I’ve spent the past 30 minutes trying to come up with a plausible way to tie this post back into Wikinomics principles, and while I’ve got a few ideas, I feel like I’d be phoning it in.

Every so often in my adventures on the Internet, I come across something pretty far out there, and I do what I can to spread it around. This is one such discovery. A small disclaimer, this relates to TV from the ’80s, so if I missed the boat and this is old news, my apologies.

Earlier today a friend was telling me about a TV show from the mid-’80s, St. Elsewhere. In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it is revealed that the entire show took place in the imagination of a minor character, Tommy Westphall, a young boy with autism. Here’s where it gets good: with the TV crossovers.

Some of the characters from St. Elsewhere once visited the Cheers bar, that means that the Cheers bar was also just a figment of Tommy’s imagination. Since Frasier was a spin-off of cheers, everything that happened on Fraiser was also imaginary. On Fraiser, Niles and Daphne read the comic strip from Caroline in the City, so Caroline & company are also imaginary, and on and on and on. This is just one avenue, and it continues and branches and expands beyond all reason:

In a 2003 article published on BBC News Online, St. Elsewhere creator Tom Fontana was quoted as saying, “Someone did the math once… and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall’s mind. God love him.”

The Internet, true to form, has an index of all such cross-overs, and has mapped out the entirety of the universe that exists inside of Tommy’s mind:

Click for the full sized PDF

The final count is 282 shows that exist in this imaginary universe, all tied together in some sort of bizzaro social-network. If you’re a real trivia buff, you can read the index of how all the shows are related. Hit ctrl+f and search that page for the name of your favorite show — it’s probably in there. They even tied Firefly (and therefore Battlestar Galactica) via the Weyland-Yutani corporation! In it’s own way, this is the kind of peculiar, off the wall thing that you really could only find on the Internet, I don’t think this would have seen a wide publication in print.

If there’s anyone who’s hanging in to see if there’s a Wikinomics angle to this after all, how’s this: what is described above is a great example of how links in a bunch of seemingly seperate entities can, when examined from a suitable distance, tell us something (debatably profound) about the much larger collection.

While connections in tv shows are as trivial as you can get, as more and more devices become intelligent Internet enabled, and more information about how we go about our lives becomes aggregated, and links between data of every type are discovered and catalogued, what sorts of emergent observations will we then be able to make, again of course, from a suitable distance?