Playing self takes real character

David Nelson, who died on Jan. 11, was best known for playing a person named David Nelson on a television series that also starred his parents, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, as people named Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, and his brother, Ricky, as Ricky Nelson.

What's in a name? In this case, much. From the actor's point of view, there may be no difference between playing a character who is similar to yourself and someone who is supposed to be you, but the use of a real name sets in motion interlocking wheels of identity, authenticity and artifice; it adds a kind of conceptual depth.

It was common on radio, where "Ozzie and Harriet" began, for stars to play themselves. On "The Jack Benny Show" the "plot" of any given episode was, in essence, the enactment of the episode.

"Benny" was an inspiration, years later, for "It's Garry Shandling's Show," a sort of Cubist sitcom that limned its concocted realities from every conceivable angle.

Shandling investigated similar ideas on "The Larry Sanders Show," where various actors and musicians played counterpoint to their public selves.

Happy to look bad are such folks as Larry David, whose "Curb Your Enthusiasm" went way beyond meta when it became the platform for a "Seinfeld" reunion. With the "Seinfeld" cast playing both themselves and the characters they used to play, it provided a kind of second finale to the sitcom that was both a fictional and actual episode of "Seinfeld."

A similar looking-glass dynamic animates "Episodes" on Showtime, in which Matt LeBlanc, from "Friends" and "Joey," portrays Matt LeBlanc, from "Friends" and "Joey," as the troublesome star of a poorly remade British sitcom.

For the bulk of his career, in two separate sitcoms, LeBlanc has played a single character, the sweet and more than slightly dim Joey Tribbiani, whose sweetness one can easily believe is LeBlanc's own.

Here he's not only playing against well-established type, he's playing against the person we imagine him to be. Cast as a negative image of himself, a coldly charming Hollywood predator, he paradoxically gets to stretch.

It's a smart move that says, first, "I am a good sport, secure enough to play this dark inversion without fear for my career or reputation."

In fact, it's the sort of thing that bolsters a career or seals a reputation: Notwithstanding that there are jokes in "Episodes" that play off LeBlanc's unspectacular post-"Friends" work life, unimportant people are not asked to play themselves on television.

In addition, the altered reality makes "Episodes" more "interesting" out of the box than Courteney Cox's current series or Matthew Perry's new one.

Something of the reverse is at work with another class of people employed to represent themselves on television: the nonactors of reality TV, whose paraded pathologies are only interesting if we regard them as authentic, even as we know, or should know by now, that the reality they inhabit is simplified and manipulated.

We watch both sorts of performances with a kind of double consciousness, taking in the player and the play in a single bite; even as the flavors mingle, they remain distinct.