By IAN SHOALES
I was sitting down to watch "X-Files" and happened to catch the show before it, "Strange Luck," about a guy who has, um, gee, strange luck, I guess.
I only caught the end, but I gather that the hero had just found his long-lost brother, who was mixed up in something shady, and had fled from the hero's life once more. He'd left behind a message: if anything happens to him, the hero should contact Agent Mulder at the FBI.
Agent Mulder, of course, is the hero of "X-Files" (coming up next!). In my opinion, if the "Strange Luck" guy had been really strangely lucky, he would have been told to contact Homer Simpson, anti-hero of another Fox series. But then there wouldn't have been the promotional tie-in and graceful segue, I suppose.
Guest star appearances happened a lot in the early days of televison. That was part of the essence of "I Love Lucy." ( "But Ricky, why can't I meet John Payne?"). Not to mention any Bob Hope Special from the past hundred years, where all sorts of has-beens-in-the-making could be seen, reading incredibly lame jokes from cue cards, half-heartedly.
And spin-offs? Forget about it. "Mary Tyler Moore" begat "Lou Grant" and "Rhoda." "Happy Days" begat "Laverne and Shirley" and "Mork and Mindy."
The basic idea here seems to be that fame is both contagious and self-perpetuating. When the successful hang with other successes, their very proximity brings vaster fame to all. This is how fame breeds, so the theory goes. It's kind of like a chain letter -- if you break the chain, you'll never work in this town again. If you stick with the program, and pass the fame on, you'll have a miniseries before the next full moon. (What would Mulder and Scully make of this?)
Now network television seems to be doing a variation on this strange Darwinism again: Yoko Ono popped up on "Mad About You," Peter Tork turned in a cameo on "Wings," Martha Stewart gave decorating tips to "Ellen," JFK Jr. showed up on "Murphy Brown" .... Florence Henderson, Suzanne Somers, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks, Tawny Kitaen, Bob Saget have all played themselves in cameos.
"The Larry Sanders Show" may have taken this in-joke to hilarious new heights, but it's still pretty shallow ground, if you ask me. Look at the series of ads with Penny Marshall and Rosie O'Donnell plugging K-Mart. What's up with that? They're supposedly playing themselves, but neither of them would be caught dead in a K-Mart in real life (I'm betting), so they're actually playing themselves as if they were the kind of people who would be caught dead at K-Mart, in real life. So who are they really? And who are we, the viewers, really? Does this low-rent Pirandello act make us want to shop at K-Mart, really?
Next page: Michel Foucault and Jill St. John: the shocking untold story
