TV often has “a show within a show” (or, as nobody calls them, a SWAS) — a fake television series playing in the background or, in some cases, directly involved in the storyline or plot. Recent examples include Community’s spoof on Doctor Who, Inspector Spacetime, and — to make a reference to a certain animated series in two consecutive Tube Talk posts — Futurama’s ongoing soap opera, All My Circuits.

I love the meta nature of a good SWAS. Even the silliest ones reveal something about a show’s universe and characters, and sometimes they impact the plot of a season or episode. They’re also often whimsical and absurdly, delightfully funny.

Perhaps the best SWAS, however, is on Apple TV’s Murderbot, a sci-fi dramedy based on the excellent Murderbot Diaries books by Martha Wells. In it, Alexander Skarsgård plays a bargain basement SecUnit designed to kill (in order to protect) who — after it hacks its governor module — names itself Murderbot and spends much of its time watching trashy television, including a melodramatic program called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

The faux show, which Wells described to Newsweek as “kind of based on How to Get Away with Murder, but in space, on a colony, with all different characters and hundreds more episodes,” comes up a lot in the Apple TV series, including some of the first season’s funniest and/or most emotional moments. My Reactor colleague Leah Schnelbach explains some of these moments in detail here. And for Tube Talk, I talked to Wells about SWAS’s in general, including how TV helps us work through emotions.

“I think people using the interactions on TV shows to learn how to understand their own emotions happens in the real world all the time,” Wells told me, adding that this was especially true if you come from a dysfunctional family. “Everyone's always like, ‘Oh, TV's terrible, blah blah blah,’ but there's also a lot of good examples of behavior that sometimes you don't get growing up.”

Certain scenes in Murderbot reflect exactly this, with Skarsgård’s character trying to help the humans he was hired to protect by parroting lines from Sanctuary Moon and other SWAS’s, with varying degrees of success. When trying to help a human in shock, for example, it stiltedly blurts out, “Stay calm, it will be okay! You have my word,” in a way that would make anyone feel unsettled rather than safe.

It also helps that Sanctuary Moon is entertaining. On the Apple TV show, the faux series is over-the-top in every way, from its theme song to the technicolor settings, to the A+ casting choices, with John Cho, Clark Gregg, Jack McBrayer, and DeWanda Wise embracing their roles with gusto.

When I interviewed co-showrunners Chris and Paul Weitz for Reactor, Chris said the actors signed on because they were excited by “the chance to act badly or seemingly badly, or to be really over-emphatic and over-emotional….” Paul added that the show wasn’t unlike a David Lynch film: “It’s soap opera acting, and there’s an over-emotiveness to it, but also, it’s art.”

The expansiveness of Sanctuary Moon, which in the Murderbot universe has thousands of episodes, also lets Wells come up with elaborate plots at will.¹

The opportunities are endless, as is the fan fiction potential. It reminded me of a fake fandom I wrote about for The New York Times. During the pandemic, people congregated online, first on TikTok and then on a fan wiki and Discord, to share their favorite moments about an entirely fictional series, with each fan creating their own plot lines, moments, and characters.

SWAS’s are different beasts, of course, and Wells creates them for different purposes. “Sometimes it's me trying to be funny, and sometimes, like at the beginning of Rogue Protocol [the third book in the Murderbot Diaries], when [Murderbot is] watching a show about humans exploring a spooky place and being attacked, and it thinks, ‘What this story really needs as a SecUnit.’ Part of that was Murderbot now seeing itself as enough of a person to want to start imagining itself in the shows.” The spooky thriller, she added, is also a meta nod to the novella, which is a spooky thriller in its own right.

Several other SWAS’s pop up in the Murderbot Diaries. There’s World Hoppers, which Wells based on Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, as well as her personal favorite, Timestream Defenders Orion, which she based on The CW’s progressively bonkers series, Legends of Tomorrow. Another SWAS, Lineages of the Sun, was inspired by a type of Chinese or Korean drama that’s a “kind of unwieldy, often historical show with tons of characters.”

Wells, who has read all the scripts for Murderbot’s upcoming second season, teased that there are at least one or two more SWAS’s from her books that will make an appearance on the Apple TV series. She’s also a fan of SWAS’s in other media (Brazzos on Only Murders in the Building is her favorite — “It’s almost not fake, because it has so much reality in the show”) and joked that she’s manifested one of her SWAS’s into something you can stream on Netflix.

In her latest Murderbot novel, Platform Decay, she created a new SWAS called Honor Princess Detective, which she imagined was a Chinese or Korean historical drama focused on a murder mystery. “And then I started watching a show recently, a Chinese drama called Unveil: Jadewind that is basically what I was thinking of… I manifested a really good show,” she said with a smile.

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