Sunday, October 29, 2006

TV Time

I'm noticing that several of the shows I watch play cute tricks with time. I know that they will, for instance, have a Christmas episode close to Christmas and stuff like that, but now they're getting subtle and cute. For instance, in the second season finale of Lost, they name the date of the plane crash as September 22, 2004. That's the date Lost premiered on ABC.

Likewise, on the episode of Heroes that aired on October 2, Hiro traveled forward in time to November 8, the day after the election, and what looked like a nuke went off in NYC. Then he traveled back to his "present" time, which was what date? October 2.

And on Smallville, they refer to the disaster that engulfed the world when Zod came to Earth as "Dark Thursday," because, of course, Smallville airs on Thursday. It's not as if the episodes air in real time, but the creators like to throw in Easter eggs, I guess.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

TV shows have frequently used the air date for the "real" date of the show. The first time I caught this was an old episode of Remington Steele. For more metatextual jazz, Buffy even mentioned once that things got more Hellmouthy in November and February, and peaked in May (i.e. Sweeps and Season Finales).