I wrote earlier about how the Kindle had finally appeared on an episode of The Simpsons. I really enjoy collecting examples of the Kindle’s appearances throughout our “popular culture”, and it feels a little bit like magic whenever my favorite gadget starts turning up in imaginary stories on television. In fact, over a year ago, there were actually complaints about just how often the Kindle was appearing on The Big Bang Theory
“I mean, it was only shown on screen about 17,000 times last night,” complained a blogger who’d watched an episode, and spotted a Kindle conspicuously propped in the background throughout an entire scene. (“We get it writers and advertisers, the characters on the show are nerds and probably have gadgets…”) In later episodes it becomes clear that the Kindle belongs to the nerdy character Sheldon – and that he really loves it a lot. “When he was acting like a dictator during the Arctic expedition,” remembers a fan page, ” the other guys toyed with crazy ideas of ways to kill him. One idea was the throw his Kindle out the door of the science station, and when he went out to get it, lock the doors and let him freeze to death!”
Of course, the Kindle has also been used as a give-away by daytime talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres. (And when Charlie Sheen videotaped himself bragging about his plans after leaving Two and a Half Men, he eventually captured footage of himself telling a friend on the phone, “Yeah, let’s — let’s do the Kindle thing with, uh, Apocalypse Me: the Jaws of Life. Best title ever. Best book ever…!”) And while they didn’t use a Kindle, The Office included an episode where three men from the paper-sales company visited a Border bookstore, with warehouse-worker Daryl confessing to the sweet lady behind the counter that he’s scared to death of digital readers.
“Those things terrify me. They could put us out of business. I heard those things hold like 10 books at once.”
“Actually, it’s 10,000.”
“Holy ####! What? Let me see it…”
By the end of the episode, he’s secretly purchased a digital reader for himself, and he’s trying to hide it from his co-workers by pretending that he bought something less embarrassing — pornography!
But by now, it’s almost impossible to keep track of every single appearance by the Kindle in a TV show. In Amazon’s Kindle forum, another poster once remembered the Kindle turning up on a fittingly-titled series: Modern Family. (Interestingly, the character who’d owned the Kindle was played by Ed O’Neil — the actor who used to play Al Bundy, the unhappy husband on Married With Children.) In this series his character (Jay) goes on vacation with his “e-reader thing,” and proudly announces that he’s loaded it up with eight different thrillers by Robert Ludlum. “He doesn’t say Kindle, but when he holds it up it looks like a Kindle 2,” the poster remembered — but apparently Jay also left that Kindle on a beach chair. “Later when he is poolside and his stepson sits down, Jay shouts out, ‘My Ludlums!'”
And last year even President Obama — in the annual State of the Union Address — mentioned the future possibility of “a student who can take classes with a digital textbook.” But the Kindle’s strangest appearance of all was probably in a line of dialogue on Joss Whedon’s sci-fi thriller series, Dollhouse. It’s set in the future, and Patton Oswalt warns a character about what are now some very serious legal complications. One fan called it “a line that only Joss Whedon would try or could pull off.”
Instead of saying “They’ll throw the book at you,” he warns that “They’ll throw the Kindle at you!”
