TV Tuesday: This Week's Special Guest

[yourlibrarian]

Celebrity cameos/guest appearances are their own category when it comes to award shows. Can there be too many famous faces in a show? When were these done well or poorly?

Comments

[jo]

Friends had SO many guest star appearances. Most worked really well, others... not so much. My top three bad ones are:

Kathleen Turner as Chandler's trans father. 'Nuff said.

Danny DeVito as a worn-down male stripper -- it's just an uncomfortable episode.

George Clooney and Noah Wyle as doctors who treat Rachel's injured leg and then take Rachel and Monica on a double-date. Not exactly a cross-over but ER and Friends were two of NBC's biggest shows at the time, so it was a blatant attempt to cash in on that. It totally ignored the fact that ER was set in Chicago, and both Clooney and Wyle were not their ER characters, so it was just weird (to me).

The good ones are too numerous to mention, but my fave is probably Brad Pitt as Will, a former classmate of Rachel, Ross and Monica's who hated Rachel's popularity in high school and founded the "I Hate Rachel Green Club" with Ross, who was secretly pining over her. Watching the then-married couple go at each other is brilliant.


Big Bang Theory also had a lot of guest appearances, and often by people who weren't actors in real life and were "playing" themselves, e.g. Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Buzz Aldrin, Adam Nimoy, etc. That said, a lot of the actors making cameo appearances were also playing themselves (e.g. Bill Shatner, Brent Spiner, Levar Burton, Carrie Fisher, James Earl Jones, etc.). The one cameo appearance however, that is totally cringe in retrospect, is Elon Musk, because of what he's turned out to be. Plus the plot of the episode has him volunteering at a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving -- which I am fairly certain is not something he'd ever lower himself to do in real life.

Among the good ones are returning appearances by Laurie Metcalf as Sheldon's mom, and Christine Baranski as Leonard's mom.