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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
02:22chair manoeuvre became a bit of a meme as fans started to take notice, and yet, despite how
02:27distracting it seems in retrospect, so many millions of fans never once picked up on it
02:31themselves. There's actually a practical reason for this move, though. Will Wheaton confirmed on
02:37Reddit that Jonathan Frake suffered a back injury while moving furniture prior to working on The
02:42Next Generation, and so this peculiar means of sitting was actually an attempt to take off some
02:47of the strain on his back. Similarly, Riker can often be seen leaning or otherwise bracing himself
02:51against objects throughout the series, all of it in an attempt to prevent further aggravation of his
02:56real-life existing injury. Despite its basically medical purposes, that hasn't stopped the internet
03:02embracing it in recent years as 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 something that can
03:24be seen, so scouring every inch of a single shot won't actually help you. You see, the instrumental jazz
03:30tune Daybreak can be heard on no less than a dozen different community episodes between seasons three
03:35and six, and characters are heard humming it in separate episodes. It also plays on a radio and
03:40in an elevator, amongst other situations. According to the creator Dan Harmon, the reason for this is
03:45that the production spent so much money securing licensing rights to play the police's Roxanne in
03:50the legendary season three episode Remedial Chaos Theory that the season's music budget had mostly been
03:56eaten up, and so Daybreak was used to fill the gaps for the season, with Harmon ultimately deciding to
04:01run with the ball and turn it into a wider community gag that you probably had no idea about.
04:066. Tyrion's Half-Told Joke – Game of Thrones
04:09If you're not a hardcore Game of Thrones fan and have only seen each of the episodes once,
04:14then you wouldn't have much hope of noticing this sly running gag subtly deployed over the course of
04:19eight seasons. On three separate occasions, Tyrion Lannister attempts to tell a joke about bringing a
04:24jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel, but each time he's interrupted before he's able to finish
04:29it. It first shows up in his trial in season one's A Golden Crown, and he attempts again to tell
04:34the
04:34joke in season six's No One, but is cut short by a ringing bell, while his third and final effort
04:39in
04:39the series is in the finale The Iron Throne, where the scene simply cuts away as he starts to tell
04:44the
04:44joke. Now some of Thrones' more obsessive fans did catch wind of this, however they were infuriated by
04:50the lack of closure, and attempted to come up with their own answers, while the Huffington Post even
04:54asked some comedians to complete the punchline. Again, if you're not a hardcore Thrones fan,
04:59this is incredibly easily missed, especially if you've not revisited the series since it ended.
05:04Committing to the bit three times over an eight-year period, that is impressively sneaky.
05:095. The Secret McBain Movie Hidden Throughout The Show – The Simpsons
05:13The Simpsons is of course jam-packed with running gags both blatant and subtle, from Bart's prank
05:19calling Moe's tavern to the reoccurring crow that always caused distinctively during any
05:23establishing shot of Springfield's nuclear power plant. But an altogether more ingenious
05:28running joke occurs between the second and fourth seasons, where five separate episodes show clips
05:33of the fake movie McBain starring the action hero Rainier Wolfcastle. Viewed across three years,
05:38the clip seems simple enough. But more recently, as more fans began to binge The Simpsons,
05:43they started to realise that these clips all form part of a continuous narrative,
05:47and are, in effect, a truncated version of the McBain movie. The four minutes of footage are
05:53effectively a McBain short film, showing McBain's best pal and partner being killed by the corrupt
05:57senator Mendoza, and McBain's blood-soaked quest to avenge his fallen friend. We all remember McBain,
06:03but these excerpts are by themselves such typical parodies of corny action movies that most fans didn't
06:08even realise that they were connected in a kind of coherent way. Pretty incredible, right?
06:134. Pineapples Everywhere – Psych
06:16Hit detective comedy series Psych touted a most bizarre running gag across its 120 episodes,
06:22that a pineapple would appear in some form in almost every single episode. Perhaps it might
06:27be a whole pineapple, mere slices of one, a pineapple smoothie, a pineapple pizza,
06:31or even just images of pineapples somewhere within the frame, but the commitment to the bit
06:35is nothing if not admirable. Fans cottoned on enough that a website was made to track the
06:40pineapple's location in each episode, all 170 of them, amounting to an average of almost 1.5 per
06:47episode. There's never been any official explanation for the gag beyond the showrunners
06:52doing it to amuse themselves, and it caught on enough with the hardcore fans that eventually
06:55it would have been a crying shame to stop it. Sometimes a running gag is its own weird reward,
07:00whether it makes sense or not. 3. The gang always reuses the same videotape
07:06It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia – It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is basically built on the
07:10foundation of in-jokes and running gags. The one of the sneakier one involves the gang always using
07:15the same damn grotty VHS tape to record and display their latest audio-visual scheme. The ads
07:22for Fight Milk and Kitten Mittens, Dee's Invigoron video, Dennis and Mac's fake terrorist video,
07:26and so many more were all shot on the same tape, with each recording over the previous one.
07:31Several times throughout the show when their latest video is playing, we'll see scattered
07:35fragments of their previous ones at the beginning and the end of the tape. It's easily missed if
07:39you're not paying total attention, but a hilarious ongoing callback if you do.
07:44Hopefully they'll never ditch this gag, because the longer it goes on, and the further the
07:47weirds of society stray away from VHS, the funnier it actually becomes.
07:512. Tommy Shelby Never Eats – Peaky Blinders
07:54Now, Peaky Blinders might not be a show where you'd expect to see anything in the way of
07:58a major reoccurring joke, and that's likely why this running gag is rather on the sly side.
08:04While recently promoting the show's final season in an interview with the BBC, star Cillian
08:08Murphy confessed a gag that's been part of the show since the very beginning, that his
08:12character, Tommy Shelby, is never seen eating on screen. Obviously it's a given that Shelby,
08:17being a living human and all that, does eat, but Murphy confirmed that once the production
08:21team realised that Tommy hadn't been seen eating in the first two seasons, that they
08:25opted to keep it going for the remainder. He said,
08:28I remember we had gotten through the first two series, and then we realised that Tommy
08:31had never eaten. We've never seen Tommy eat. Like, he sat down at tables, but he's never
08:35consumed a morsel. So we then made it a kind of running gag. So throughout the 36 hours of
08:41television, Tommy Shelby never consumes anything, except I think once he consumes a sprig of mint
08:45when he's with his son. In its own way, it subtly implies Tommy's obsession with his
08:50life's work, something a small quarter of fans picked up on years ago, but which was
08:54only recently confirmed as an intentional character flourish by Murphy and the creator
08:58of the series.
08:591. Foreshadowing Buster Losing His Hand
09:02Arrested Development
09:03Perhaps the single most memorable moment in Arrested Development happens in the Season 2
09:08episode, Out on a Limb, where poor Buster Bluth has his hand bitten off by a loose seal,
09:14with the missing limb then being replaced by a hook. Hilariously though, Buster's impending
09:18dismemberment was foreshadowed almost an entire year in advance, with a series of gags throughout
09:23the latter part of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. These include a flashback to Michael
09:28performing in the play The Trial of Captain Hook, Buster declaring this party is going to be off the
09:33hook, a mention of a seal attack on the news, Buster playing a claw game and winning a toy seal,
09:38and Buster sitting on a bench which reads,
09:41Arm Off. Obviously it says more than that, but the way that he's sitting obscures the rest of the text.
09:45Now these are just a few examples, but of course nobody read into these gags on an initial viewing
09:49because nobody knew the fate of waiting Buster. Even on repeat watches, most of these sight gags
09:54and one-liners come so thick and fast that you might well miss them, and that makes them utterly
09:59brilliant. And there we go my friends, those were the 10 longest running TV gags you never even
10:03noticed. I hope that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about it down in the
10:07comment section below. As always I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Twitter at
10:11Retro J with a zero, or you can swing by Live and Let's Dice where I do all of my
10:15streaming
10:15outside of work, and it'd be great to see you over there. But before I go, I just want to
10:19say
10:19one thing. Hope you're treating yourself well with love and respect my friend, because you deserve all
10:23of the best things in life, and do not let anything or anyone else tell you otherwise, alright?
10:28You're a massive ledge, and I need to go out there and smash it. As always I've been Jules,
10:32you have been awesome, never forget that, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.
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