While watching My Name is Earl last night, a promo for the show’s website came up at the end of the show. New website, great – then they mentioned that Randy, a character on the show, had a blog.
Now I’m not sure if you’ve seen the show but Randy isn’t quite the sharpest knife in the drawer. In other words it’s a little unrealistic for him to have a blog. (If any character on the show would, it’d be Darnell, all the way.) The blog is naturally in character but, come on.
On the other end of the spectrum, the character Barney from How I Met Your Mother has a blog too… although it hasn’t been updated since last season. He references it on the show, and I totally buy that he’d have a blog and use cheesy Excel graphs on it.
What do you think of all of this fake people having blogs business?
Posted in Television, Movies, and Music
Steve A September 28, 2007, 10:58 am
It’s advertising in the cheapest form. And there’s no need to even use the same person to do the writing!
Just another nail to the coffin of the sad state of US television.
Ciao,
Ryan September 28, 2007, 2:12 pm
The Office has a couple of character blogs, too — Creed’s is particularly humorous, though Dwight’s had teh funny, too.
I think it’s clever as long as it’s not overdone, and it’s starting to move in that direction…
Paul September 28, 2007, 3:33 pm
Thing about Creed’s blog, Ryan, was that part of teh funny on the show was that Ryan had set up a Word document for him and called it a blog, mostly to get him off his back. And then there it is for real. Sigh.
Merle October 1, 2007, 11:05 pm
Psych does the same thing. I’m sorry, but why would I want to read a fictitious blog? Writing my own would be more fun. If the actors want to have some sort of journal, fine, but for the characters it is just silly.
If they want extra content they could simply produce more episodes, rather than slacking off for half of the year.
Adam October 3, 2007, 12:21 am
I’m not completely against it. The Fake Steve Jobs blog was obviously written in character and everyone loves (loved) it. That’s a little different in that it is a character based on a real person, but it’s not that different.
While I don’t watch The Office, that’s a show that I could see making it work. They tried (but failed) to do something similar for that show Invasion. One of the lead characters was always writing on his blog about weird things happening in town. Little did he know that he was on to something. That’s a case where it actually fit into the show. However, they really didn’t do a good job with it.
Bottomline: while I don’t think it works a lot of the time, it can if done well. It’s all about the execution.
Adam October 3, 2007, 12:30 am
Californication might be a good one to try a character blog of sorts. If you haven’t seen the show, the lead character played by David Duchovny actually writes a blog. At the end of each episode they usually fade to credits with his voiceover reading part of the blog entry. It’s usually written based on events that happened in that episode.
It might be cool if they created a blog that actually posted the entire entries as if you were really reading Hank Moody’s (character name) blog on “Hell-A” magazine’s site.