Greetings, reader!
Following "Top 10 best movies never made" two weeks ago, and "Top 10 greatest movies I have never seen" from last week, this is the culmination of my silly un-movie trilogy. Today we're looking at the greatest TV shows and/or movies that only exist within other TV shows and/or movies. Whether it's a made-up movie in a movie about movies, a fictional movie featured as a plot element in a TV show, a fake TV series made for the purpose of a real movie, or a show in a show about shows, these are my favorite fictional TV shows / movies. They're not ranked just based on how good they'd necessarily be, but based on the ingenuiety of the idea, how well it serves the plot, and how curious I'd be - for one reason or another - to see the whole thing if it was real.
Here are my honorable mentions: Cleaver (The Sopranos), Invitation to Love (Twin Peaks), The Orchid Thief (Adaptation.), Threat Level Midnight (The Office), and all the fake game shows from Saturday Night Live.
10. The McBain franchise (The Simpsons)
Sure, The Itchy & Scratchy Show would be a more popular choice - but I'd choose McBain over it any day of the week. Itchy & Scratchy is a fun gag and decent satire about violence in media, but the McBain franchise is different gravy. From the brilliant concept of lead actor Rainier Wolfcastle, a thinly veiled Schwarzenegger parody, to the over-the-top action sequences riddled with every cliché imaginable, these are just pure gold. My favorite element is the "secret story" gag - if you watch every McBain clip we see throughout The Simpsons, interspersed across tens of seasons, they actually tell a well-built, cohesive story. That's cool as shit.
9. All My Circuits (Futurama)
I've always held on to my hot take that Matt Groening's lesser-known sitcom Futurama is extremely underrated, and in fact, slightly better than The Simpsons - and funnily enough, it places just one spot above it on this list as well. Throughout the show's run, we often see clips of All My Circuits - an all-robot soap opera that is all the rage in the 31st century. And yes - a generic soap opera parody, but with a robot twist, is just as hilariously entertaining as it sounds.
8. The Thunder Gun franchise (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia)
Originally introduced in the utterly fantastic episode Thunder Gun Express, this fictional movie franchise combines all sorts of action franchise clichés while adding its own, IASIP-specific twist to become fantastically bonkers. The concept is funny in itself, and absolutely hysterical when you factor in the main characters' relationship to the franchise.
My favorite instance of Thunder Gun lore comes in Thunder Gun 4: Maximum Cool, which I consider to be the best episode of the sitcom's fourteenth season. In a razor-sharp commentary on current culture wars around the world of cinema, the gang is chosen as the focus group for a new Thunder Gun sequel. The film attempts to bring the franchise to the modern day with a "woke" direction, and oh boy, the main characters of this satirical anti-sitcom make for the most pitch-perfect exploration of the attitudes that take over the internet whenever a real film franchise does anything of the sort. Gags like the gang not realizing the painfully obvious subtext in the "passing the torch" sequence are pure gold.
7. The Passions of Santos (Jane the Virgin)
It was difficult to choose the best fictional TV series from Jane the Virgin - major character Rogelio De La Vega (Jaime Camil) works as a TV actor throughout the series, and we follow the behind-the-scenes misadventures of several fictional shows via his storylines. An argument could be made for any one of them: the sci-fi telenovela Tiago a Través del Tiempo is hilariously over-the-top, the conceptual Los Viajes de Guillermo is funny in an amiable and memorable way, and then there's The Passions of Steve and Brenda - the American remake of Rogelio's original telenovela, which works as a beautiful meta commentary on Jane the Virgin itself (although it spirals from there, eventually becoming This Is Mars).
But after all is said and done, I have to go with the OG - The Passions of Santos. It's the telenovela in which Rogelio stars when the show begins, and is intensely followed and loved by a majority of the show's other characters. The parallels between the fiction and the fiction-within-the-fiction are at their freshest and most clever here, and after the show is over and Rogelio moves on to other things, the Passions of Santos lore becomes a warm and nostalgic staple of Jane the Virgin.
6. Angels with Filthy Souls (Home Alone)
My seventh-graders always choose Home Alone for their end-of-the-period movie in my music class, so I've had two cases of watching the movie five or six times a week (and getting paid for it) during the past year - and that's on top of having seen the film a good 15-ish times before that in my life. Mind you, I'm still not sick of it - that's how great Home Alone is.
When you watch that movie that many times in rapid succession, you really start to pick up on every single detail (for example: you know how the McCallister family is comically filled with people at the beginning of the film, with references to a complex family tree? I now know the name of every single character in the extended family, and how they all relate to one another). And so, I've become intimately acquainted with Angels with Filthy Souls, the made-up black-and-white gangster movie that Kevin watches and later uses to trick the Little Nero's delivery guy (and later yet, the crooks).
Sure, we all remember classic lines like "ONE, TWO...TEN!" and "Keep the change, you filthy animal". But oh man, I've had the time to analyze the less memorable lines leading up to that, to the point that I have a pretty good idea of the dynamic between the gangsters Johnny and Snakes, the role of the off-screen character Acey who is mentioned, and the likely events leading up to the violent confrontation we know and love. I'm a bit less well-versed on the sequel, Angels with Even Filthier Souls, that Kevin watches in Home Alone 2 - but I'm getting there.
5. Joan Is Awful (Black Mirror)
Oh, I love it when they go full meta. In what is the undoubtedly Kaufman-iest episode of Black Mirror, and naturally one of my biggest favorites from the show as well, we follow Joan. She's a regular woman, with all sorts of mundane drama going on in her life, until one day she comes home, turns on the TV, clicks on an interesting-sounding new show on the streaming service Streamberry - only to find out, to her existential horror, that the series is about her life, with the pilot episode recounting things that happened to her on that very day.
Now, I'm not saying that Joan Is Awful would be a particularly good show (and definitely not an ethical one, either) if it was real, unlike many on today's list. But I had to rank it high, because the very concept of it is so amazingly creative. In the post-post-information age we live in, with AI "art" being shoved down our throats while questions about digital consent become more and more dystopian, this premise feels relevant as hell, and ultimately quite profound in all scariness.
4. Two Brothers (Rick and Morty)
I really could've gone with any one of the zany and inventive pieces of media that we see in the iconic episode Rixty Minutes, and its sequel Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate. For those not familiar, there are two episodes of Rick and Morty that consist pretty much entirely of the characters just watching TV, flipping around to see what different channels from different dimensions have to offer. Apparently, they were all produced in the following manner: the voice actors would just improvise some crazy-sounding TV show, and the animators would work around that to create what the show ends up looking like.
There are so many gems to choose from here: the absurd reality show Man Vs. Car, the chaotic morning show hosted by twins Michael and Pichael Thompson, the absolutely glorious trailer for Jan Quadrant Vincent 16...but if I had to choose one, I kept coming back to Two Brothers. The whole sequence is peak Rick and Morty.
3. TGS with Tracy Jordan (30 Rock)
30 Rock is another show full of fictional movies and TV shows with hysterical premises, as this is a key component the show's nature as a satire of modern showbusiness. Choosing TGS, the main show-within-a-show, almost felt like a boring choice - the sketch comedy often feels like little more than a stand-in for Saturday Night Live, whereas many of the movies and shows in the 30 Rock universe have more of an original personality to them. Who could forget movies like the poorly marketed The Rural Juror or Tracy Jordan's Black Cop / White Cop, as well as the reality show MILF Island?
But then again - TGS is home. Yes, it's a thinly veiled SNL metaphor, but that is by no means a bad thing. If anything, that ensures that Tina Fey was conveniently able to draw every little bit of inspiration from her experience in the crazy world of Saturday Night Live into this series, often making it feel like a behind-the-scenes look at that world, albeit an exaggerated one. So many of 30 Rock's most unforgettable episodes and moments stem from the work they do on TGS, so I had to pick that as the show's representative on today's topic.
Also, unlike its real-world counterpart, TGS never had a guest host do a monologue where he calls women whores. If that happened in a 30 Rock storyline, many of the characters would probably deem that it's time for Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) to retire and for Tina Fey's character to take over. Just throwing that out there.
2. Lyman's Boys / Pucks (Episodes)
Episodes, an underappreciated gem that flew sadly under the radar, is a scathing critique of Hollywood and showbiz - and more specifically, a surgical look at why so many American adaptations of British shows have failed. In the series, we follow two British writers who have just finished the critically acclaimed run of a show called Lyman's Boys - a smart, witty, classy and slow-paced British sitcom about the headmaster of a boys' school and his rambunctious students. The writers are approached by a Hollywood producer, offering a deal that they move to Los Angeles and write an American adaptation of the series! With stars in their eyes, the writers take the deal - only for their deal to turn into the utmost nightmare.
They quickly notice how their intelligent ideas are bulldozed by boardrooms full of soulless Hollywood execs, out-of-touch people who see the TV show only as a product to make money off of, and the soul of the series is thus slowly stripped away until it becomes a shallow echo of itself. Through a catastrophic chain of bad ideas, Lyman's Boys becomes Pucks - a generic and fast-paced sitcom, where the students are replaced by a hockey team, and the headmaster becomes their coach - who is played by Matt LeBlanc (the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. alumnus stars in Episodes as an exaggerated version of himself).
Throughout the razor-sharp satirical dialogue in Episodes, a few things become clear - the writers of the show (the real one, not the fictional ones) had some amazing insight into modern showbusiness, and one wishes that these made-up TV shows would be real just so you could watch them. I can only imagine what a glorious train-wreck Pucks would turn out to be, while it pains me that Lyman's Boys isn't real as they make it sound so genuinely amazing.
1. Abed's Jesus movie (Community)
I mean - it is the greatest movie ever made, and since Shirley destroyed the footage, you can't prove me wrong. I heard that it's the same movie backward and forward, and that the deleted scenes are the scenes and the scenes are the deleted scenes. Say what you will about Abed - the man cannot be killed.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week as I tackle the ever-nearing 2026 midterm elections by sharing how I ranked Alaska's candidates for the House and Senate on my ranked-choice ballot!
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