For A Song

Suburgatory is one of those shows I watch as much due to location as anything else.  It's on right before Modern Family (and right after The Middle) so if I'm home I'll check it out.

Anyway, it had its second season debut last week and something strange happened.  Lead character Tessa came back from a summer stay in Manhattan with her grandmother, where she learned about her mother, who'd abandoned her.  In particular, mom was a singer.  So Tessa decides to perform a song mom wrote in the local follies.

At the end of the episode, she gets up on stage and sings the song. It's the show's theme song.  It's kind of freaky to have a character acknowledge the theme.  It's almost like admitting you're on a TV show.  Imagine Captain Kirk humming the Star Trek theme as he beams down to a planet, or Norm saying he wants to be where everybody knows his name.

There are only two other examples of something similar that I can think of off the top of my head.  First, Ricky Ricardo sings the I Love Lucy song on his show: Then, and this is a bit of a cheat, in the movie version of M*A*S*H, there's a big scene where the Painless Pole thinks he's going to take his life, and they sing the theme song, "Suicide Is Painless."

(The story behind the latter is fascinating.  Director Robert Altman knew he needed a song for the scene and professional Johnny Mandel wrote the tune, but Altman wanted a really crappy, pseudo-Dylanesque lyric, so had his teenage son write it.  The tune (not the words) was kept on as the theme of the hit TV show, and his son got paid every time it played, so he ended up making more than ten times what his father got paid for the movie.)