At Splitsider this week, Meredith Haggerty expertly explored what happens to the social media accounts of television shows that go off the air. “Sad things,” she concludes. Well, while the accounts of actual people who join social media platforms to promote said shows aren’t always quite as sad, they are pretty funny in their own ways.
When an actor joins social media to promote a project, sometimes it turns out well, sometimes it doesn’t. Behold the myriad of ways these experiments go.
Exhibit A: The Newbie
Justin Prentice is a young actor you may or may not have heard of who joined Twitter in 2011.
He then didn’t tweet for a year. Prentice began again when he got cast on Malibu Country (a cancelled show which has a particularly sad Twitter account, as Haggerty points out in her piece).
After that, Prentice was pretty consistent about tweeting, until he wasn’t, taking a year break from the service again. Finally he got another job and, low and behold, took up with it again a few months ago.
Cool.
Exhibit B: The Start-and-Stopper
Formerly of The West Wing, Whitford was cast on the sadly cancelled Trophy Wife last year. According to him, he joined Twitter at the behest of his then-TV daughter Bailee Madison, though during his brief eight months on the platform, he mostly attempted to live-tweet the show, sharing occasional West Wing reunion vids and a goodbye to Philip Seymour Hoffman.
His feed has not included a tweet since May, and most of the last ones were goodbyes to the show. This prompted his former coworker Joshua Malina (now on Scandal) to remark last week that Whitford’s feed was “depressing.”
Exhibit C: The Occasional Poster
Though Robin Williams joined Twitter and Instagram somewhat inauspiciously, the move was clearly pegged to the release of his show The Crazy Ones in the fall of 2013.
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