 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. The TV is out there. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on iTunes, or on our website, SFPodcastNetwork.com. Or is it? We're circling back to a topic we've broached in the past. With all the social media, videos, blogs, podcasts, and fan fiction about TV shows, you're going to get obsessive TV fans coming up with conspiracy theories to explain plot holes and other issues. Let's start with the Flintstones, which just started running on Mi TV. Are they truly in the Stone Age? Consider. They have versions of modern conveniences. TVs, appliances, airplanes. They've enslaved talking animals to run appliances. It's a living. And more important, they celebrate Christmas. Kind of difficult to do if you're living thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Also, consider the Jetsons. A civilization built on giant metal stilts. We never see the ground. Why could the Jetsons represent people with enough affluence to literally lift themselves out of a post-nuclear hellscape? Could the rest of mankind be forced to recreate their world with the remaining resources, a.k.a. rocks? Could both shows coexist in a post-apocalyptic world? It would explain mutant talking animals, stone-based replicas of modern conveniences, as well as names of 60s celebrities misremembered with either stone or space identifiers. One last piece of evidence, an episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law featured the Jetsons coming back in time to sue mankind for allowing global warming to ruin the planet. Hmmm... Moving on to a newer example involving an early 90s teen show. Zack Morris was a lead character on a Disney Channel sitcom called Good Morning Miss Bliss. After a short run, it was reformulated with new cast members and renamed Saved by the Bell. No problem so far. Right. But in the first series, Zack is a nerdy character living in Indiana. Now he's the cool kid living the California lifestyle. Sure, the character might have just moved, but how did the personality change? Could the entire Saved by the Bell series simply be a dream fantasy of the geeky Zack still back in the Midwest? A world where the girls chase him and he's admired by his peers. Speaking of fantasy, did the Fresh Prince actually move to Bel Air? Or was there a different result of his issues with a gang referenced in the opening theme? Does the mysterious cab actually take him to his uncle's home or to heaven? Did the gang actually kill him? And the series is just a fleeting fantasy Will has as he dies? Note that his parents rarely visit. Perhaps that's just them visiting his grave. Jumping back to cartoons, where exactly is Scooby Doo's mystery machine band heading? Sure, they run into old men wearing masks trying to scare people to suit their criminal plans, but is there a final destination? Well, the show premiered in 1969 at the height of protests about the Vietnam War. Perhaps the Scooby Gang is driving to Canada to escape the draft. Say Fred was drafted but ran away with Daphne, with hippie Shaggy and activist Velma joining them on the trip. Of course, poor Scoob just went along for the ride. A show set in the next decade, that 70's show has its own conspiracy theory. In season 4, Eric goes out during a tornado to pick up Donna. We later hear via a radio that the tornado warning was lifted but that a local teen is in critical condition. Could that teen be Eric, now in a coma, with his mind coming up with a storyline that takes over the remainder of the series? A story that ends with Eric disappearing from the series near the end, the actor left the show, only reappearing in the final episode to say goodbye. Let's jump back to a classic 60's series, Gilligan's Island. There's a theory that the series is actually set in hell and that the characters represent the seven deadly sins. Mr. Howell is greed, Mrs. Howell is sloth, Ginger is vanity, Mary Ann is envy, the professor is pride, and the skipper represents both gluttony and wrath. That leaves Gilligan, who always wears red. Could he, in fact, be Satan? He always screws things up so they can't leave the island. Wow. Moving on to a long running drama, there's a theory I fully agree with. Murder she wrote to Jessica Fletcher is clearly a serial killer, considering that Cabot Cove, a small town of 3,500 people, experienced 268 murders, which would make it the murder capital of the world. Not all the murders took place in Cabot Cove. Most of them did, but not all of them. You mean the ones where she went somewhere else and somebody died? Yes, yes. So either killers just happen to visit the town a lot, or Jessica conveniently fingers someone else for the deaths. Nineties and one of the biggest sitcoms, friends. We have a small group of people who, for the most part, only interact with each other, only have jobs when it's convenient to the storyline, and generally don't seem to have problems with money. Seems like a fantasy, right? Could Phoebe be seeing her friends through the window of Central Perk as a homeless person making up stories in her head? Consider that the other characters have some sort of history or reason to have met, but Phoebe seems to come out of nowhere. Then there are the theories designed to explain crossover episodes where characters or events from show A appear in show B with little rationale as to why. This happened once in a while throughout TV history, but it became an epidemic when NBC wanted to tie together shows airing the same night with a theme, like a must-see TV Thursday when all the programs experienced the same blackout event. This has resulted in the Tommy Westball theory. Tommy was a character on St. Elsewhere amid 80s medical drama. He was the autistic son of the head of the hospital. We learn in the final scene that the entire series was created in the boy's mind. So, an interesting ending to a series, but here's where it gets weird. Being on Crossover Crazy NBC, St. Elsewhere's characters appeared on other series, both sitcoms and dramas. Also, there are numerous references in the series to other shows. For example, a character says they served in Korea with BJ Honeycut. In another episode, a patient in a psych ward turns out to be Mr. Carlin. Also, an orderly is a character from The White Shadow. Did we mention that the PA system references characters from other shows? As a result, the Westfall universe, all coming from Tommy's mind, began to grow as obsessive people began to document all those connections. Momentum increased due to already connected shows making their own links. Mad About You, part of the Blackout Crossover, has an episode with Alan Brady guesting, for example. A single character on another show by the same producer created more connections. Detective John Munch on Homicide. St. Elsewhere characters appeared on that series when Munch went on to the Law and Order franchise, as well as shows as varied as Sesame Street and Arrested Development. As a result of all of these connections, the Tommy Westfall universe currently encompasses 441 TV series as of the last update. Of course, where else would it be? TheTommyWestFall.wordpress.com which I highly recommend you go see because it is the most rabbit hole of internet rabbit holes ever. Now, I have to say that some of the references are really oblique at best. There's references to the... to Oceania Airlines from Lost, but a lot of shows reference the name of that airline long before Lost with a Thing, but they're counting that, so I'm not really sure what the deal is there. Well, you remember Munch was also on The Simpsons, so Tommy Westfall also incorporates animated universes. Yes, yes. I'm just saying. And The Simpsons and Family Guy have tied together and Futurama has tied together with that. We're all living in Tommy Westfall's head. While you're there, you can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics, which he also made up on iTunes or on our website, smpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark. Thanks for watching.