By skyforbes I basically am or was David, BTW. A guy who loves the 50's even though I didn't grow up in them, grew up watching old 40's and 50's movies and loving the Americana of it all- the idealized completely fictional version of it.
But I am pretty sure that even if I was a devoted viewer of that show, knew it like the back of my hand and was put inside it just like David, without a sister, fully intending to play along, my personal logic, knowledge and ethics would have kicked in at some point and I would have changed their world, just like David.
I mean, even David, who's completely well intentioned, changes things by simply being himself and eventually caves to his own desires, like with Margaret Henderson baking the cookies for him instead of Whitey (LOL).
David is the one who first confuses Skip Martin. David is the one who's late to his job and causes Bill Johnson to break his routine and start to not only screw up, but to become creative when David doesn't remember or know about their routine with how they put together the burgers, encourages- out of real world human frustration and a short temper- for Bill to finish putting the lettuce on the burger himself, which leads to Bill having an existential crisis and doing other stuff differently. It's really David who has nuanced layered conversations with the people around him that changes their perspective and how they think.
Yes, Jennifer has relations with Skip, which throws him for a loop and causes some color to enter the world and that leads to other teens hooking up and then she explains the birds and the bees to the mom character, but it's really not any different than David having certain conversations and encouraging the people around him to think differently than they were or simply not reacting the way his character would have reacted to various scenarios, causing the characters to react differently than they would have otherwise, which causes them to think differently, which changes their world.
All that said– What did the TV Repairman think was going to happen by sending a real person- any real person- into that world? If he had only sent David into the tv show alone, by himself, no sister, somebody who literally wanted to go along with the program, *David* messes everything up all on his own, simply by virtue of being a real person who thinks with real world logic and isn't a pre-programmed Non-Playable-Character type and has the moral compass to encourage Bill to pursue art.
So basically, had that TV Repairman sent *anybody* into that world from the real world, they would have caused similar changes- obviously for different reasons, in a different order, but the changes would have occurred.
The scene where David is confronted by the other teens who ask what's outside Pleasantville, etc. was going to happen no matter what so long as a real human, smart or dumb, well or ill intentioned, had come into the picture.
So… apart from the TV Repairman being a plot device and nothing more at his core, it seems that there was no way in hell that this wasn't going to happen inevitably.
Thoughts?