Thursday, October 18, 2007

Biting the Hand that Will Someday Feed You

A commenter on the "Weird Science" DVD announcement notes:


I think that the Season 3 episode "Fly Boy" was arguably the best X-FILES parody any show did at the time.


That brings up one of my favorite bits of silly writer trivia: the guy who wrote that episode, Jeff Vlaming, was hired a few months later as a staff writer for The X-Files. Which means that an X-Files parody for a cable sitcom ("Molly, in 1959, three Soviet Georgian Yak Herders inexplicably burst into flame") was one of the last things he wrote before joining the actual X-Files.

There's at least one other case I can think of where something like this happened: Arnie Kogen, the veteran comedy writer and Mad magazine contributor, wrote a parody of Newhart for the magazine in 1983 and was hired as a writer for the retooled Newhart three years later.

There must be other instances where someone was hired for a TV show after having already done a parody of it, for a sketch show or something like that.

3 comments:

Got Medieval said...

Both Nick Kroll and John Mulaney are commentator/writers on VH1's Best Week Ever, and before joining the show they co-created All Access: Middle Ages and I Love the 30's, (excellent) parodies of the whole talking-head slacker clip show nostalgia genre.

Anonymous said...

Not writers, but in 1980 SCTV did a scathing parody of SNL ("Thursday Night Live"), and the two lead actors in the sketch-within-the-sketch, Tony Rosato and Robin Duke, joined the cast of Saturday Night Live the next year.

Anonymous said...

David A. Goodman wrote the FUTURAMA episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," a loving parody of STAR TREK featuring most of the then-surviving cast, and then a few years later became a member of the STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE writing staff.