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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, I’m Eric Molinsky.

And this is Tom Fontana. In the 1980s, he was a writer and producer on a hospital drama called St. Elsewhere.

TF: You know, the show was always on brink of being cancelled, our first season there were 100 TV shows on the air, there were only three networks, and we were 99th in the ratings.

CLIP: ST. ELSEWHERE

But the show was critical acclaimed. The top brass at NBC liked it, so they managed to eek out six seasons.

TF: Rather than do what a lot of people do is which is “oh my God we’re going to get cancelled, let’s make it more palatable for the audience,” we went out of our way to make it as unpalatable as we possibly could!

Tom was particularly fond of crossovers.

TF: I was a big, when I was young, I was a big Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction fan and I would love when Jed Clampet would show up at The Shady Rest hotel.

So a character from the Bob Newhart show would pop up as a patient on St. Elsewhere. Or he staged a crossover with Cheers, which is a sitcom. But they filmed their episode like a drama. So when Carla, the surly waitress, trash talks with the doctors from St. Elsewhere, there’s no laugh track – and it’s weird.

Andrea said you were on a bar near the Commons, next time be more specific. Sorry, is Catherine all right? She’s resting comfortable, blood pressure 110 over 80 and her pulse is 70. Two scotch and waters. What do you want? I think I’d something light. Maybe you could suggest an aperitif? What do I look like, a sommelier?

The writers also used to keep a list of every crazy scenario they’d love to do for the series finale. When the show was finally cancelled, Tom Fontana 2

snatched that list off the wall and brought it to a meeting with the executive producer, Bruce Paltrow. This was the first pitch. Two of the doctors are having a deep conversation in their office, which they do pretty often. And then suddenly:

TF: There was a flash, a mushroom cloud, and the two of them went, Oh my God! (Laughs) And the show ended.

Very 1980s. But Bruce Paltrow wasn’t buying it. This was Tom’s next pitch: two doctors are having a deep conversation. And one of them says, I have a secret that’s been weighing on me, and I have to confess it right now.

TF: I was the second gunman in Dallas the day that Kennedy died. And he then opens drawer and pulls out gun, and he goes now that I’ve told you I have kill you. (laughs)

Bruce Paltrow was not amused. So, Fontana was like – okay how about this? It’s snowing outside. We pan back to reveal the entire hospital is inside a snow globe, which is being held by Tommy, the mute autistic son of Dr. Westphall, who is one of the main characters. But in this world, Westphall is not a doctor -- he’s a construction worker. And another doctor at St. Elsewhere is actually his father, who stays home taking care of Tommy.

(SFX: Door opens) Hi Pop, how ya doin’? Good. How was your day on top of the building? Well, we finally topped off the 22nd story.

It turns out the entire series of St. Elsewhere has been a fantasy in mind of this mysterious boy with a snow globe.

TF: And Bruce said, well, it’s not the worst one, go ahead and write it! Ha!

I don’t understand this Autism thing, pop. He is my son, I talk to him, I don’t know if he can hear me. He sits there all day long in his own world, staring at that toy…(FADE UNDER)

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TF: The response in the mail was about 50/50, half of our audience hated, hated, like wanted to come to the MTM lot and burn us to the ground and the other half thought it was fitting part of the show.

Either way, it was all supposed to end right there -- a trick ending, nothing more.

But Fontana couldn’t stop with the crossovers. He moved on to produce Homicide: Life on the Street, where he brought over two doctors from St. Elsewhere even though that show had gone off the air 12 years earlier. He even staged a crossover with Chicago Hope, which was on a different network. He didn’t show those scenes to the execs before it aired.

TF: So the next day after the show aired, Warren Littlefield who was the head of NBC called me and said you are a bad, bad boy.

And he found a partner in crime – the actor Richard Belzer, who played Detective John Munch on Homicide.

TF: Well that become between he and I, like now the mission, and obviously he’s taken it way past, he was like, let’s see, I could be on all the Law & Order shows, this was before went over to Law & Order…and bit by bit he would get, they would say we’d want you to be in this and he’d go well, I have to play Munch.

So Detective Munch consults with the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files, orders a drink at the bar on The Wire, and teaches a class on Arrested Development.

This did not go unnoticed by TV fans, who started to wonder, does that mean Arrested Development and The Wire exist in the same universe?

Keith Gow is a playwright in Melbourne, Australia. He and his friends were talking about this a pub one night and they went even further. They wondered, if all these shows are linked – does that mean all of them were dreamed up by Tommy Westphall, the autistic boy from St. Elsewhere?

KG: And we started collating a list of shows and the further we got into it, the more connections we seemed to find.

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They made a grid of the Tommy Westphall Universe, which spanned hundreds of shows, and put it online. People wrote in from around the world, pointing out that Fontana wasn’t the only one fond or crossovers. A lot of writers were fans of The X-Files and like to incorporate names of fake brands or companies that appeared on The X-Files into their shows.

KG: I think the big one that broke it open was the Morely cigarettes that the smoking man on X-Files smoked suddenly stared popping up on other shows. So Spike on Buffy smokes Morley cigarettes as an homage to the X-Files. Huh! KG: And then we discovered a lot of characters smoke Morley cigarettes.

On The Walking Dead, Weeds, on Orange if the New Black, Friends, CSI, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American Horror Story and on and on.

The Tommy Westphall theory didn’t go viral until 2002 when the late comic book writer Dwayne McDuffie wrote a post complaining that the higher ups at DC were putting too much pressure on him to link his characters to other comic books – something that DC and Marvel are doing now on an epic scale. The hot buzzword in Hollywood now is having a “shared universe.”

But back in 2002, McDuffie used the Tommy Westphall theory to prove his point that this whole idea of a shared universe was pointless. How could the aliens on the X-Files be part of the same world as Homicde?

KG: There was one stage where there was a number articles about -- objections to the hypothesis. Well, you can object all you like but it’s a bit of fun finding the connections, like I don’t literally think The X-Files and Homicide exist in same universe.

No, but they could exist in a multiverse. The really weird part is of the Tommy Westphall theory is that it actually mirrors real theories by physicists who think that our universe may be one of many. Scientists don’t know whether these parallel universes have nearly identical versions of us. Maybe the laws of physics are so different in these other universes that if we traveled there we’d burst into flames – they don’t know. But some scientists think tiny particles might be able to break through the membranes that separate universes and travel between them. 5

The Tommy Westphall multiverse works the same way, except those traveling particles are Detective John Munch or “Morley” cigarettes.

TF: Oh, I was stunned!

Tom Fontana was also proud of the fact that Tommy was the center of this phenomenon.

TF: I think it adds a whole other layer to the idea of what an autistic person can or cannot do in a very bizarre kind of way, you know what I mean? Because it says people have imaginations regardless of what their conditions are. The human mind is extraordinary thing.

And he thinks having these porous borders is good for television. He saw it first hand when his crew from Homicide swapped cast and crew with Law & Order.

TF: What it ultimately does in my mind is enhances the storytelling because somehow it frees you to like go to a place where you wouldn’t normally have gone within the restrictions within your own genre or your own TV series.

KG: You have a show like say Sleepy Hollow, which is a time travel, procedural, fantasy, which I don’t think you could’ve had 20 years ago because 20 years ago, you had your cop show or you had your family drama but they didn’t connect with each other.

Sleepy Hollow staged a crossover with Bones, a down-to-earth FBI procedural. So thanks to Tommy, the boundaries keep eroding.

KG: I actually still have the snow globe upstairs.

EM: Really?

Yeah.

At this point, Tom went to the second floor of his office, and came back with THE snow globe, the one that Tommy held in that final scene. It was so much bigger than I had imagined. The details on the little plaster hospital inside the glass were beautiful.

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EM: Wow. That’s so cool. Can I touch it?

And as I stared into the snow globe, I started thinking. Tommy dreams up St. Elsewhere. Two doctors from St. Elsewhere appear on Homicide. Munch crosses over from Homicide to The X-Files. The Lariat Rental Car Company shows up on the X-Files and Veronica Mars.

CLIP: VERONICA MARS MOVIE

Veronica Mars’s boyfriend worked at This American Life, where she meets Ira Glass – who played himself. I was on This American Life.

CLIP: This guy, Eric Molinsky.

That means half the shows and podcasts out there are part of Tommy Westphall’s imagination – including me.

(SFX: ZIP)

MAN: Hi Pop, how ya doin’?

POP: Good. How was your day on top of the building?

MAN: Well, we finally topped off the 50th story. How’s he doing?

POP: Tommy? He just sits there all day staring at that snow globe. You know it changes what’s inside. Today, there’s an old skeleton key suspended in a sky. It says Imaginary Worlds or something.

MAN: I don’t understand this Autism thing, pop. He is my son, I talk to him, I don’t know if he can hear me. He sits there all day long in his own world, staring at that toy.

SFX: TEXT MESSAGE

POP: You got a text?

MAN: It’s that detective again. Munch.

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POP: Again?

Special thanks to Tom Fontana, Keith Gow, Robb Pruitt and Bob Lobely.

POP: You got a text?

MAN: It’s that detective again. Munch.

POP: Why doesn’t he leave us alone?!

MAN: Fuck him.

POP: You should block him.

MAN: How do I do that?

POP: I don’t know, you throw a block at your phone or something.

You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emolinsky. The show’s website is imaginary worlds podcast dot org.