The Tommyverse

[libertango]

Here's something I was mentioning at the Pub meet: The Tommyverse. It's a picture and a text-based key (note: .PDF Acrobat file at that link) to the extraordinary number of crossovers that arise from the intersection of St. Elsewhere and Homicide -- an estimated 282 TV series in all.

To give credit where due, I first read of this at Kottke.

Here's the precis, from the main page:

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Who is Tommy Westphall?

Tommy Westphall was an austistic child on the TV series St Elsewhere who, it was revealed in the closing moments of the final episode of that series, had dreamt the entire run of the show.

What's this about his Mind?

St Elsewhere has direct connections to twelve other television series - many of them direct crossovers of character to and from the series. Others make mention of specific parts of the St Elsewhere fictional universe, placing them within the same fictional sphere.

So?

If St Elsewhere exists only within Tommy Westphall's mind, then so does every other series set within the same fictional sphere.

Some of the links are direct - characters cross over from television series to television series all the time, it's a long-time television tradition. Some series spin off entire other series, obviously expanding their fictional universes.

Some connections are indirect - fictional places, character names, awards, newspapers, cigarette brands, companies place some shows within the same fictional universe.

There isn't necessarily any rhyme or reason with having one series connect to another. There is no attempt to have any crossover consistency either within the series themselves or here as we discover more connections.

Tommy's mind is a tricky thing to decipher.

Comments

[off_coloratura]

I don't buy this.

The majority of things and people that I dream about exist in the waking world. So it's really only the events of St. Elsewhere that exist in Tommy's mind. And even then, he could have dreamt about things that really happened.

So even if the crossover characters made reference to something that happened on St. Elsewhere, that's not definitive proof it didn't really happen. Only the things that were explicitly referred to as not true in real life when Tommy woke up (or when it was revealed that he was dreaming; I didn't watch the show and don't know how they did it) are Tommyverse.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

IIRC: After the last in-continuity dialogue, there's the usual external shot of the hospital with the digital time. It's snowing, and the camera begins to shake up and down. Cut to an interior closeup on a snow-globe of the hospital, being shaken up by Tommy. As the camera pulls back, we see him sitting on the rug by the fire with the actor who played the recently-dead Dr. Auschlander reading the paper in an easy chair. The actor who played Tommy's father enters the apartment door, and greets the older man as "Dad" who returns his greeting as "Son". All are wearing working-class clothes and the man whome further dialogue supports is still Tommy's father is carrying a lunchbox and a hardhat.

It's a framing sequence, or half of one, like several films have with curtains coming down at the end, and a bit of an apology similar to Puck's at the end of "Midsummernight's Dream", perhaps to excuse some of the excessive improbabilities in the show.

Since most of these shows had continuity gaffes among their own episodes and seasons as bas as any between the supposed companions series, I can buy them being part of a somewhat layered greater universe. I don't think Tommy is the creator of that universe, given how sophisticated the subject matter becomes and that his family doesn't visibly have a TV.