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Peaky Blinders' Tommy is intentionally never shown eating on-screen.
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00:00So with the longer form nature of TV that we have today, it allows storytellers to set up
00:04running gags that don't merely just run for a mere two hours, but whole seasons and perhaps
00:09the entire length of a multi-season TV show itself. Now these 10 shows, from universally
00:15acclaimed dramas to goofy animated comedy series, all offered up deviously sneaky running gags that
00:21you almost certainly didn't notice, at least not on your first viewing. So let's take a look at
00:25them as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 long-running TV gags that you've never
00:30even noticed. Number 10. CJ's Goldfish Bowl Contains Episode-Specific Props, The West Wing
00:37The West Wing boasts an especially creative and subtle running gag which endured from its first
00:41season through until its seventh and final one. Now you might recall this in one of the show's
00:46first episodes, Dani buys CJ a goldfish for her office, but the prop master for the series decided
00:52to go one step further by ensuring that new episodes had a thematically appropriate new prop
00:57inside the goldfish bowl. For example, a Christmas episode had a Christmas tree in the bowl,
01:02a Capital Punishment episode had a fake dead fish floating in it, and when there were leaks at the
01:06White House, there's a plumbing pipe placed in the bowl. There are almost 50 different versions of
01:12the gag throughout the West Wing, and yet it is just subtle enough that you couldn't be blamed for
01:16missing it. Number 9. Rick Never Wears a Seatbelt
01:20Rick and Morty Rick and Morty is another show that rewards those
01:23who pay close enough attention, though here's a running gag so slight and unassuming that you
01:28might have spaced on it entirely, and that is that Rick never wears a seatbelt. Aside from the brief
01:34appearances of Detox Rick and Pickle Rick, Rick doesn't wear a seatbelt throughout the show,
01:39a nod towards his cavalier attitude towards his own safety, and to be kind, his generally suicidal
01:44levels of despondence. Rick's refusal to wear a seatbelt isn't ever directly brought up in the
01:49show itself, but it's nevertheless a neat morsel of character shading which confirms the kind of
01:54place that he's in. Only in his alternate, healthier states is Rick ever shown wearing a
01:59seatbelt. Now that is character development. Number 8. The Riker Chair Maneuver
02:04Star Trek The Next Generation It's entirely possible to have watched all 178 episodes of Star Trek The
02:11Next Generation and never noticed the tendency for Riker to sit down on chairs in a rather unusual
02:17way, straddling them almost as though he's mounting a horse. In more recent years, the Riker Chair
02:22Maneuver became a bit of a meme as fans started to take notice, and yet, despite how distracting it
02:27seems in retrospect, so many millions of fans never once picked up on it themselves.
02:32Now there's actually a practical reason for this move, though. Will Wheaton confirmed on Reddit that
02:37Jonathan Frakes suffered a back injury while moving furniture prior to working on The Next
02:42Generation, and so this peculiar means of sitting was actually an attempt to take off some of the
02:47strain on his back. Similarly, Riker can often be seen leaning or otherwise bracing himself against
02:52objects throughout the series, all of it in an attempt to prevent further aggravation of his real
02:57life existing injury. Despite its basically medical purposes, that hasn't stopped the internet
03:02embracing it in recent years has a charmingly odd character trait.
03:057. Reoccurring Use of the Song Daybreak
03:08Community
03:09Community is unquestionably one of the most meta and self-aware TV shows ever. And though eagle-eyed
03:15fans are committed to catching every last split-second gag, there's one hiding in plain sight throughout
03:20the series that you may have well missed. This is in large part because it's not decent for this,
03:24is that the production spent so much money securing licensing rights to play the police's
03:29Roxanne in the legendary season 3 episode Remedial Chaos Theory that the season's music budget had
03:34mostly been eaten up, and so Daybreak was used to fill the gaps for the season, with Harmon ultimately
03:39deciding to run with the ball and turn it into a wider community gag that you probably had no idea
03:44about.
03:456. Tyrion's Half-Told Joke
03:47Game of Thrones
03:48If you're not a hardcore Game of Thrones fan and have only seen each of the episodes once,
03:53then you wouldn't have much hope of noticing this sly running gag subtly deployed over the course of
03:58eight seasons. On three separate occasions, Tyrion Lannister attempts to tell a joke about bringing
04:03a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel, but each time he's interrupted before he's able to finish
04:08it. It first shows up in his trial in season 1's A Golden Crown, and he attempts again to tell the
04:13joke in season 6's No One, but is cut short by a ringing bell, while his third and final effort in
04:18the series is in the finale The Iron Throne, where the scene simply cuts away as he starts to tell the
04:24joke. Now, some of Thrones' more obsessive fans did catch wind of this. However, they were infuriated
04:29by the lack of closure and attempted to come up with their own answers, while the Huffington Post
04:33even asked some comedians to complete the punchline. Again, if you're not a hardcore Thrones fan,
04:38this is incredibly easily missed, especially if you've not revisited the series since it ended.
04:43Committing to the bit three times over an eight-year period, that is impressively sneaky.
04:485. The Secret McBain Movie Hidden Throughout The Show
04:51The Simpsons The Simpsons is of course jam-packed
04:54with running gags both blatant and subtle, from Bart's prank-calling Moe's tavern to the
04:59reoccurring crow that always caused distinctively during any establishing shot of Springfield's
05:03nuclear power plant. But an altogether more ingenious running joke occurs between the second
05:08and fourth seasons, where five separate episodes show clips of the fake movie McBain starring the
05:14action hero Rainier Wolfcastle. Viewed across three years, the clip seems simple enough,
05:19But more recently, as more fans began to binge The Simpsons, they started to realise that these
05:24clips all form part of a continuous narrative and are, in effect, a truncated version of the
05:29McBain movie. The four minutes of footage are effectively a McBain short film, showing McBain's
05:34best pal and partner being killed by the corrupt senator Mendoza, and McBain's blood-soaked quest to
05:39avenge his fallen friend. We all remember McBain, but these excerpts are by themselves such typical
05:45parodies of corny action movies that most fans didn't even realise that they were connected
05:49in a kind of coherent way. Pretty incredible, right?
05:524. Pineapples Everywhere – Psych
05:55Hit detective comedy series Psych touted a most bizarre running gag across its 120 episodes,
06:01that a pineapple would appear in some form in almost every single episode. Perhaps it might
06:06be a whole pineapple, mere slices of one, a pineapple smoothie, a pineapple pizza, or even
06:11just images of pineapples somewhere within the frame, but the commitment to the bit
06:14is nothing if not admirable. Fans cottoned on enough that a website was made to track
06:19the pineapple's location in each episode, all 170 of them, amounting to an average of
06:25almost 1.5 per episode. There's never been any official explanation for the gag beyond
06:30the showrunners doing it to amuse themselves, and it caught on enough with the hardcore fans
06:34that eventually it would have been a crying shame to stop it. Sometimes a running gag is its
06:38own weird reward, whether it makes sense or not.
06:413. The Gang Always Reuses the Same Video Tape – It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
06:46It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is basically built on the foundation of in-jokes and running
06:51gags. Though one of the sneakier one involves the gang always using the same damn grotty VHS
06:56tape to record and display their latest audio-visual scheme. The ads for Fight Milk and Kitten Mittens,
07:02Dee's Invigoron video, Dennis and Mac's fake terrorist video, and so many more were all shot on the
07:07same tape, with each recording over the previous one. Several times throughout the show when their
07:12latest video is playing, we'll see scattered fragments of their previous ones at the beginning
07:16and the end of the tape. It's easily missed if you're not paying total attention, but a hilarious
07:20ongoing callback if you do. Hopefully they'll never ditch this gag, because the longer it goes on,
07:25and the further the wizards of society stray away from VHS, the funnier it actually becomes.
07:302. Tommy Shelby Never Eats – Peaky Blinders
07:34Peaky Blinders might not be a show where you'd expect to see anything in the way of a major
07:38reoccurring joke, and that's likely why this running gag is rather on the sly side.
07:43While recently promoting the show's final season in an interview with the BBC, star Cillian Murphy
07:48confessed a gag that's been part of the show since the very beginning, that his character,
07:52Tommy Shelby, is never seen eating on screen. Obviously it's a given that Shelby, being a living
07:57human and all that, does eat, but Murphy confirmed that once the production team realised that Tommy
08:01hadn't been seen eating in the first two seasons, that they opted to keep it going for the remainder.
08:06He said,
08:06I remember we had gotten through the first two series, and then we realised that Tommy had never
08:11eaten. We've never seen Tommy eat. Like he sat down at tables, but he's never consumed a morsel,
08:16so we then made it a kind of running gag. So throughout the 36 hours of television,
08:20Tommy Shelby never consumes anything, except I think once he consumes a sprig of mint when he's with his
08:25son. In its own way, it subtly implies Tommy's obsession with his life's work. Something a small
08:30quarter of fans picked up on years ago, but which was only recently confirmed as an intentional
08:35character flourish by Murphy and the creator of the series.
08:381. Foreshadowing Buster Losing His Hand
08:41Arrested Development
08:42Perhaps the single most memorable moment in Arrested Development happens in the Season 2 episode
08:47Out on a Limb, where poor Buster Bluth has his hand bitten off by a loose seal, with the missing
08:53limb then being replaced by a hook. Hilariously though, Buster's impending dismemberment was
08:57foreshadowed almost an entire year in advance, with a series of gags throughout the latter part
09:02of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. These include a flashback to Michael performing in the
09:08play The Trial of Captain Hook, Buster declaring this party is going to be off the hook, a mention
09:13of a seal attack on the news, Buster playing a claw game and winning a toy seal, and Buster sitting on a
09:18bench which reads, Arm Off. Obviously it says more than that, but the way that he's sitting obscures the
09:23rest of the text. These are just a few examples, but of course nobody read into these gags on an
09:28initial viewing because nobody knew the fate awaiting Buster. Even on repeat watches, most of
09:32these sight gags and one-liners come so thick and fast that you might well miss them, and that makes
09:37them utterly brilliant.
09:42even noticed. I hope that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about it down
09:46in the comments section below. As always, I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Twitter
09:49at RetroJWithAZero, or you can swing by LiveAndLet'sDice where I do all of my streaming outside
09:54of work, and it'd be great to see you over there. But before I go, I just want to say one thing.
09:58Hope you're treating yourself well with love and respect, my friend, because you deserve all of the
10:03best things in life, and do not let anything or anyone else tell you otherwise, alright?
10:07You're a massive ledge, and we need to go out there and smash it. As always, I've been Jules,
10:11you have been awesome. Never forget that, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.
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