was stuttering because he was trying to remember what he had to say without flubbing the take.
  • As the platoon medic, Godfrey carries an aid bag rather than a heavy rifle. He also wears regular shoes instead of boots and puttees. This was all because Arnold Ridley was very frail, and the production was trying to make shooting as comfortable as possible.
  • It's noticeable when watching the series that much of the physical comedy tends to be inflicted upon Corporal Jones, Private Pike, and Warden Hodges. These characters, not coincidentally, were also played by several of the younger members of the cast (Clive Dunn, Ian Lavender, and Bill Pertwee), who were thus able to withstand a lot more than their older colleagues would have been able to.
• In Season 2 of Daredevil (2015), Matt Murdock and Karen Page are set up as an Official Couple. If Deborah Ann Woll's onscreen chemistry with Charlie Cox during their scenes looks so good, it's because her real-life boyfriend EJ Scott is blind, having lost his sight to Choroideremia, and one of her pet causes involves raising awareness for the disease.
• A Diagnosis: Murder episode shows Dick Van Dyke as the character of Mark Sloan watching home movie footage of himself playing "cowboys" with his son Steve (played by real-life son Barry). This is in fact real footage of Dick Van Dyke presumably playing "cowboys" with a toddler-age Barry, though it could conceivably be another family member.
• Doctor Who:
  • One of the show's most famous story devices, regeneration — in which the Doctor and other Time Lords transform into completely new people when injured or near death — was created expressly to explain the change in actors from William Hartnell, who was ill, to Patrick Troughton.
    • Hartnell's illness also affected his appearance in "The Three Doctors" 7 years later, as it made him unable to join Troughton and Jon Pertwee's Doctors on the same stage. This was written into the story as the First Doctor being "trapped in a time eddy" and only being able to communicate with his successors through a viewscreen in the TARDIS. On top of that, it wasn't just his last appearance as the First Doctor but his last acting appearance ever.
    • Similarly, Tom Baker's refusal to appear in "The Five Doctors" was explained away by having the Fourth Doctor (represented by archival footage) also get trapped in a time eddy.
  • During the production of the Second Doctor serial "The Mind Robber", Frazer Hines (Jamie) contracted chicken pox. This resulted in a last-minute rewrite of the serial, which allowed another actor (Hamish Wilson) to play Jamie's part for Episode 2 of the serial.
  • In 1970, Doctor Who made the switch from black and white to color. At the same time, the production team came up with a Story Arc where the Doctor gets exiled to Earth in the 1970s, which allowed them to save the money that would ordinarily get spent on more exotic settings. The producers considered having him face off a number of alien invasions. However, it was felt the sheer number of invasions would push Willing Suspension of Disbelief too far, and so the Master was introduced as a recurring villain. Furthermore, the Master was originally slated to die saving the Doctor's life. Instead, Roger Delgado (the Master) died in a tragic car accident. Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor) left the show partly due to this and the Master got new life later, played by other actors. These events make certain events of the Tenth Doctor's finale a fourth-wall-straddling date with destiny.
  • Much as the Fourth Doctor enjoys fighting the robot in "Robot", he is clearly bored out of his mind with having to be in UNIT, snoozing with his hat over his eyes or talking over everyone else during the exposition scenes and even having a mini-meltdown at the end about how he refuses to go on like this. The creators were getting sick of how UNIT limited the space-time travel premise of the show, and the Doctor's boredom is a metaphor for their own boredom and a plea to get the audience back into space again.
  • In "Terror of the Vervoids", we see Mel putting the Doctor through an excercise and healthy eating routine, telling the Doctor "it's your waistline I'm concerned about". Colin Baker was struggling with weight gain at the time, and appeared noticeably more rotund in Season 23 than he had in Season 22.
  • In the second episode of the new series, Rose Tyler rants at the "bitchy trampoline" Cassandra that "she'd rather die" than have any of the cosmetic modifications Cassandra suggests. The very powerful subtext at work here is that Billie Piper had anorexia years earlier.
  • A mild case, but it seems very likely that the Tenth Doctor's last line before he regenerates into his eleventh incarnation is as much his actor speaking as he is, as said actor, David Tennant, got into acting to play the Doctor. The line?
    The Doctor: I don't want to go.
  • The short special "Time Crash" showed the Tenth Doctor meeting the Fifth and practically gushing over the earlier incarnation. That's because David Tennant grew up on the Fifth's serials, considers the Fifth his favorite Doctor, and cites Peter Davison as the reason he wanted to become an actor and eventually play the Doctor. That's Tennant's fanboying you see throughout the whole thing.
  • Not just Tennant's; Steven Moffat, who wrote it, is also an unabashed Davison fanboy.
  • "Victory of the Daleks", for the first time, justifies the change in default Dalek props in-universe: Three Daleks who have miraculously survived the Dalek genocide of "Journey's End" (and are thus represented by the Russell T Davies props) create a new Dalek breed, technicolor, taller and more powerful than them. The old Daleks declare their unworthiness in comparison to the new ones and are promptly disintegrated by them. The actual production reason for the switch is that the RTD Dalek props were built so that they could go eyestalk-to-eye with Billie Piper (Rose), so the Steven Moffat props were conversely made to match the much taller Karen Gillan (Amy).
  • When Matthew Waterhouse was 16, his older brother committed suicide, just two years before Matthew got the part of Adric. What happens in Adric's introductory story? His older brother is yanked out of his grasp to his death.
  • Matt Smith cut his hair for Lost River. To explain his in-character entrance as the Doctor at the 2013 Doctor Who Prom not long after filming of that movie wrapped, prefilmed footage clearly filmed before production of How to Catch a Monster began depicted the Doctor (and Clara) getting into the Royal Albert Hall by bodyswapping with people present on the stage; the process caused the Doctor to inherit his target's short hair when he appeared on stage.
  • "The Day of the Doctor" featured a forgotten incarnation of the Doctor who had fought in the Time War, serving as a metaphor for the Wilderness Years and the many diverging, convoluted arms of the Expanded Universe that took over the Doctor's 'life' at that time.
  • Smith's final episode, "The Time of the Doctor", has the Eleventh Doctor suffer a leg injury that leads to him either limping or using a cane for the remainder of the story. This is a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as Smith had hurt his leg in real life just prior to the start of filming.
  • Also in his last episode, Smith's baldness was written into the story, allowing him to conceal a spare TARDIS key under his wig. In Real Life, he'd shaved his head for a film role; in-Whoniverse, Clara correctly deduces that Eleven cut off his hair on a whim because he was bored.
  • Eleven's final lines, right before he regenerates could easily be interpreted as Matt Smith saying the lines in regards to his tenure as The Doctor:
    Eleventh Doctor/Matt Smith: I will always remember when The Doctor was me.
  • The subsequent season premier, "Deep Breath", contains a large amount of commentary about Peter Capaldi, who is currently the oldest actor to portray the Doctor in the revived series. Clara acts as a stand-in for the audience and questions the legitimacy of the new, physically aged Doctor, which parallels the fervor in the fanbase about such an old actor playing the character after the Younger and Hipper precedent that was set with Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith.
  • "Twice Upon A Time" ends with Twelve making a speech to his successor as the Doctor essentially saying "it is your time now, good luck". It is very easy to see this as Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat wishing their successors (Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall) all the best.
  • There are a lot of examples to do with Tom Baker, as he was the most blatant example of Meta Casting yet seen on the whole show, and Robert Holmes, who edited much of his era, thought he was an interesting person enough that he deliberately wrote elements inspired by Baker's life into the Doctor's backstory, or would use the show to criticize aspects of Baker's behavior.
    • One of the Fourth Doctor's most overwhelmingly common villain templates was religious fanatics or ritual-obsessed villains, usually in robes and using Catholic-inflected iconography. He had spent his teens and the beginning of his 20s as a monk in an extremely repressive environment and still carried emotional damage from this, and enjoyed the opportunity to work out his issues by shouting at people in cassocks, which the writers were happy to give him. In particular, Holmes based Time Lord society on the organizational style of the Catholic Church.
    • "The Brain of Morbius"'s plot kicks off when a religious fanatic looks up to make eye contact with the Doctor and becomes infatuated with his face. This is peculiarly similar to a formative experience Tom Baker recounts in his biography, where, as a monk forbidden to look at faces, he'd accidentally glanced up to see another novice and become infatuated with his face.
    • Robert Holmes wrote "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" at a time when Baker's mental health was starting to fail him, and his ego and drinking habit was beginning to cause production issues and public embarrassment. The story portrays the Doctor as very selfish and aloof, paying little attention to Leela and trying to ditch her four times (as Baker hated the character and had been pushing for her to be written out), contains a setpiece where the Doctor intentionally upstages another actor on a stage as a mindgame (Baker often hogged scenes and stepped on lines to abuse actors he disliked), and also portrays the Doctor as having a secret alcohol stash.
    • The Fourth Doctor audio drama "The Justice of Jalxar" contains a scene where the Doctor has to protect a group of innocents by confessing to all the crimes he has committed to a homicidal justice robot, so it would pursue him rather than the ordinary people. His confession is structured like a Catholic confession and involves him begging "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa", something absurdly uncomfortable to listeners aware that Tom Baker had spent years as a Catholic monk not allowed to look at people's faces, forbidden to laugh, repeatedly made to repeat that he was worthless and told that if he ever left he would go mad outside, leaving him with lifelong emotional damage.
    • Actress Jemma Redgrave has openly stated several times that Kate Stewart's intense admiration and love for her father, the Brigadier, is a reflection of her own for her late father Corin Redgrave, and that this connection is the thing she has most in common with the character.
• Dollhouse was conceived after Joss Whedon, who'd sworn that he would never again work with Fox after his terrible experiences making Firefly, was asked by Eliza Dushku to produce a show for her so that she could get out of her contract to Fox. To hear Whedon tell it, Fox treated him very much the same way that Rossum treats its "Actives", which may go a long way towards explaining why the show is much darker than most Mutant Enemy shows.
• ER: Dr. Elizabeth Corday and Dr. Peter Benton have a brief and tense relationship that finally fizzles out when she realizes he'll never get over his discomfort of dating a white woman (he's African-American). In Real Life, Benton's portrayer Eriq LaSalle was equally uncomfortable with the relationship, feeling that it sent a negative message to the African-American community and asked the show's writers to nix it.
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: In "The Star-Spangled Man", the scene where Sam gets profiled by white cops who nearly draw their weapons on him clearly draws inspiration from recent incidents of police brutality and black deaths, most famously George Floyd. What is particularly galling is that Bucky, a white guy who's standing right next to Sam, was himself an international criminal and assassin (since pardoned), but he gets practically ignored until the police discover a warrant for his arrest. And even then, they treat Bucky with significantly more respect and gentleness while arresting him than they did with Sam. ^note Behavior like this has been observed in real life frequently, e.g. of a black driver being shot just for saying he had a (legal) gun in his car (like you're advised to) after police stopped him while a white man carrying a rifle openly was not only spared, police treated him with kid gloves.
• Firefly: By a rather unfortunate coincidence, the cast and crew ended up filming the funeral scene at the end of "The Message" shortly after Joss Whedon delivered the news that Fox had decided to cancel the show. The characters might have been mourning the death of Private Tracey, but the cast was mourning the end of the show that they'd poured so much effort into.
• On Frasier, Jane Leeves' pregnancy was written into the show. The guilt Daphne suffers as a result of leaving Donnie at the altar, and the difficulties in Daphne and Niles' new relationship, cause Daphne to begin overeating. She gains sixty pounds, but Niles is so blinded by love he doesn't notice until Daphne falls to the floor and is too heavy to get up without the help of Frasier, Niles and Martin (who remarks "it took three Cranes to lift you!") The weight problem was written into the show to allow Leeves to continue working while pregnant. Daphne then left for several weeks to attend "fat camp" and returned with her figure restored. During the episode "It Takes Two to Tangle" in which she did not appear while at the resort, Niles tells Roz that Daphne had lost 9 pounds, 12 ounces (the weight of Leeves' baby in real life). Leeves' second pregnancy, in the 11th season, was written into the show as her character getting pregnant, though.
• Friends:
  • Chandler's "transfer" to Tulsa was because Matthew Perry was going through rehab. (He still appeared in every episode, just not as many scenes.) Many of the scenes revolving around Monica's support of him moving probably reflected the real life support the cast gave Matthew Perry during this time. (Especially as other cast members said Courteney Cox who plays Monica, was one of the most supportive people for him.)
  • Chandler's weight also fluctuated throughout the series, much more than the other characters, due to Matthew Perry's drug problems. In the early episodes, Chandler was average size, however, in later seasons he was extremely skinny and in other seasons he gained weight back. In one case he looked noticeably heavier in a season premiere that was supposed to take place shortly after the previous season's finale.
  • Monica and Chandler's struggle to have children while not based on Courteney Cox's miscarriages did reflect her situation. To the extent, Cox found some scenes difficult to film, and Matthew Perry's previously mentioned close friendship with her meant his delivery of Chandler's "she's mother without a child" speech was particularly heartbreaking and emotional.
• Ghosts (UK): The ongoing storyline about the restoration of the Haunted House mirrors the restoration of the actual house where it's filmed. The relationship is symbiotic, as the real-life restoration is in large part funded by the fees the BBC pays to hire the location for filming.
• Glee:
  • In one episode, Kurt wants to sing "Defying Gravity" from Wicked, but runs into some trouble because it's traditionally sung by a girl. Kurt's actor, Chris Colfer, had wanted all throughout high school to sing the song at the talent show but was denied.
  • Kurt and Mercedes are best friends on the show; Chris Colfer (Kurt) and Amber Riley (Mercedes) are best friends in real life.
  • In the episode "Furt", Sue Sylvester just happens to be acting principal of McKinley and undergoes Character Development that makes her more sympathetic to Kurt's bullying problem. Sue also realizes her own mother is a bully as well, as evidenced by continued disapproval and Passive-Aggressive Kombat over Sue's plan to marry herself. Jane Lynch is an outspoken gay icon in real life who had recently married her girlfriend (though they divorced in 2013), so someone behind the scenes may have decided the episode's Gay Aesops (about bullying and marriage) were more poignant coming from her.
  • In one Season 3 episode, Blaine is hit in the face with a slushie laced with rock salt, and injures his eye badly enough that he has to have surgery. He's completely absent from the following two episodes, the reason being of course that he's at home, resting after his surgery. In reality, Darren Criss was absent from the filming of those two episodes because he was doing a two-week stint in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway.
  • With the death of Cory Monteith, the episode held to mourn his character had the cast crying for real.
• Grey's Anatomy:
  • Actor Isaiah Washington (Preston Burke) was canned from the show at the end of the Season 3, causing his character's romantic storyline with Sandra Oh's Christina Yang to end rather abruptly, with her stood up at the altar and going to his apartment to find out he'd cleaned house and left. Also, the sudden disappearance of Dr. Erica Hahn was due to the unexplainable firing of actress Brooke Smith.
  • Season 6 has had to do quite a bit of covering up — George was killed in a bus accident when T.R. Knight wished to leave the show, Katherine Heigl was written out for some episodes in order to shoot a movie and spend time with her recently-adopted baby, and Meredith had a storyline that required her to be bedridden to cover up Ellen Pompeo's pregnancy.
    • And the maternity leave of Jessica Capshaw (Arizona) led to a hugely important arc: Arizona leaves for Africa, she and Callie break up, Callie sleeps with Mark and gets pregnant, Arizona returns and they reunite and decide to raise the baby together, Arizona ends up proposing and Callie says yes immediately after a near-fatal car accident. A rather extreme example of Real Life Writes the Plot.
• By the fourth and final season of Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus adopted a more mature image (she was 18-going-on-19), and had already released the reflective and (slightly) Hotter and Sexier album Can't Be Tamed earlier in 2010. Many of the plots and themes in Hannah seemed to address this change, from Miley wincing at the girlish look of the new room her dad (played by real-life dad Billy Ray Cyrus) put together for her, to Hannah trying new styles of music and getting backlash for it, to Miley Stewart wondering if fans would accept the real Miley without the wigs and flashy clothing after she revealed her identity and performed as herself.
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,
  • During the fourth season, Hercules received less screentime, Iolaus and Autolycus got more to do, there was a Autolycus/Salmoneus episode (which Herc doesn't even appear in) and several Young Hercules episodes were produced. This was due to Kevin Sorbo's health problems that year and production worked to accomodate while he recovered. The Clip Show "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Hercules" is quite obviously Leaning on the Fourth Wall, as it shows a production team desperately trying to do the show when Sorbo is suddenly unavailable.
  • During "Prometheus", a crossover episode with Xena, Michael Hurst injured his arm during a fight sequence. In "Cast a Giant Shadow", Iolaus' arm is subsequently injured and shown in a cast for a couple episodes.
  • "Regrets... I've Had A Few" was filmed at the end of Season 3. Kevin Sorbo was eager to start his vacation, so the writing staff decided to give him less to do and plug the Young Hercules pilot at the same time.
  • In "For Those of You Just Joining Us", Rob Tapert announces his plan to kill off Iolaus in the fifth season to generate interest in the series. He mockingly says this to Paul Coyle, who is being played by Michael Hurst. The real-life Tapert actually did do this with Hurst for those reasons, though presumably in a far kinder way, of course.
• The ITV television play Hidden Talents from the anthology series Unnatural Causes focuses on a bedridden, terminally ill mother who is taken care by her son. Around the same time, her actress Pat Phoenix (who is best known for her role in Coronation Street as the Fiery Redhead Elsie Tanner) was battling lung cancer and sadly it became her final performance as she would pass away weeks after filming of the play ended.
• Westley's remark about how he thinks everybody will be wearing masks in the future, recreated in Home Movie: The Princess Bride precisely, takes on a darkly humorous bent considering that this series was shot remotely in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everybody was urged to wear masks in public.
• Jennifer Morrison (Dr. Cameron) and Jesse Spenser (Dr. Chase) dated in real life before their characters got together on House, and were even at one point engaged to be married. Subverted in that the actors had broken up before the characters got married.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • A month after actor Neil Patrick Harris came out as gay, the show introduced Barney's gay brother (played by Wayne Brady), who makes a lifestyle choice with which Barney initially disagrees. Said lifestyle choice being getting married instead of living the life of promiscuity that Barney favors.
  • The show also hid the pregnancies of Cobie Smulders and Alyson Hannigan using large, baggy shirts, but towards the end of the season, Hannigan was too big to hide and needed to go on maternity leave, so the writers created a joke that offended Hannigan's character Lily so much that she wouldn't speak to the rest of the group for a month.
    • This also led to a line in the next season premiere when Marshall asks Robin and Lily if they have lost weight to distract them from a previous comment he had made. Both women's babies had been born during the summer hiatus.
  • However, during a later season, several months after Lily became pregnant, Alyson Hannigan announced she was pregnant again.
  • The part in "Vesuvius" where Marshall gets mad about a silly scene where his film counterpart ("Narshall") eats a cake is based on an interview where Jason Segel had criticized the writing on the show. Specifically, he used a hypothetical joke about Marshall eating a cake and then lying about it as an example of how formulaic the writing on the show had become. The scene in "Vesuvius" was basically the writers having some fun and throwing a minor Take That! at Segel.
• Carly only appears in the first and last scenes of iCarly episode "iBalls". This was because of her actress Miranda Cosgrove had to take time off to recover after breaking her ankle in a tour bus accident.
• I Love Lucy:
  • Fifty years prior to the Malcolm in the Middle example below, Little Ricky became a character as the result of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball not wanting to trick-shoot the show to hide the latter's pregnancy.
  • Several episodes during this time were Whole Episode Flashbacks — with Ricky et. al. recalling some wacky hijinks. They were filmed while Lucy was still able to appear, but production intended them to air during her downtime after she gave birth.
• JAG: Mac was assigned to the judiciary in the latter half of Season 8 because of Catherine Bell's pregnancy.
• Let's just say Jared Padalecki, the star of Supernatural, is somewhat... accident-prone.
  • When Padalecki broke his wrist partway through filming an episode in Season 3, Sam Winchester had to break his wrist in a fight. There then follows at least one episode where Sam doesn't seem to do much while Padalecki was dealing with the pain and painkillers.
  • In one episode of Season 4, Sam was only onscreen for forty seconds because Padalecki was busy filming the Friday the 13th (2009) remake.
  • In Season 10, Sam begins the first few episodes with his arm immobilized in a sling after having badly dislocated his shoulder before season 10 filming began. Padalecki had undergone surgery and had clearly lost a bit of weight, but could be explained in character due to the fact that Dean had literally disappeared for weeks after dying in Sam's arms. Turns out, Dean had become a demon. Multiple characters bring up the injury in-universe — at least once per episode for the first four episodes.
• In Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, Ryota Ozawa, who plays Marvelous, is best friends with Yasuhisa Furuhara, who played Sosuke.
• Kamen Rider Fourze: As revealed by the production blog after the show wrapped, the scene at the start of the final episode where Yuki reads Kengo's farewell letter after he's been killed by Gamou was the last scene filmed. According to director Koichi Sakamoto, the main actors had become as close as family over the course of the shoot, thus the tears being shed were their real tears over the fact that they were about to go their separate ways. It was made worse was the fact that Ryuki Takahashi, Kengo's actor, couldn't be on the set for obvious plot reasons. The same blog post had Fumika Shimizu, Yuki's actress, reveal that she actually considered messing up her lines on purpose just so it wouldn't have to end.
• Tim Allen's sitcom Last Man Standing sees his first lines including "I'm back!" and "It's good to be home" — referencing his return to TV and network ABC over ten years after Home Improvement ended.
• Law & Order:
  • Olivia Benson's stint undercover (leading to her temporary disappearance from the show) in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was because the actress was pregnant.
  • Law & Order: Trial by Jury:
    • Jerry Orbach died of prostate cancer just after joining the cast, after spending 12 years on the mothership show as Detective Lennie Briscoe. Trial by Jury was canceled in its first season due to low ratings, and Briscoe is stated to have died offscreen sometime thereafter.
    • In one episode, Briscoe is huddled by the door of a courtroom with some cops and is providing whispered commentary so as not to interrupt what's going on inside. The scene was written this way because Jerry Orbach was so weak from cancer treatments that he couldn't raise his voice to a normal speaking volume.
  • A rather haunting episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent ("Renewal") revealed that Mike Logan, Briscoe's first onscreen partner, had dreams about him, in which he tells Mike that he isn't dead. It wouldn't be surprising if there were a lot of Chris Noth's emotions in there.
• Leverage:
  • Sophie disappears to go "find herself." This is because of actress Gina Bellman's real-life pregnancy.
  • Several episodes are centered around examples of The Cast Showoff. "The Schehearade Job" involves Alec Hardison playing the violin, which Aldis Hodge can do in real life. "The Studio Job" centers entirely around Eliot performing country music, while Christian Kane has his own country band.
• The 2016 Netflix limited series Lost Ollie features a new storyline where Billy's mother suddenly gets diagnosed with cancer and how Ollie alongside his owner Billy and his father are coping with it and the aftermath. It also has a central theme about coping with a person's death focused on Zuzu's love for Nina. The original book by William Joyce was written not long after his own daughter (Mary Katherine Joyce) passed away in 2010 from a brain tumor.
• Make It or Break It actress Chelsea Hobbs (Emily Kmetko) was pregnant so this was written into her character's story arc.
• Malcolm's family from Malcolm in the Middle ended up with another child after actress Jane Kaczmareck became pregnant in real life.
• Married... with Children:
  • For the first three or four seasons, the character of Marcy was married to a materialistic banker named Steve Rhoades, played by David Garrison. When Garrison grew tired of television and did not want to continue the series, he and the producers mutually agreed to write off his character. Over the course of several episodes, Steve would be phased out of the show, culminating in his going to jail and Marcy's divorcing him. Garrison would, however, return to play the role of Steve several times during the rest of the show's run.
  • Another example came from Katey Segal's first pregnancy. The writers fully embraced it as material for that season and had Peg in-show getting pregnant as well. Unfortunately, this plan did not materialize as perfectly as the writers hoped. Right before the predetermined birth, Katey suffered a miscarriage. This forced the writers to give the season an All Just a Dream ending because having an infant on-set would be traumatic for Segal. Fans were initially displeased, but after the writers explained the tragic situation behind the season finale, they cooled down and expressed their condolences to Segal. Segal would become pregnant twice more during the show's run, thankfully successfully both times. Both times, the writers had Peg Put on a Bus and invoked The Bus Came Back when Segal was ready to return to work.
• M*A*S*H: In the season 7 episode "Preventative Medicine" a gung-ho colonel is planning to attack an enemy-controlled hill, not for any strategic necessity but simply for personal glory and to improve his chances for promotion. Hawkeye is so appalled that he drugs the colonel and performs an unnecessary appendectomy on him to keep him laid up long enough to prevent the attack from being carried out. In the original script written by Tom Reeder, both Hawkeye and B.J. were equally ready to take out the colonel's healthy appendix, just as Hawkeye and Trapper did to Col. Flagg in the early-series episode "White Gold". However, B.J.'s actor Mike Farrell strenuously objected to this, considering it ghoulish to cut into a healthy patient for any reason, while Alan Alda argued that whatever was necessary to get a Blood Knight off of active duty was justified in the name of saving lives. Their real-life argument fascinated Reeder, who revised his script to include Farrell's and Alda's real-life viewpoints in their respective characters, and ultimately saw Hawkeye perform the surgery alone when B.J. refused to participate. The end of the episode ties in as well, as Alda and Farrell's falling out had apparently strained their friendship and the characters reconciling was indicative of the actors doing so as well.
• The TV series Max Headroom was about an investigative reporter fighting MegaCorps using the power of pirate broadcasting. Seven months after its American debut, we got this.
• In Miami Vice, Sonny Crockett has a very contentious working relationship with his commanding officer, Lieutenant Martin Castillo. This "feud" wasn't just created for the cameras — Don Johnson and Edward James Olmos often argued during the first season due to their wildly different acting styles, and there are scenes and moments that unintentionally evoke this feeling of tension between them. Notably occurs in "Nobody Lives Forever" (where Johnson looks visibly disturbed while Olmos glowers at him) and "Back in the World", where Crockett rails at Castillo for not having the resources to do his job (and Olmos not even looking at Johnson until the very end of the scene).
• The Mindy Project has been criticized for its Monochrome Casting in regards to Mindy's love interests (who have all been white), although this criticism died down somewhat after she settled down with Danny. In Season 4, she goes on a date with an Indian guy who doesn't think she's Indian enough for him. She then begins wearing traditional Indian clothes and even has a traditional Hindu ceremony for her son Leo. The end of the episode even features Mindy asking her parents why they didn't immerse her more in Indian culture.
• A.J. Langer came down with the chicken pox during filming of the My So-Called Life episode "Life of Brian" (which has nothing to do with the Monty Python film). This resulted not only in her very limited screen time in that episode but also in having all of the makeup to be thrown out.
• The Muppet Show:
  • When Peter Sellers guest starred, there was a brief bit where Kermit told him that he could feel free to drop his personas while backstage and be himself. Sellers' response was, "But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself. You see, there is no me; I do not exist... There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed." He meant it. Sellers' claim that he existed as only what others wanted him to be was based on feeling his real self wasn't sufficiently able to make others or himself happy (and a desire to protect his privacy). In any case, his fascination with being others and never himself was what caused him to identify so much with Chance the Gardener in the novel Being There, to the point of spending much of his final years getting a film adaptation made so he could play Chance. Indeed, his family and friends have argued that of all of Peter's characters, Chance is by far the closest to who he actually was as a person.
  • When Gene Kelly guest starred, Scooter predicted the world would end and Beauregard was certain it was true. This was the last episode to be produced (though — at least in America — not the last one aired).
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  • The final season opens with an episode where Joel Hodgson (the creator and original host) made a cameo after leaving five seasons before. Replacement host Mike Nelson becomes jealous that he got to escape and have a normal life, and Tom cautions him "Don't compare yourself. It ain't healthy." This line is a Fandom Nod to the "Joel vs. Mike" debates that raged over the Internet when Hodgson first left the series, debates that still go on to this day over a decade later (despite the fact that Hodgson and Nelson are good friends).
  • During an Season 7 episode, Crow goes through a hassle trying to get his film made and marketed. This mirrors the tough times getting the MST3K film made and marketed.
  • The episode "Gamera vs. Guiron" has a line that's become infamous as the show's most obscure joke ever. There's a shot of a girl running away from the camera, and Tom Servo shouts, "Look out, Mike, she's got your keyboard!" This was a reference to the fact that head writer Mike Nelson was once dumped by a woman who stole his keyboard and took it back to Japan with her. (And this was back when Joel was the lead character, and Mike Nelson only made occasional appearances in front of the camera.)
• Shane Conor's drug problems and alleged violence on the set of Neighbours led to him being fired from the show, so his character Joe Scully implausibly disappeared to run a farm in Bendigo.
• When Zooey Deschanel got pregnant, her character Jess on New Girl was sent up for jury duty.
• Following the death of Phil Hartman, the first episode of the next season of NewsRadio had the WNYX staff dealing with the death of his character, Bill McNeal, of a heart attack in front of the TV. Apparently the actors weren't acting. Their responses to Bill's death mirror the actorss actual responses to Hartman's death, including, apparently, Beth (Vicki Lewis) standing outside Bill's apartment, drunk, calling his name, and Matthew (Andy Dick) believing Bill's gonna come back somehow. Of course, that puts an extra subtext on Dick's fucked up behavior the last few years (particularly the incident that caused Jon Lovitz to beat the crap out of him).
• Similar to the Are You Being Served? example, Night Court went through two elderly female bailiff characters, with both actresses dying, so the producers finally cast a younger actress for Roz, who happily survived the rest of show's run.
• Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak of The Office (US) fame have dated on and off in much the same way that their characters Kelly and Ryan did on the show.
• In One Tree Hill, Lucas Scott and Brooke Davis became Amicable Exes after their breakup. Their actors were married for a while.
• In Only Fools and Horses, the deaths of Lennard Pearce, Buster Merryfield, Kenneth MacDonald, and Eva Mottley were written into the show: Grandad and Uncle Albert were said to have died (and their funerals were shown), Mike Fisher was said to be in prison for embezzlement (leading to Sid taking over the Nag's Head), and Denzil's wife Corrine was said to have finally divorced him.
• Minor example in Parks and Recreation: Actor Chris Pratt dropped a significant amount of weight and put on some muscle for his part in Zero Dark Thirty. They could cover up the muscle by dressing his character Andy in baggy clothes (not much of a departure for the slovenly character); the weight loss is Handwaved in a throwaway line revealing that he's given up beer.
• Power Rangers:
  • Combining Reality Subtext and Fanon, many Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers fans believe that Trini, the original Yellow Ranger, is dead, since her actress, Thuy Trang, died in a car accident. Until 2023, her death was never been mentioned on-screen, but since Power Rangers shows are usually independent of each other, this is not surprising. However, this one's purely Fanon. Reunion Shows involving characters who knew her have never mentioned anything bad had happened to her.
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: Kendrix, the Pink Galaxy Ranger, makes a Heroic Sacrifice in a Dying Moment of Awesome near the end of the team-up with the Space Rangers. Her actress had to leave the show to undergo leukemia treatments. She was written out in this manner so that if the treatments were unsuccessful (as is all too often the case) people would have a grand heroic deed to remember her by. Fortunately, the treatments worked, and as a result, Kendrix was revived at the end.
  • In Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Jason David Frank — playing veteran ranger and mentor Tommy — had prior commitments in the USA in the middle of filming (which takes place in New Zealand), and so the producers arranged to have Tommy first trapped in amber, then stuck in his Ranger suit, and then finally invisible (so that Frank could provide voice-overs without having to be present on set).
• When Prison Break actress Sarah Wayne Callies' pregnancy overlapped with the first few episodes of Season 3, the writers plotted around her maternity leave. The Fox Network refused to sign off on the proposed plotline of S3, forcing the writers to redo everything, and their new season arc came to involve the death of Callies' character. The actress refused to return to work just to be killed off, hence her offscreen death in the fourth episode. But she came Back from the Dead in Season 4 anyway.
• Psych:
  • During the filming of the pilot, Kirsten Nelson (Chief Vick) was pregnant. While she gave birth before the filming started proper, they never hid it in the pilot, and her character continued to be pregnant until halfway through the first season.
  • Timothy Omundson (Lassiter) broke his collarbone in a mountain biking accident. Consequently, Lassiter's arm was in a sling for a few episodes in Season 2, an injury that he mysteriously never explained despite being asked by other characters.
• Two subtexts for the price of one on the sixth season premiere of Reba: First, Melissa Peterman's weight loss is written into the script, as Barbara Jean's been seeing a personal trainer. Second, the first (and only) line for Kyra in the episode is "I just went out to get something to eat!" The line references actress Scarlett Pomers' battle with anorexia (and explains away her absence for the last quarter of the fifth season). That episode gives Kyra a second line in its stinger, where she says she's going to get something to eat in response to Van asking where she's going (to which Van quips 'Okay, see you next year" in response).
• In the 1983 adaptation of Jin Yong's story Return of the Condor Heroes, numerous people applauded the performance of how love-struck and romantic Andy Lau (who played Yang Guo) was towards Idy Chan (who played the character's love, Xiao Long Nu). Apparently, Andy Lau has since admitted that he harbored a huge crush on Idy Chan. To quote him, "When I collaborated in Return of the Condor Heroes with her, I really felt that she's my girlfriend. When we go home after work, I would be worried about her and think of her. Then when we collaborated again in Casino Raiders where she played Alan Tam's girlfriend, I felt unhappy about it."
• Sarah Shahi:
  • Shahi is half-Iranian and speaks Farsi in real life. The Life episode "A Civil War" revealed that her character, Dani Reese, has an Iranian mother and can speak Farsi.
  • Also, during production on the last season of Life, she became pregnant, which resulted in the last five episodes being rewritten so her character would be recruited for an FBI joint task force and only able to communicate with the main character by phone, requiring the casting of Gabrielle Union as a replacement partner.
  • Her Person of Interest character, Samin Shaw, also has an Iranian mother (no word on if she speaks Farsi yet, though). Shahi was also pregnant during the forth season of the show, leading to her character being apparently killed off, but actually being held by Samaritan operatives.
• Scrubs
  • Both of Dr. Cox and Jordan's children in were written in because Christa Miller became pregnant, as was Sarah Chalke's pregnancy in the final season.
  • In "My Cake", Scrubs paid proper homage to John Ritter's death by having J.D.'s father (who, of course, was played by John Ritter a couple of years prior) die of a massive heart attack.
  • In "My Catalyst", Dr. Kevin Casey is played by Michael J. Fox. Casey suffered from OCD, a neurological disorder that usurps (directed) control of the body from a person. Fox stated in an interview that he let his struggles with Parkinson's (a neurological disorder that causes a person's body to shake uncontrollably) inform Casey's character.
• Seinfeld:
  • In the episode "The Jacket", Jerry and George meet Elaine's father, Alton, and they're very intimidated by him. Lawrence Tierney, the actor who played Alton, scared the Seinfeld cast and crew just as much with his offscreen behavior (he stole a butcher knife from the set and hid it under his jacket), which is why the character never appeared again.
  • Jason Alexander struggled to act alongside Heidi Swedberg, who played George's on-and-off girlfriend Susan, and felt that his comedic sensibility was "off" in every scene they did together. He claimed that Larry David chose her as George's fiancée in Season 7 for this exact reason, stating that their non-chemistry created the perfect effect as people would neither root for or against them as a couple.
• Sonny with a Chance was retooled into So Random!! due to the departure of star Demi Lovato following their rehabilitation from eating disorders, self-harm and depression.
• On Sports Night, Robert Guillaume's real-life stroke was written into the storyline as a stroke suffered by his character, executive producer Isaac Jaffee. This led to some very emotional scenes upon his return. Likewise, the on-screen portrayal of Executive Meddling throughout Season 2 was almost certainly Aaron Sorkin's somewhat pissy reaction to the same. The latter theme would reappear in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (see below).
• Stargate-verse:
  • Alaina Huffman's pregnancy was apparently written into Stargate Universe. In fact the Stargate canon has never (in 16 seasons of television starring at least one and usually two or more women) included a pregnancy it wasn't forced into by actress pregnancies. The best one is probably the first, Sha're's pregnancy with the Harcesis, which actually came about because Vaitiare Bandera was pregnant. The father was Michael Shanks, who played Sha're's husband, Daniel. Less important for the series but the same father, Dr. Lam (Lexa Doig), which resulted in Lam just disappearing for a while without explanation. Note to producers: keep Michael away from your actresses.
  • Later on Amanda Tapping was in Area 51 for 6 episodes at the beginning of the ninth season because of her pregnancy — lots of cunning video-conferencing with conveniently placed computers. While she was away Claudia Black did a guest spot on the show to inject some estrogen. At the end of the ninth season Black's character, Vala, returns... and she's pregnant, because Black was.
  • Teyla's pregnancy on Stargate Atlantis was because of Rachel Luttrell's real-life pregnancy. (But Michael Shanks wasn't even on that show!)
  • And a non-pregnancy Stargate one — in the episode "Nemesis" Daniel Jackson is mostly out of the picture because he has appendicitis... because Michael Shanks was recovering from appendicitis.
  • Also, Jack O'Neill was transferred to the Pentagon to head Homeworld Command when Richard Dean Anderson decided he wanted to retire. Later on in the show, his replacement Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder), complains about shows who lose their lead actors and just replace him with a younger version of the same guy.
  • General Hammond died of a heart attack because of the death of his actor, Don S. Davis. The Daedalus-class battlecruiser George Hammond in one of the movies and Stargate Universe was renamed in his honor.
  • In "Family Ties", Carter and Jacek have a conversation which is ostensibly about the lack of funding given to the SGC, but is actually an obvious reference to the then-recent cancellation of the show and its replacement with the series [Eureka.
    Jacek: I don't mind telling you, I'm a bit disappointed in this facility. I was expecting more.
    Carter: Well, at times so do we. But the truth is the Stargate Program just doesn't get the support it used to from the people in charge.
    Jacek: Why not?
    Lee: [working on something nearby] Eureka! One down, twelve to go.
    Jacek: That's too bad, because after all your Stargate Program has accomplished for this network of planets, I would think the decision makers would show it the respect it deserves.
  • Poor Sergeant Siler is the series Butt-Monkey, who always gets voluntold and blown up or beaten for his troubles so often it has become a Running Gag. However, there's a reason for this. Dan Shea, who plays Siler, is also the series' stunt co-ordinator (as well as Richard Dean Anderson's stunt double), so of course he does all the cool stunts.
  • Another example is the clear shout-out to Farscape in Episode 200, since by that point in the series, both stars of the show (John Crichton and Aeryn Sun / Cameron Mitchell and Vala Mal Doran) were appearing in SG-1.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Ultimate Computer", William Marshall stars as Dr. Richard Daystrom, a prideful and ultimately fanatical computer designer. His eventual Sanity Slippage carries a haunting subtext: Daystrom delivers a heartbreaking monologue about how he's been mocked and ridiculed and underestimated by people who did not understand him or his vision. In Real Life, Marshall was a classically trained actor and opera singer who likely suffered similar indignities and a shortage of opportunities because he was African-American.
  • The televised gladiator combats in the very next TOS episode to air, "Bread and Circuses", reflect the writers' rather jaundiced view of network television as it was increasingly believed as the episode was being written that the show would be canceled after the season.
  • On TNG, Sarek's declining health and eventual death seemed to mirror those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. To whit, "Unification, Part 1", in which Sarek died, was dedicated to Roddenberry, who had died a couple of weeks earlier.
  • Riker's existential crisis throughout "The Best of Both Worlds" paralleled producer/writer Michael Piller's own crisis, as he pondered whether he should stay with TNG or move on to new opportunities. Riker's statements about Commander Shelby mirror Piller's feelings about younger writers like Ronald D. Moore. Riker and Guinan's conversation about Riker becoming his own man and "letting go" of Captain Picard in order to beat him could almost be about the show's struggle to find its own identity in the long shadow of the original series.
    • This story was the Darkest Hour for both the Federation and the franchise as a whole: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was a critical and financial failure, and TNG was on the verge of cancellation after the execrable mess the writers' strike made of Season 2 after a promising but raw Season 1, and it was still "on the bubble" during Season 3 despite Growing the Beard. The intense fan interest in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I," which became the most talked-about cliffhanger in serial television since "Who shot J.R.?", saved TNG and made Star Trek into the 90s media juggernaut it was.
  • Denise Crosby, who played Tasha Yar in the first season of TNG, felt she was underused and asked to be let go abruptly. They managed to squeeze her death into "Skin of Evil", but she was to film "Symbiosis", which was going to air first. In the final moments of the last episode she filmed, you can see her waving to the camera.
  • In "Yesterday's Enterprise", Yar's performance is just dripping with meta commentary. The timeline is accidentally changed decades ago and suddenly Tasha is still alive on the ship (among other disagreeable changes). Tasha discovers that in the original timeline she died a "senseless death, one without meaning" (fans had complained ever since it happened that valiant character deserved better than a Red Shirt exit.)
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cost of Living", Counselor Troi's mother Lwaxana reveals that she's suddenly marrying again. Majel Barrett (Lwaxana) had just lost her husband, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, several months earlier, adding another layer to Lwaxana pondering marriage again.
  • In The Survivors, "Kevin" (an immortal Energy Being who has lived the past 50 years disguised as a human) gives a powerful and heartfelt speech about how he "wished he could've died with her", referring to his recently deceased (human) wife, who died fighting the aliens who destroyed their planet, never knowing her husband wasn't human. In reality, the actor playing Kevin, John Anderson, had just lost his wife of 43 years, and almost turned down the role because of it. His speech comes across as really genuine, because it was. Anderson himself died of a heart attack less than 3 years later.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine got in a few great lines in its fifth season when Nana Visitor (Major Kira) was pregnant with Alexander Siddig (Dr. Bashir)'s child. Since Kira was the show's female lead, this would have been hard to hide, so the writers resorted to a plot twist: Keiko O'Brien was pregnant, and after she was injured in an accident on an away mission, Bashir had to transplant the fetus into Kira to save its life, and then couldn't take it back out before the due date due to Kira's biology. In "Apocalypse Rising", Kira is talking with Dr. Bashir, she gets off the line "this [pregnancy] is all YOUR fault." The best part was probably in the episode "The Begotten", where Bashir finally delivers the little snot. Visitor gets the line "YOU DID THIS TO ME!" Common enough in media, where the woman in labor shouts at the father.
  • In another DS9 episode, "Second Skin", Kira is abducted by the Obsidian Order and surgically altered to look like a Cardassian. Kira is visibly horrified by the transformation and becomes increasingly distressed through the episode. Nana Visitor is severely claustrophobic and found the Cardassian makeup incredibly uncomfortable, eventually ripping it off her face when a take took too long.
  • Similarly, Andrew Robinson is also claustrophobic, and drew on this experience in portraying Garak's claustrophobia, most notably in "By Inferno's Light." He was also suffering from the flu when the episode's scenes of Garak in the crawl space were shot, and said later that between the claustrophobia and the flu, he "didn't have to act" when portraying Garak's suffering.
  • In the Deep Space Nine, Grand Finale, "What You Leave Behind", the scene where Quark and Vic play Go Fish because there's nothing else to do was the last scene ever filmed for DS9. So, there actually was nothing left to do on the show.
  • Star Trek: Voyager made a few guarded allusions to behind-the-scenes production. "Muse" is basically a plea for understanding from the writers of this oft-criticized series, explaining how they're pulled between the desire to create meaningful works of art, the need to satisfy those paying their wages, and the demands of the audience for more "action" and "romance", told via a dirt-poor playright on a primitive warlike world who's trying to write a play based on Voyager's logs. The "executives" (or nobles) in question will have the playwright's head if he doesn't deliver.
  • The "Equinox" two-parter seemed to be suggesting "This is how awful it could have been if we had taken a violent route and not produced the show we have — a complete antithesis of Gene Roddenberry's ideals." Ron D. Moore, who resigned from the show before the second part aired, got the last word with Battlestar Galactica (2003), which was more interested in dealing honestly with the problems faced by the Equinox.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise was greatly impacted by 9/11. Most of the cast and crew had friends, colleagues or relatives who perished in the attack. As a consequence, Enterprise Seasons 2-4 (and to a large degree the films, which will never wholeheartedly embrace the pacifist and multicultural message of Roddenberry's time) was a show defined by the war on terror. Even before the terrorist attacks, it seemed like the stories were consciously girding themselves for the conservative Bush presidency. The cast was mostly white Americans. The Captain was not a scientist or a diplomat, but a ruggedly all-American test pilot.
• Stephen Fry:
  • There's a lot of this in Blackadder Goes Forth with General Melchett, played by the aforementioned (and Straight Gay) Fry. There's his habit of addressing Captain Kevin Darling as just "Darling" — and then there's "Major Star", in which he falls for Hugh Laurie in drag yet finds "Bob" (a female passing for male) in "drag" utterly repulsive.
  • In "General Hospital", Blackadder uncovers a spy by reciting the 'great universities': "Oxford, Cambridge, Hull", and observes that the spy failed to notice that only two of them were great universities. General Melchett chimes in, "Yes, Oxford's a complete dump." Fry was an alumnus of Cambridge, whereas Blackadder's actor, Rowan Atkinson, attended Oxford.
  • There's a bit of this in the A Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch where Fry plays a British officer, Major Donaldson, and Hugh Laurie plays a Nazi officer. Fry is captured by the Nazis and is tortured to make him reveal information about the invasion of Normandy. He hasn't cracked under the torture. But as soon as he sees Hugh, he's smitten with the German officer, reveals the information he wants, and begs for a kiss. (The German says, "Well, maybe a little one.")
• In Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Matt Albie is constantly getting into arguments with his blonde, Christian ex-girlfriend about everything from politics to same-sex marriage to whether or not she should pose for a men's magazine. Aaron Sorkin had recently broken up with his blonde, Christian girlfriend having had many of the same conflicts with her. Critics were quite to point out that this gave Sorkin an opportunity to win all the arguments by proxy since he was now writing both sides.
• Latka's Split Personality problem in Season 4 of Taxi was conceived to relieve Andy Kaufman's boredom with the role, making him The Cast Showoff in the process. Andy was extremely fond of assuming alternate identities in real life, which was to be incorporated into a first season episode where his Alter-Ego Acting persona Tony Clifton would serve as the guest star while Andy/Latka was elsewhere; it didn't work because Tony treated everyone like dirt, to the point he was not only fired but escorted from the Paramount lot.
• In the middle of filming the second season of Titus, Cynthia Watros became pregnant. Their way of hiding it was rather ingenious; during the early stages, her character wore a lot of baggy, shabby clothes, as she had temporarily gone back to her parents and pretty much given up on her dreams after Christopher started drinking again (long story), and she was still getting over that. Later, as she got bigger, her character broke her leg chasing after a burglar, and spent the bulk of the rest of the season in a wheelchair. They did also work the pregnancy into a cutaway gag; Erin wins a pie-eating contest, then stands up triumphantly, revealing a swollen belly.
• Then there is the insanity that is the show formerly known as Valerie. Star Valerie Harper was let go at the very start of production of Season 3, amid accusations of demanding too much money and being hard to work with; her character was killed off and replaced with Sandy Duncan (who played her sister-in-law), and the title was changed to Valerie's Family: The Hogans. Then Harper won a defamation suit against the studio, forcing them to change the title again to The Hogan Family.
• A major plot point in HBO's 2019 Watchmen miniseries is that a vicious white supremacist paramilitary organization called "The Seventh Kavalry" formed to uphold the legacy of Rorschach (who died at the end of the original book) after his diary was published by The New Frontiersman, even wearing replicas of his mask in tribute to him. Most fans and critics recognized this as a commentary on Rorschach developing a massive fan following after the publication of the original book, despite Alan Moore intending him to be an utterly despicable character.
• In The West Wing, Knowing that John Spencer (Leo McGarry), had died in real life, makes the characters' reactions (especially those of Kristin Chenoweth) all the more poignant.
• The Wire:
  • Co-creator Ed Burns left the Baltimore police force to teach in city schools, much as Prez does in Season 4.
  • The Deacon is played by Melvin Williams, the real-life inspiration for Avon Barksdale's character. In his prime, during the 1970s, Williams dominated the drug trade in West Baltimore in much the same way.
  • Felicia Pearson had never acted before Michael Williams saw her in a nightclub and invited her to the set to test for Snoop. Before that, she had lived much the same life, getting involved in drug dealing in her teens (which she still did even after she was on the show, until she knew she'd like doing it) and serving a prison term for a murder she insists was self-defense. ^note The victim's family was not happy she got the part.
• In an episode of Witchblade, Sara lectures the coroner about alcoholism when she spots booze in the room. In real life, Yancy Butler has had battles with alcoholism, which led to the show's cancellation after the second season.
• David Henrie (Justin Russo) and Selena Gomez (Alex Russo), who play brother and sister in Wizards of Waverly Place, liked each other in Real Life (and they still probably do) and it affected their characters' relationship, as implied by the looks they gave one another while they were performing the roles and by the way they acted around each other. Their obvious chemistry was commented on by many fans, critics and even by their friends and families. Much to some people's relief and to a vast part of the fandom's dismay, they didn't act upon their crushes.
• The X-Files:
  • David Duchovny forced production to move from Vancouver to Los Angeles, in part to further his wife Téa Leoni's acting career. Vancouver is rainy, forested, and has similar architecture to the Eastern U.S. Los Angeles mostly looks like Los Angeles. As a result, there were substantially more episodes set in the American Southwest, which L.A. can credibly replicate.
  • The X-Files first did this when Gillian Anderson first became pregnant. For a while, her character Dana Scully was wearing her trenchcoat and sitting behind desks a lot more until she was abducted by aliens and was gone for the length of Anderson's maternity leave.
  • Not only that but when Scully returned she was in a coma for most of an episode. Due to complications from the pregnancy, her pallor didn't need a lot of make-up.
  • This had even more effect on the plot than most such cases since it helped kick-start the show's long-term myth arc, whereas before it had only featured vague alien-related plots and unconnected events.
• Early into the second season of Xena: Warrior Princess, Lucy Lawless broke her pelvis during a stunt accident on The Tonight Show. More so than with Kevin Sorbo the following year, production jumped through hoops to make it work. Xena's bodyswitch with Callisto in "Intimate Stranger" carried on into "Ten Little Warlords". she now died at the end of "Destiny" and new Xena-lite scripts were produced (such as "The Quest", "Necessary Evil" and "For Him the Bell Tolls") to give Lawless time to recover.

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