And That Little Girl Was Me / Live-Action TV

Times where somebody shares a disguised anecdote about themselves in Live-Action TV.

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Creators:

• Parodied by Chris Rock in a commercial for one of his HBO comedy specials. The ad consists of him telling us about a little white girl growing up in a convent in the Alps, who would "sing her heart out whenever things looked bad." He then informs us that he was that little girl. "And now I'm an adult black male," he says, with no further explanation.

Series:

• 7 Yüz:
  • The climax of "Büyük Günahlar" reveals that party guest Nihal is Aytaç's daughter, the little girl who first answered Elif's fateful phonecall. Following the events described by Mete, she witnessed the disintegration of her parents' marriage and her father's mental state, which ultimately led him to commit suicide.
  • In "Karşılaşmalar", Gödze finds an old photograph of herself and ex-boyfriend Kerem in better times -— only to notice her husband, Onur lurking in the background. She immediately begins to connect the dots, coming to the realization that her now-beloved husband had started stalking her from that moment.
• The final episode of the second series of Blackadder contains a series of increasingly bizarre examples as a gloating Master of Disguise reveals his past encounters with the main characters. Starting with...
  Prince Ludwig: We have met many times, although you knew me by another name. Do you recall a mysterious black marketeer and smuggler called Otto with whom you used to dine and plot and play ze biscuit game at ze old pizzel in Dover?
  Blackadder: My God!
  Prince Ludwig: Yes! I... was ze waitress!
• Subverted in the pilot of Boardwalk Empire. Nucky Thompson gets a group of Moral Guardians on his side by telling a story about how his family suffered terrible poverty in his childhood due to his father's alcoholism, and he was once forced to catch rats for their dinner. Then outside, he reveals to his cohort that it was all made up.
  Nucky: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
• The Bob Newhart Show: Subverted. Bob tells Emily a story about a bully he used to know in high school. Eventually a new kid stood up to the bully and they became friends, and the bully stopped being a bully because he was only angry because he was lonely and didn't know how to relate to people. Since Bob is a psychologist, Emily assumes he was the "friend" in the story. Bob replied that he isn't, which make Emily think he was the bully. Bob replies in the negative again; it really was just two guys he knew in high school.
• The Brittas Empire: In "Reviewing the Situation", Brittas recounts a memory from school:
  Mr. Brittas: I remember when I was at school, we had one little lad who always carried a bag of sweeties around with him, and he always gave sweets to all the other boys and girls because he wanted them to be his friends, but do you think he could buy their friendship?
  Helen: No...
  Mr. Brittas: No, it didn't work for me then, (Beat) and it's not going to work for you now.
• Cheers: In "Those Lips, Those Ice", Eddie tells Carla he has no attraction to a hot new coworker because, for one thing, earlier that day she chewed out a guy at their ice show in front of everybody else. When Carla asks why then he didn't defend the guy, Eddie tells her he was the guy.
• Cobra Kai: In season 5, Stingray tells the teenagers the truth behind how Terry Silver assaulted him, but due to his trauma, he does so by telling the story of his Dungeons and Dragons character as an allegory.
• Daredevil (2015) does it twice in "Guilty as Sin":
  • Stick tells a story about how a child began fighting the Hand, killing them until they were driven out and this act of defiance was the origin of his organization, the Chaste. Matt assumes Stick is talking about himself and sarcastically compliments him on keeping himself at the center. What the audience sees of the Chaste indicates Stick isn't its leader, suggesting this assumption may well be wrong.
  • At Frank Castle's trial, Colonel Schoonover testifies as a character witness, and tells a story about a stupid officer who got Castle's squad into an ambush, that caused said idiot officer to lose his right arm. When Reyes claims no one can really know what happened if they weren't there, Schoonover clarifies that he was that idiot officer, completely undercutting Reyes' argument (and making her wonder how she managed to overlook his prosthetic arm in the first place).
    Blake Tower: How did you miss that in his file?
    Samantha Reyes: All the names were redacted.
    Blake Tower: Not good.
    Samantha Reyes: No shit.
• The Dick Van Dyke Show: Subverted in "When a Bowling Pin Talks, Listen". Alan calls Uncle Spunky about the bowling pin sketch and says the show doesn't own it; a young comedian in 1939 did a bowling pin sketch. This prevents Uncle Spunky from suing The Alan Brady Show. The onlookers assume Alan meant he did a bowling pin sketch in 1939. Presumably, that was what Alan meant for Uncle Spunky to assume, but he's really just running a bluff, suspecting that someone must have done the bit before but Uncle Spunky won't do the research to find out who.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Pandorica Opens": Amy assumes this is the case when the Doctor tells her about people "dropping out of the world", asking him if the "she" he lost was nice. The Doctor was actually talking about someone Amy herself lost, her retgoned fiancé Rory, so he immediately changes tack.
  • "The Timeless Children" inverts it: The Master recounts a story about the mysterious Timeless Child and how they fit into the origins of the Time Lords, before informing the person he's speaking to, the Doctor, that they are, in fact, the subject of the story.
• The fourth episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared has Warren the Eagle attempt to pull this by telling a story about "a guy that I knew" who was rejected by his friends for his great ideas that they didn't even really understand. However, it's incredibly obvious from the get-go that he's talking about himself, to the point that he even drifts into first-person at one point. When he tries to drop the reveal, even Yellow Guy admits to having figured it out.
• In the Flashpoint episode "A Day In the Life", team rookie Raf tells a woman who took her daughter's abuser hostage a story about "a guy I know" who was abused by a teacher, and how the kid's father attacked the teacher with a baseball bat and went to prison for it, and how the kid had wished his father had found another way to show his love... "So he could stay a part of my life."
• In the Christmas episode of Glee, Coach Beiste has to dress up as Santa Claus, to convince Brittany (who still believes in Santa Claus) that even Santa's magic can't grant her wish: for Artie, who is paraplegic, to be able to walk. Beiste does this by sitting down Brittany on the couch and telling her a story about another little girl, just a little younger than herself, whose only Christmas wish every year was to be petite and slender instead of "a little husky". And how she never got it, but she did get the gift of patience. Subverted in that Brittany never gets it — Santa's a boy, duh!
• In The Golden Girls, Sophia often ends her "Picture it..." stories like this.
  "That beautiful young peasant girl was me. And that artist...was Pablo Picasso."
• The wedding guest in The Haunting of Bly Manor tells the bride and groom the story of an au pair employed to work in a haunted house. The woman falls in love with the gardener there, but the story ends tragically when the au pair succumbs to a ghost possessing her. The gardener lives on however, and it's revealed that she is the one telling the story.
• Quasi-subverted on Hill Street Blues when the eccentric vigilante "Captain Freedom" spins Detective Belker a long story about a boy growing up neglected and abused with only the heroes of comic books and TV shows to relieve his horrible existence. However, when Belker is moved to tears by the story the Captain assures him that the little boy grew up to be a business leader and that he read about him in Reader's Digest. It's unclear if the Captain was actually talking about himself or not.
• House:
  • "Three Stories": House tells a class of medical students three stories about diagnosing three different patients, all complaining of leg pain. The third story is revealed, at the end, to be the story of the aneurysm, and infarction that caused House's permanent leg injury, and continuing chronic pain. He never tells the students the third patient was him, but his colleagues, sitting in the back, figure it out, in part because the condition is so rare that it's extremely unlikely for House to also have encountered it in a patient (the students miss it because they, unlike House's colleagues, don't know even the basic details of what caused his limp). Although Cameron had already figured it out before House named the condition.
  • Taub explains that he's so adamantly against suicide because he knew a guy in college who almost threw his life away and hurt the people he loved. By the end of the episode, he's accused of using this trope, but it isn't clear either way.
• Subverted in British sitcom Just Good Friends.
  Penny's mother: Many years ago there was ... a girl who lived in the same road as me — we were the same age. She met a chap. And then she discovered she was carrying his child. Her family disowned her, the neighbours shunned her, even her best friend called her a trollop. She miscarried. Years later she married. She has a small family of her own now.
  Penny: That girl, it was you, wasn't it?
  Penny's mother: It most certainly was not me! Her name was Eileen Bennett, and I was her best friend, the trollop!
• In Kamen Rider Drive, Drive's sentient Transformation Trinket Mr. Belt tells Shinnosuke the story of a scientist whose invention was used for evil and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it. Shinnosuke guesses that this trope is in play, but Mr. Belt explains that he was actually talking about Alfred Nobel and the invention of dynamite. Double subverted later on, when it's revealed that the story could just as easily apply to Krim Steinbelt, Mr. Belt's original identity, since one of his inventions serves as the power source for the Monsters of the Week.
• On Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a woman debunks a psychic this way, by showing a picture of a girl whom the psychic had claimed was killed and then revealing that to be an old picture of her.
• The Crack Fox in The Mighty Boosh tells his backstory to Vince in this manner, showing him a short animated film about a fox that moved from the countryside to London, only for his life to be ruined by drugs and constant partying, before concluding "That fox, my friend, was none other than me... the Crack Fox".
• Subverted in an episode of Monk. Sharona has a fear of elephants that culminated when she was a little girl. She tells a story of how when she was little, a small girl ended up in the elephant cage at a zoo. As the girl didn't actually get hurt, the audience waits for her to say "I was that little girl", but nope, she was apparently traumatized because some other girl was in that predicament.
• Parodied in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Day The Earth Froze, when Gypsy puts on a "one woman show" and ends the show with the story of "a gal who ran the higher functions of a little satellite in a synchronous orbit." It's clear she intends the story to be uplifting and inspirational — the problem is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
• Subverted in an episode of My Two Dads: Nichole is worried about going to the prom, and Judge Margaret tells her about another teenage girl who was teased at her prom. When Nichole asks what the girl did, the judge says she destroyed the other girls with her psychic powers.
  Nichole: Wasn't that Carrie?
  Margaret: It's all I've got. I was really popular at school.
  • Another similar episode had Nicole becoming jealous of one of her friends at school who had developed breasts before her. The judge told her about one of her friends back then. When Nicole asked her if said friend was the first to get breasts in her school, the judge told her : "I was the first one to get breasts in my class !", and told her of all she suffered because of that, including the breaking up of her friendship with the girl she was talking about.
• Inverted and subverted in the Odd Squad episode "Double Trouble". When Otto complains that Olive does all sorts of cool stuff while he's stuck doing menial tasks, Oprah tells Otto a story of a baby bird who had an older sister who had been in the nest a lot longer than him, and how said baby bird flew out of the nest and got sent back in time via a worm hole to work at a hot dog stand in Albuquerque, New Mexico before getting in trouble with the mayor of the city for not having permission to run the stand. Otto then asks if he's supposed to be the baby bird in the story, but Oprah tells him that all she wanted to do was tell him a random story.
• Outnumbered: Subverted in "The Chinese Horde", where Karen is called to the headmistress's office:
  Headmistress: You know, Karen, I once knew a little girl like you. A long, long time ago. She was clever, she had lots of opinions, which she loved to share, she thought she was the center of the universe and she didn't think the rules should apply to her. And do you know what happened to that strong-willed little girl?
  Karen: Did she become head teacher?
  Headmistress: No, she got expelled. She's in prison now. Turns out the rules did apply to her after all.
• In The Phantom of the Opera (1990), Gérard Carrière tells Christine all about the Phantom's childhood and his relationship with his father; when Christine asks him how he knows all this, he reveals that he is the Phantom's father.
• Pixelface: Subverted. In "The Game's Up", Rex is deliberately slowing down his performance as he approaches the final level of his game. QM tells him a story about a character who did not want his game, so started deliberately screwing up, and eventually the player gave up playing the game because he couldn't finish it, and the character became a quartermaster in a console. When Rex goes "You were that character!", QM responds indignantly (and seemingly genuinely surprised) and says he is talking about a quartermaster in another console who is a total loser.
• Preacher:
  Saint of Killers: You ever hear that story about the drunk General who got caught reading his map sideways? It was back in the war middle of a big battle. Colonel rides up on his horse and says to the General, "What do we do?" Our General says, "We're gonna march right up that hill". The Colonel sees the sideways map in the General's hand, but he follows orders just like everybody else, so he sends his men up that hill into a slaughter...
  Jesse Custer: You were the Colonel.
  Saint of Killers: I was the General.
• Maya Rudolph parodied Kamala Harris’ own That Girl Was Me moment (see Real Life below) several times while impersonating her on Saturday Night Live. In multiple Democratic Debate sketches aired in 2019, Maya-as-Kamala would claim that she was the true protagonist of every story her opponents were telling, no matter how ridiculous.
• Stranger Things: The Orderly tells Eleven about the child designated 001 that Brenner has kept secret, only to reveal that he himself was that child. After killing everyone else he tells El about the ill-fated Creel family, revealing himself to be the son of Victor. And just in case it wasn't clear by the end of the episode, the last shot reveals that he became Vecna upon his banishment to the Upside Down.
• Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye: In "Silent Night", Sue's parents come for a visit. When Sue isn't getting along with her mother, Lucy tells Mrs. Thomas a story about a childhood friend who grew up and had a fight with her mother over some silly thing. The two stopped talking for two years. Eventually Lucy reveals that she was talking about herself.
• Hank Henshaw related a story about hunting an alien refugee as part of the DEO in Supergirl. Naturally, for this trope, it turns out to be Henshaw himself, who's really the Martian Manhunter and the real Henshaw died trying to kill him.
• In an episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Derek Reese, worried about his nephew John's mental state, tells John's mother Sarah a story about a friend of his who went out of a bunker to "take a leak" and suddenly shot himself in the head. It is later revealed that the "friend" was Derek himself, but that Derek's girlfriend Jesse stopped him.
• Ultraman Decker sees Captain Murahoshi under investigation from TPU Internal Affairs for suspicion of collaborating with the Alien Bazdo Agams. When he's cleared of that, the investigation shifts to the fight against Metsu-Orochi in Ultraman Trigger: New Generation Tiga when he allegedly abandoned a mission to combat the Dark Giant Hudram to save a boy, but no one could find the boy afterwards. After double-checking the date of the incident, his subordinate Soma Ryumon proceeds to recount the whole incident: How Murahoshi gave the boy the TPU Badge on his arm, how the boy's parents forced him to move away from the city and live in a private estate for several years. Then Ryumon pulls out the badge to show that yes, he was the boy in question.
• Parodied in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt:
  • First with Titus and Kimmy.
    Titus Andromedon: And that 12 year-old boy who got kicked out of the choir...was me!
    Kimmy Schmidt: Yeah. You said that. That was the whole story.
  • And again in the same episode, with Lillian and Jacqueline:
    Jacqueline White: And that young, impressionable girl in the fishing gear was me!
    Lillian Kaushtupper: Yeah, I know. That was the whole story.
• Utopia Falls: Bodhi relates to Phydra the story of a little girl in Reform Sector who was sent there with her parents as they were dissidents. To escape, she'd turned them in as they were still active in opposing the government, and was given a junior position in the Authority, with her parents getting "ghosted". Phydra is clearly that girl all grown up, now head of the Authority.
• In The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, Daryl tells an uncooperative prisoner a story about a kid he knew named Jimmy, a target of neighborhood bullies, who was one day forced by his father to slaughter his pet piglet. Jimmy's reluctance to hurt the piglet only prolonged its suffering, but the bullies, hearing the squeals, assumed he was torturing it on purpose and never bothered him again. Afterwards...
  Isabelle: That little boy was you, wasn't it?
  Daryl: No, I made all that shit up.
• Implied (as he never outright confirms it), for drama, in the second season episode "Shibboleth" on The West Wing. Toby has been pushing Leo and President Bartlet to nominate Leo's sister Josie for a recess appointment (that the Senate is presumably supposed to rubber stamp) of Assistant Secretary for Primary and Secondary Education, because he wants a fight with the Republicans on school prayer. It turns out, because of a compromising photograph, Josie is forced to withdraw her name from consideration, and Toby concedes she was the wrong face to put on it. However, he tells Leo they need to keep at this:
  Toby: But I'll tell you why it should be front and center. It's not the First Amendment, it's not religious freedom, it's not church and state, it's not...abstract.
  Leo: What is it?
  Toby: It's the fourth grader who gets his ass kicked at recess cause he sat out the voluntary prayer in homeroom. It's another way of making kids different from other kids when they're required by law to be there. That’s why you want it front and center. The fourth grader; that's the prize.
  Leo: ...What'd they do to you?
  (Toby says nothing, but looks uncomfortable — note that he is Jewish)

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