The Show Must Go Wrong

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"But you know, I miss live TV. It's like sex, you know. It's almost better when everything goes horribly wrong."
—Rosemary Howard, 30 Rock

When the characters in a show put on a play, radio show or television show, and everything goes horribly wrong. The Show Must Go On until the management decides the production is truly beyond hope and closes it down. Usually used in comedies, and is sometimes a School Play thanks to lack of experience.

A subtrope of Show Within a Show. The inversion of this is Springtime for Hitler.

Examples of The Show Must Go Wrong include:

Comic Books

Film

  • The finale of The Muppet Movie is performed while their first attempt at filming goes epically awry.

Literature

  • One of Gordon Korman's books, Macdonald Hall Goes Hollywood, concerns a movie being filmed on a school campus. Bruno, a prankster, interferes with the filming. His attempts to befriend the movie star even get them stranded in the wilderness at one point.
  • The Christmas play in Bless Me, Ultima. Two of the kid actors got into a fight, another urinated himself, and in the commotion the baby Jesus was decapitated.
  • Discworld:
    • In Maskerade this is the mantra of the Ankh-Morpork Opera House, holding to it when the lead singer dropped dead just before the first act, when a dragon was perching on the roof, during a civil war, as a mysterious Ghost murders people, and ignoring said Ghost being chased from one box via the chandelier by a cat transformed into a human, showering the audience with glass ornaments. It eventually stops when a hostage situation breaks out on stage, and even then the orchestra continues to provide musical stings.
    • The bledlows of Unseen University also determinedly follow their ancient and utterly meaningless rituals such as the Ceremony of the Keys (a simple exchange of keys added to over time until shouting "Oops! They were in my jacket pocket the whole time! Forget me own head next!" at the top of their lungs is an honored part of the procedure) while ignoring storm, great big things with tentacles, harpies, dragons, and faculty members who scream at them things like "Keep it down! What's the bloody point?".

Live-Action TV

  • Frasier used this in the Mystery Theater episode. Frasier is reading a play for his radio show, and no one cooperates. Roz's can't speak properly because of Novocaine, Bulldog gets stage fright and can't talk, Gil gets arrogant and wants to tell a childhood story, and Niles gets fed up with everyone and "shoots" all of the characters (with the sound effects).
  • Subverted in Seinfeld when Jerry and George film the pilot for their show. It looks like they're struggling and it's going absolutely nowhere, but they successfully make a pilot. The show is canceled because of George and Susan's failing relationship; the show has no problem in itself.
  • This trope must be the motto of The Muppets. No matter what kind of chaos is going on backstage, the Muppets always keep the show going until the very end.
  • In Modern Family, when Cam directs the school play, only one thing really goes badly wrong: the crane that's supposed to lift and lower Luke gets stuck with him at the top. Unfortunately, the premise is that Luke is flying around the world and landing in various places, and most scenes presuppose his return to the ground.
  • Slings and Arrows' third-season production of King Lear is like this. It ends with the lead actor dying and everyone else involved in the production being fired.

Theatre

  • Noises Off: It's both playing this trope straight and subverting it.
  • Auntie Mame
  • "Pyramus and Thisbe" is sometimes played this way in productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, though it's already pretty awful.
  • The second act of Gypsy opens with Louise in "Mme. Rose's Toreadorables," a tacky pastiche of June's turns that degenerates into a parade of flubs. Fortunately, it's only a rehearsal.

Video Games

Web Original

Homestar: (While onstage) Wow. I can't believe the night of the big Decemberween pageant has finally arrived! After all the weeks and weeks of rehearsing and practicing and memorizing lines...
Marzipan: Homestar, I don't think those are your lines.

Western Animation

  • In Chowder, the main cast (minus Endive) put on a play, and it is nearly completely ruined by Chowder when he takes his role too seriously. And then it gets really weird
  • In It's Christmas Time Again Charlie Brown, the school Christmas play goes wrong when Peppermint Patty, playing a sheep, first drowns out Franklin with her baa-ing, and then forgets what sound sheep make ("Meow! Woof! Moo! Whatever."). And it goes bad again when Sally screws up her one line, saying "hockey stick" instead of "hark".
  • In King of the Hill, Hank tries to make a video to impress the Dallas Cowboys, but his friends and family are so stupid that they mess everything up.
  • A number of Warner Bros. cartoons have a show gone hilariously wrong. In "Show Biz Bugs," Bugs can seemingly do no wrong while everything Daffy does is a full-fledged FEMA candidate. Bugs puts Elmer on the spot in "Stage Door Cartoon," and leave us not forget "Rhapsody Rabbit."
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