Actor playing an actor playing a character

TV "ITV drama has unveiled one of its most daring projects, commissioning two linked dramas to run on ITV1 and ITV2. [...] Echo Beach has been billed as a soap set in Cornwall and follows the life of residents of a fictional seaside resort, it will broadcast on the digital channel. However alongside it on ITV1 is comedy drama Moving Wallpaper, which is a fly on the wall style production that goes behind the scenes of the soap, spying on the cast, producers, crew and publicists. " -- The Stage

The key to this will be execution. The difficulty will be how well Echo Beach reflects the programme that is in production in the fiction of the annoyingly titled mothershow. The touchstones I can think of are The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Cock & Bull Story and the problem with the former (at least for me) was that you didn't really get a sense that the characters in the period sections were being played by actors in the contemporary section rather Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons instead. The performances and production in Echo Beach must reflect the abilities and tastes of the characters being portrayed in Moving Wallpaper rather than the actors portraying them, otherwise what's the point?

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