Meet Doug and Mike: When reality and fiction collide, who are the ultimate victims?

'Til Death is one of those shows most people haven't noticed. A cheap-o FOX sitcom starring Everyone Loves Raymond's Brad Garrett and Ellen's Joely Fisher, this barely par sitcom currently runs Sunday nights at 7.

Amazingly, the show has been going for four years!

By now you're wondering why anyone should care about this, as well you should, but before I can get to what's interesting, I have to tell you a little bit more about the show. According to Wikipedia:

’Til Death centers on Eddie and Joy Stark, and their relationship and behavior after 23 years of marriage. The first three seasons often focused on the contrast between the Starks and their newlywed neighbors, Jeff and Steph Woodcock (Eddie Kaye Thomas and Kat Foster).

The fourth season focuses on the Starks adjusting to life with their daughter Ally (Lindsey Broad) and new son-in-law Doug (Timm Sharp), who live in a trailer in the Stark's backyard. The series takes place in suburban Philadelphia in Cheltenham Township.

It is the character of the son-in-law Doug, and especially the character's revelations in the 64th episode of the series entitled "Hi Def TV" that concerns me here. The episode aired on January 31, 2010, and in this episode Doug became convinced that he was a character on a sitcom.

Character self awareness in sitcoms is not all that uncommon.





Way back George Burns would step out of character and address the audience directly on The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show. More recently, The Office and it's sister show Parks and Recreation have made talking to the camera and breaking the fourth wall part of its very style. Breaking the fourth wall is a common motif from Shakespeare to Bugs Bunny, but the Kafka-esque nightmare of realizing that one's reality is someones "fictional" entertainment is something else entirely.

Actors such as Groucho Marx might turn to the camera and sarcastically confide a joke to the audience, but in this case we are aware in a meta-sense that the actor is stepping slightly out of character to let us in on something. In The Office the characters all have and believe in their existence as actual people, and we are led to believe that the cameras are there to film some sort of ongoing documentary.

But on 'Til Death, Doug has a sudden surge of paranoia concerning reality.

He is a character, trapped in a sitcom world, who can hear the canned laughter of an audience reacting to lame jokes, who catches glimpses of mysterious boom mikes dipping into frame most unprofessionally, and who becomes convinced that he can't utter curses or have sex with his wife for fear of being censored. Since Doug is in fact a fictional character, we cannot find solace in hiss new found awareness. This isn't like The Truman Show, where we can hope that Truman might escape the artificial world he's been born into. Truman was able to escape the bounds of his confining reality. Doug will simply be forever trapped in his diminished world.

What happens to a person trapped in a sitcom reality?

Unfortunately, we don't really know.

In the movie Pleasantville the effects of real people on a fictional world were quite dramatic. But that's a movie, and it had a movie like ending. Most sitcoms don't give us movie like endings, they just end. And most sitcoms don't have characters who realize that they are characters on them. (At least, the characters don't admit to knowing.)

But there is one character, and one show, that explored this idea in full. The show was called Growing Pains. According to Wikipedia:

The show's premise is based around the fictional Seaver family, who reside on Long Island, New York. Dr. Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), a psychiatrist, works from home because his wife, Maggie Malone (Joanna Kerns), has gone back to work as a reporter. Jason has to take care of the kids: troublemaker Mike (Kirk Cameron), honors student Carol (Tracey Gold), and rambunctious Ben (Jeremy Miller). The show was relevant in the mid-1980s, as women going to work was becoming more and more common, as were stay-at-home dads.

Growing Pains lasted from 1985 to 1992, and made a star out of born-again Christian and nutty creationist Kirk Cameron. This is where things get weird. In the sixth season episode "Meet the Seavers", which aired on March 6, 1991, the younger brother Ben got into trouble and wished his life could be more like a sitcom. Somehow his wish propels him into the real world, and he realizes that his bedroom is just a set, there are cameras and a live studio audience watching.

As the episode progresses, Ben learns that his name is Jeremy, that he is an actor, that the people playing his parents are actors, and that his entire world is a fiction on a television series called Meet the Seavers. The person Ben thought was his brother is an actor named Kirk Cameron. Ben struggles to return to his fictional reality, and this only becomes possible after Kirk Cameron reveals that he is in fact not Kirk Cameron, but Mike Seaver, who had made a similar wish some years before. He has been trapped in the real world ever since.

Of course Ben returns to his world, and all is well, save for one last nightmare image. As Ben sits down to watch television, he sees his brother, Mike Seaver, calling to him for help. We are left with the unsettling possibility that Kirk Cameron is not a real person playing a part on television, but a fictional character somehow brought into our world.

If this is true, imagine the humbling psychological implications for the fictional character navigating our real world. Kirk Cameron would be absolutely right in believing that the world has a god-like creator: In his case Growing Pains was created by Neal Marlens (who also created The Wonder Years and Ellen with writer Carol Black). Having now crossed into our world, he would more easily than most come to believe that universe are created. Being cut off from all he knows in the world he left, he might search for meaning and continuity through religion.

Kirk Cameron is a born again Christian. He believes universes can be created in days, and in the case of the sitcom universe he came from, he's right. According to Wikipedia:

Cameron says he was once an atheist, but around age 17 or 18, during the height of his career on Growing Pains, he developed a belief in God, and became a Christian. After converting to Christianity, he began to insist that story lines be stripped of anything he thought too adult or racy in Growing Pains.

Of course a character in a sitcom would be offended by adult and racy content. He came from a more innocent world, and insisted on maintaining those standards here on Earth. Also note that the change in religious belief corresponds nicely to the time line of events established in the episode under discussion.

It is a pleasing paranoia to indulge a fantasy in which our lives are a sitcom for the amusement of an unseen audience. But when we become convinced this is so, it becomes a serious mental imbalance. How much more horrifying then, to be cursed with such an awareness when you truly are a character on a television series?

Madness and reality blend into a strange world where the end times come not as a mighty Judgment Day but as an anti-climatic cancellation.