Shower Thought I recently had: Is Marge Simpson Mary Tyler Moore’s best friend’s sister? Well, I had to look it up and. . . yes but technically probably no.
Mary Richard’s best friend, Rhoda Morgenstern, had a sister named Debbie but when Rhoda moved back to New York her sister was reborn as Brenda played by Julie Kavner.
Professor Frink almost married Phoebe Buffay who was actually married to Phoebe’s sister’s unsatisfied customer at a restaurant. Who frequented this restaurant frequently with her husband, Burke, who did try to fuck them over for a goddamned percentage.
OK, that last one wasn’t TV. And also-- did you follow that?
You can find a list of all the crossover universes (at least, on American television networks) in the website:Crossovers Spin Off Master Page .
Go down to almost the bottom where you’ll find a list of 38 crossover universes. Two television shows are in the same crossover universe if a character (played by the same actor) appears in both shows. This creates a connection between them. A crossover universe is all the television shows that have a set of connections between any two of them.
The TV universes are cool. Probably even cooler than what I was doing-- mixing up tv universes with real life. The Gilmore/Sopranos thing is a bit trippy.
To me the weirdest tie-in was Happy Days and Mork & Mindy. Mork’s first appearance was on Happy Days, in what was implied was a dream sequence but was then retconned into having had actually happened. So one show was a glossy rose-coloured-glasses look at the fifties and sixties in middle America, and one was a bizarro science fiction tale about an alien from a planet when people age like Benjamin Button and the men lay eggs, both taking place in the same narrative universe.
There’s a fun little fan theory out there that Brian Cranston’s character on Malcolm in the Middle changed his identity and became Walter White. I have a similar one that I think is even better, and as far as I know is my own invention-- Michael Bluth on Arrested Development changed his identity and became Marty Byrd of the show Ozark.
The characters are very similar-- both are businessmen with sardonic, generally unflappable personalities who think they are always the smartest person in the room, and often are, but also routinely overestimate their abilities and good judgement, and get in over their heads in complicated situations that are extra-legal or completely illegal, often unwittingly.
The timeline works out pretty well, especially if you discount the later AD seasons-- the original AD show run ended in 2005, and Ozark began in 2017. There’d have to be a few years of overlap where he juggled two families while establishing his Marty Byrd identity, since the older daughter in Ozark was probably around 15 at the start of the show.
And here’s the kicker- Michael Bluth and Marty Byrd have the same initials-- he could keep all of his monogrammed shirts and cufflinks!
Abed on the NBC show Community mentioned multiple times that he was a fan of the ABC show Cougar Town. In one episode he talked about getting a background role on Cougar Town.
Then in an episode of Cougar Town you can actually see Abed in the background of a scene.
I like to pretend Al Bundy, witnessing the mob hit of his wife Peg, had to join the witness protection program, moved to California under the name of Jay Pritchett. Bud and Kelly came along with him and changed their names to Mitchell and Claire. Thus Modern Family is actually a sequel to Married with Children and not a separate universe.
On the comics pages, Sally Forth and Judge Parker are now written by the same person. Which makes me suspect that the Forths eventually carry out their plan of becoming rich by changing their name and moving and just telling everyone they’re rich.
Speaking of MTM and the topic in general: I believe it was openly speculated—in newspaper and magazine articles, at least, which was “media” back then—when the MTM Show began, that the reason Mary had moved to Minneapolis was that she’d divorced Dick Van Dyke.
On a few occasions a star of a sitcom would appear as themselves, the actor, in addition to their character. Robert Cummings, Lucille Ball, and Robin Williams all did this. I am assuming that the fictional versions of the actors had a resume that did not include the shows they were currently on.
One year NBC had a preview of new and possibly returning shows. The format was that Chico and The Man, in character, were touring the NBC Studios and finding out about all of the shows. At the end whomever was guiding them mentioned the show Chico And The Man. The characters responded that they were always busy at the time the show aired so they weren’t watching TV. But apparently their own TV show was still a TV show in their universe.
A TV tradition that goes back at least to George Burns and Gracie Allen, where Burns would sit in his den watching what was happening to the other characters and commenting to the audience.
The most complicated of all the inter TV relationships was the Beverly Hillbillies/Petticoat Junction/Green Acres multiverse where the Green Acres characters would see the opening titles painted on the barn or floating in mid-air in front of them, while no one else in Hooterville was aware of it.
There was an episode of The Honeymooners in which both Ralph and Norton are fans of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, and both of them play themselves, going off camera and changing clothes, then coming back and interacting with the other. Can’t remember the episode title, and if it was one of the Lost Episodes or not. Old-school meta.
On 30 Rock, Liz Lemon’s mother once mentioned that she worked at Sterling Cooper, the ad agency from Mad Men.
A few seasons later on Mad Men, Ted Chaough ordered an “Old Spanish” - a cocktail first mentioned on 30 Rock (containing red wine, tonic water, and olives).
Here we are in the year of our Lord, two-thousand twenty-five, and I just now realized the connection between Sally Forth the comic and sally forth the idiom. I saw your post and suddenly a connection was formed in my brain. I think I need to sit down and see what other revelations come to me.