Crossing Over with Tommy Westphall

When I started watching Homicide more than a few years ago and started poking around online to learn more about the series, I was amused to learn how many crossovers, explicit of otherwise, it had done with other TV series. Whereas comics universes always seem rather, well, obvious -- generally speaking, at least for superhero comics, it's virtually a given that all of the characters from one company's books know or could team up with each other -- on TV this sort of thing accrues more gradually, often while no one's looking. When Law & Order characters appeared on Homicide, or a Homicide characters appeared on The X-Files, even the most casual viewer knew what was up. But how many people caught the veiled reference to an X-Files episode on Picket Fences, or could place the name of the Doctor Richard Kimble paged on the final episode of St. Elsewhere, or knew why it was hysterical when the Weigert corporation took over the prison hospital on OZ? Sometimes these things work, sometimes they don't; when part of an episode of St. Elsewhere was set in Cheers, complete with appearances by Carla, Norm, and Cliff, the results were not very pretty.

Even the most dedicated fan of TV crossovers might be amazed to discover just how many of these things have taken place over the years, and how many of them can be traced back to two series, Homicide and St. Elsewhere. You can learn more about them than you ever imagined it was possible to know at this web site and look for your favorite series on its insanely large chart.

I'm kind of surprised that neither Buffy nor Angel appears to be on the chart; those shows, though, were always rather self-contained up until Angel's final season, when we suddenly had an explicit reference to Captain America (in the World War II episode) and offhand references to corporations from the Buckaroo Banzai and Alien movies. (Prior to that season, the closest I could come to tying the Buffyverse to any other series was a reference to Mulder and Scully in an episode of Angel a season after the hysterical L.A.-set "X-Cops" episode of X-Files, which timing meant that it could have been a reference to them as "real people" in the context of the show, rather than as TV characters, but that seems a bit of a reach...) And while I've got a sneaking suspicion that Alias' SD-6 was the power behind The Initiative from Season 4 of Buffy, there's not much textual evidence to prove that.