Today, we look at how Chandler Bing from Friends showed up on Caroline in the City to just flame out horribly in a pickup attempt.
This is Somewheres in This Universe, a feature examining when characters from TV shows make guest appearances on other TV shows (in non-crossover stories), thus establishing that the two shows share a universe.
As I noted in the first installment of this feature, which saw David Schwimmer’s Ross Geller from Friends show up on an early episode of The Single Guy to help promote the then-new NBC sitcom, NBC would often use characters from its popular sitcoms to guest star early in the run of NEW NBC sitcoms to help promote said new show. At least early on, at least, when the Friends stars weren’t TOO famous to say no to these sorts of requests.
Right around the same time that Ross was showing up on The Single Guy, Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing made a cameo on the OTHER new sitcom on NBC’s Thursday night lineup, the 9:30 sitcom, Caroline in the City, starring Lea Thompson as a comic strip creator in New York City. Amy Pietz played her best friend, Annie, a Broadway dancer who loved to date a lot.
In the show’s fifth episode, “Caroline and the Folks,” Annie is at the local video store looking for a movie to rent, which is what we used to have to do in the years before streaming brought every movie right to your television screen, when she runs into Chandler. He isn’t actually NAMED in the episode, but it’s A. clearly Chandler and B. NBC promoted the episode as guest-starring Chandler, so I’m counting it as Chandler.
Chandler pretends to be into The Piano to appear sensitive. When he realizes that Annie was about to rent a cheesy slasher film, though, he notes that he could have just been himself. She tells them to just be himself, then, but he is is now so self-conscious that he just freezes, and then runs out of the store in embarrassment…
Cute bit. There was another cameo from an NBC sitcom character later in the episode, and Lea Thompson would cameo in a DIFFERENT NBC episode that night (all of the cameos were obviously part of the promotion for that night of episodes, which was the start of November sweeps), but I’ll address those in their own posts!
Feel free to e-mail me at brian@poprefs.com for suggestions for other good non-crossover guest appearances by TV characters!
