The Third Universe: Where All Your TV Dreams Could Come True

Bradley Whitford as Josh Lymon

American TV shows seem to have exploded into some sort of renaissance over the last few years.  What broke the levee?  Was it The Sopranos?  The Wire? Was it a subtle rise in quality starting way back with Homicide: Life On The Street? Or was it the advent of the DVD box set?  I couldn't tell you, all I know is there's a lot of good stuff around, with good acting and high production value.  But perched in the sidecar of this particular reawakening, is the revival of older serials, many of them revisited on DVD box sets, others found in charity shops on VHS, or downloaded from the web.  In the last few years I have watched season upon season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, ER, Seinfield, Miami Vice, The Wire, The X Files, NYPD Blue and Twin Peaks to name but a few; and after a while a funny thing began to happen: faces began to reappear.  Bradley Whitford, playing the boyish, fast talking, competitive and loveable Josh Lyman in The West Wing turns up in The X Files episode 'Firewalker' as Daniel Trepkos, a scientist one sandwich short of a picnic, slowly picking off the rest of his co-workers on a remote mountain research lab in Oregon.  He again turns up in the immensely great, if not slightly reactionary, cop drama NYPD Blue, this time as the despicable, lascivious reporter Norman Gardner.

Bradley Whitford as Daniel Trepkos

Actually this is an entirely predictable phenomenon, it makes complete sense that jobbing actors would take as many roles as they could in high profile dramas, or that such actors would eventually land plum, starring roles in other programs.  But it still makes for an oddly enjoyable sensation when the gremlin-like Prinicipal Snyder (Armin Shimerman) from Buffy The Vampire Slayer walks into Jerry Seinfield's apartment as Kramer's buddy Stan the Caddy.  Or when Laura Palmer's gaunt, disturbed looking mother from Twin Peaks (Grace Zabriskie) turns up in Seinfield playing the wife of another Twin Peaks alumni Warren Frost (Dr Hayward, father of Laura Palmer's best friend Donna Hayward, who is played by Moira Kelly in the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk With Me and who also appears in The West Wing as Mandy Hampton, Joshy Lyman's ex-girlfriend).  When Grace Zabriskie then has a walk on part in The West Wing as CJ Cregg's boss who subsequently fires her, it seems to me that some sort of circle has been completed.  Although it hasn't, because the links I just described don't form one.  I'm sure I could find some sort of circle incorporating various TV dramas, we could all play Six Degrees of Separation forever and get a little kick out of it blah blah blah.  But I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in chaos.

Grace Zabriskie & Warren Frost, both of Twin Peaks fame, appearing in Seinfield

It's about random chaos.  A crazy whirl of faces and names and characters zinging away from each other and hurtling back, splurging and congealing together in our heads.  The hilarious and scary Mayor Wilkins (Harry Groener) from Season 3 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer turns up in a couple of The West Wing episodes as the Secretary of Agriculture, a rather sweet and humble man from what we see of him.  The sarcastic secretary in ER, Jerry (Abraham Benrubi) pops up in The X Files as the naive  and hapless Big Mike Raskin, who is dispatched by a Tibetan Tulpa, a manifestation of the thoughts of Gene Gogolak, the head of a gated community who uses this evil 'thought form' to ensure that residents abide by his strict rules of neighbourhood taste.  Fabulous.

Grace Zabriskie as Sarah Palmer

This is a phenomena very much particular to TV rather than film, because a serial allows an actor to have a fairly decent supporting role for one episode and then appear in no subsequent programs in the series.  What all this amounts to is the birth of a new world, a Third Universe.  When watching a program, there are two universes at play: the viewers world, which is our world, the real world, and the one playing out on the screen in front of us.  But after assimilating so many American TV programs over the last few years, a Third Universe has arisen in my head, sparked off whenever I see a face I recognise where I haven't seen them before, and it begins to simultaneously play out as the show progresses.  By noticing these actors who have leaped across the boundaries of fictional worlds for the sake of financial rewards, it immediately places them in my universe, and I realise that they are not this character, this ruthless lawyer, witty civil servant, stressed clinician, maverick FBI agent or gruesome half-human half parasitic gooey flesh eating monster (take your pick), but also an actor seeking work to pay the bills.

Armin Shimerman as Prinicipal Synder

And then I really start to have fun, as my mind begins to spin the fabric of the Third Universe.  The uncharted hinterland between reality and fiction; a swampish landscape of half-characters and split personalities, where the plethora of people, real and fictional, converge into one huge, chaotic, awesome, post-modern, self referential, medical-political-cop-teen-horror-thriller-sci-fi-sitcom-drama.  Where Bradley Whitford/Josh Lymon/Dr. Daniel Trepkos delivers witty put-downs to Republican opponents while trying to do the dirty on a hardworking cop at the same time as using his laser-sighted rifle to pick off a scientist.  All on a volcanic mountainside.  While on the phone to his agent.  Where Grace Zabriskie/Isabel/Mrs Ross/Sarah Palmer knocks back another sherry and grimaces at George Costanza while firing CJ Cregg and screaming in fear at the long haired, denim clad terror lurking at the bottom of her bed while accepting yet another role from David Lynch as a 'weird, freaky' lady.  The possibilites are endless, and if I had the money, the power, the sheer wealth of Hollywood, HBO and any other big, fuck off American network at my disposal, I would induuuuuuulge.  Think of what I could do!  If could make these actors a financial offer they couldn't refuse, then I could piece together some sort of post-modern medley of TV drama merged with a Samuel Beckett-esque aesthetic, all into one beautiful Brechtian extravaganza!  It could be a comment on the domination of US culture on the world!  It could be an expose on the hardships of being a jobbing TV actor!  It could be a fan's wet dream!  An at times glorious, at others most probably nightmarish, journey of puzzled actors, flitting between roles in confusion!  Of TV sets that transform as the camera moves; government offices morphing into graveyards populated by vampires and from there into a clean Manhattan apartment with SO much cereal (why does he have that much cereal?), where a gurney bursts through the front door, a prone body lying on top of it, while doctors and nurses propel it forward while shouting phrases that we don't understand but nonetheless make us feel tremendously excited!  The possibilities are as endless as Fox Mulder's supply of sunflower seeds.

Armin Shimerman as Stan the Caddy

But alas this will never happen.  So I must cherish this vision in my head, where it will stay, and cherish the reality of a particularly special moment, when this phenomenon I've been pondering these last few paragraphs, crossed the water to plain old Blighty.  Watching an old VHS copy of Absolutely Fabulous that I bought from a charity shop last year, who should walk into Edina Monsson's (Jennifer Saunders) living room but none other than Stringer Bell!  Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), resident of Baltimore, Maryland in HBO's The Wire; ruthless gangster, friend to the corrupt politician, a man who strives to take his calm, sober greed to ever higher levels of business, power and influence; a man so committed to protecting himself and the drug running business he oversees that he had his bosses and best friend's nephew murdered.  A man, in the end, who flies too close to the sun.  Surely one of the most intriguing characters in The Wire, nay, television history!  And here he is in Absolutely Fabulous playing a gigolo called Hilton, who accidentally mistakes one of Edina's oestrogen pills for Ecstasy, leading to ridiculous consequences, if my memory serves me correct.  You may be hoping for a clip here, but I couldn't find one, and in a way this only increases the tantalising nature of this phenomenon.  This wondrous walkway, that bridges the gap from classic 1990s BBC comedy, to high budget, social realist US drama, this is where the magic lies, this bridge we can only ever see the ends of, but never the middle, that hinterland where our minds fill in the gaps, that space between where anything is possible.  Imagine the fun we could have...