Trivia / The Pretender

• Actor Allusion:
  • Miss Parker is played by Andrea Parker, who previously was cast in the pilot of JAG as Lieutenant Pike. Doubles as The Danza, obviously. Interestingly, both are unintentional, as the character of Miss Parker was named before she was cast.
  • In the first-season episode "Jaraldo!", Lisa Howard plays a reporter who befriends Jarod. In Days of Our Lives, Lisa Howard played April Ramirez, a love interest to Michael T. Weiss' character Dr. Mike Horton.
• California Doubling: Jarod's adventures take him all over the United States, but the filming locations are rarely in the same place that the stories are set. One specific instance is that the Centre is in Delaware but the exteriors of the building are actually filmed in Ontario.
• Channel Hop: The two TV movies that followed up the series aired on TNT. Also a case of Production Company Hop: MTM Enterprises (yes, the people who brought us WKRP in Cincinnati and Newhart) produced the first season; shortly afterwards, it was bought by 20th Century Fox and was produced by them for the rest of the run alongside NBC (even after their main purchase target, Fox Family, was sold to Disney alongside the remnants of Fox Kids and the renamed ABC Family).
• The Danza:
  • Mr Raines's favorite mook, Willie (played by Willie Gault), and Miss Parker's favorite mook, Sam (played by Sam Ayers).
  • Miss Parker herself is played by Andrea Parker, but this is a coincidence: the character was named before she was cast.
• Directed by Cast Member: The episode "School Daze", in the final season, is directed by Jon Gries.
• DVD Commentary: Michael T. Weiss and Andrea Parker's commentary for the second season two-parter "Bloodlines," which is two hours of riffing on plot holes, moronic characters, glurge, and Haley Joel Osment's acting, is positively hilarious.
  Michael T. Weiss: "Hmm! Pi! There it is again!"
• Edited for Syndication: The season finales ("The Dragon House," "Bloodlines," "Donoterase," and "Inner Sense") aired as 90-minute episodes. For reruns on TNT and elsewhere, they had to be split into separate episodes—cutting out some material in order to make room for intros and Previously on… segments. The DVD releases feature the full-length versions.
• Fake Brit: Pamela Gidley as Mr Lyle's sidekick, Brigitte. After half a season, the writers had Brigitte drop the accent and admit that she'd been putting it on all along, to the lampshade-festooned unsurprise of every other character who had ever heard her speak.
• Fake Mixed Race: In the episode "Pool", Jennifer Garner plays a woman with a white mother and African-American father. (For what it's worth, it's a plot point that she's been passing as white her whole life and didn't even know herself that she had mixed heritage.)
• Hey, It's That Place!: The external view of the Centre is the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant in Ontario, which has appeared in numerous films and TV series as a corporate headquarters, prison, or hospital.
• Real-Life Relative: In the episode "Pool", the actor playing the wedding celebrant is Fred A. Keller, the father of the episode's director Fred K. Keller.
• Recast as a Regular:
  • Jake Lloyd had a one-off role in the first season, as the son of a pilot whose death Jarod investigates, then had a recurring role as young Angelo in the second and third.
  • Kelsey Mulrooney had a one-off role as the littlest orphan in the first season's Christmas episode, then returned in the second season for a recurring role as Broots's daughter.
• Same Voice Their Entire Life: In flashbacks featuring Timeshifted Actors as the younger versions of Mr. Parker, Sydney, or Jacob, their lines are looped by the actor who plays the present-day version of the character.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: In the episode "Pool", Miss Parker's father decides to hold a family dinner party — at his daughter's house, without discussing it with her first. Behind the scenes, this was almost certainly because the interior of Miss Parker's house was an established set and the interior of her father's wasn't, but it works well for the episode, inspiring a few moments that illustrate Miss Parker's relationship with her father and other family members.
• Technology Marches On: Jarod's library of mini-discs was a lot more impressively high-tech when the show started than it is to a viewer now.
• Written-In Infirmity: In "Dragon House", a handyman Jarod talks to happens to have his arm in a cast — because the actor broke the arm shortly before filming.