Orange Is the New Black is the latest series to establish a common thread holding together another galaxy in the Tommy Westphall Universe.
For those of you who aren't TV geeks, you may not be familiar with the cultural phenomenon known as the Tommy Westphall Universe. Of course, if you've found this site, you probably know what I'm talking about. But if not, the TWU is a massive cluster of television shows that exist in the same fictional "universe" through crossovers, where a character, characters, or mythology from one show shows up in another show.
Let's Potato Chips -- she'd give them a buy, too.
St. Elsewhere's writers loved acknowledging the mythology of other shows, and in many cases, they wrote their characters into other shows and wrote other shows into the world of St. Eligius. When you account for the shows that those other shows crossed over with, a web of a few hundred shows emerges, all presumably existing in the same fictional space. And because the world that was home to St. Eligius turned out to be a figment of Tommy Westphall's (or whatever his real name was) imagination, so too are all the shows connected by these crossovers.
Jenji Kohan's new women-in-prison series (which I have yet to check out, but probably will eventually because I enjoyed Weeds), Orange Is the New Black, has recently entered the TWU, as Hollywood.com has observed. The use of Let's Potato Chips, a brand that originated as a running joke on Community, is a pretty firm crossover point, I'd say. Let's Chips also turned up in one of the new episodes of Arrested Development. Arrested Development crossed over with Tom Fontana's Homicide: Life on the Street when Detective John Munch (Richard Belzer) showed up in an episode, and Homicide crossoved over with St. Elsewhere when Drs. Roxanne Turner (Alfre Woodard) and Victor Ehrlich (Ed Begley, Jr.) made cameo appearances (Woodard was nominated for an Emmy for hers, as she often is.) So Orange is only four degrees of separation from the source.
The fifteenth installment of the continuing adventures of St. Eligius's most difficult patient, from the episode "Any Portrait in a Storm", begins with an introduction to happy-go-lucky telephone installer Tony Clifton (John Corey), who is using gerbils to run cable through St. Eligius's ducts. He draws the ire of short-tempered ward nurse Lucy Papandrao (Jennifer Savidge), then informs her that one of his rodent employees is missing.
I've also left in one of St. Elsewhere's greatest meta gags. Orderly Warren Coolidge (Byron Stewart) moved from Los Angeles to Boston to play college basketball, but he blew out his knee and ended up working at St. Eligius. Television viewers first knew Warren when he was a star high school player on the CBS drama, The White Shadow (1978-81), an MTM production created by St. Elsewhere executive producer Bruce Paltrow. Timothy Van Patten played teammate Mario "Salami" Pettrino, so when Warren sees Dean, the drug dealer/hustler boyfriend of a coke-addicted pregnant fourteen-year-old, who happens to be played by Van Patten, he thinks he's seeing his fellow Carver High alum and calls out to him.. Dean replies, "you've got the wrong guy, pal." Warren stands confused for a moment, then walks away singing "Purple Haze" to himself: "things they don't seem the same."
Warren Coolidge (Byron Stewart) thinks he's spotted his old Carver High teammate (Timothy Van Patten).
Mrs. Hufnagel is once again keeping herself occupied with her ham radiowhen Clifton's runaway employee ends up in her room, and the two hit it off over their shared enthusiasm for gerbils (Tony's are named Ike and Tina). Nurse Papandrao arrives with an IV ordered by Dr. Chandler, and Hufnagel has taken it upon herself to monitor the hospital's charges, having already run up quite a few bills in her previous visits. Papandrao explains that she doesn't need to do that--the hospital tracks billable expenses by placing stickers on a chart on the back of the door. The enlightened patient then takes it upon herself to do some creative accounting.
Later, we rejoin Mrs. Hufnagel in the hospital's financial department, where she has kept a beleaguered administrator long past the end of her shift by refusing to pay charges for items she doesn't feel justified paying for. Chief of Services Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) arrives to settle the dispute.
After calling Auschlander "Jeeves," she once again demonstrates her uncanny ability to hit someone where it hurts when she recognizes him as the guy whose portrait in the "rogues gallery" (actually, the hospital's chapel, where his portrait will be hung next to that of Father McCabe, the hospital's founder, hence the title of the episode) made him look like "death warmed over." Auschlander had been in a particularly cranky mood over the idea and process of having his portrait painted.
Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) counts out the Benjamins as Mrs. Hufnagel pays her bill.
She asks him why she has to pay for things like surgical gloves (which she doesn't even wear) and rubbing alcohol (for that kind of money, they could have used Chivas). Auschlander inquires about her payment options, and we learn that Hufnagel doesn't believe in medical insurance, and when he asks about Medicare, she replies, "A senior citizen with the big C and you're beatng the drum for Medicare? Doesn't cover diddly-squat."
But for all her haggling over the bill, we find out that it's not because she can't afford it. Quite the contrary--her father sold short before the Great Depression, and she's got enough to cover her costs...in cash. The look on Norman Lloyd's face as he counts out the hundreds along with her is hilarious.
Here's Mrs. Hufnagel in "Any Portrait in a Storm":
Observations & trivia:
The callsign Mrs. Hufnagel uses here is Kilo-Alpha-Six-Zulu-Golf-Bravo, or KA6ZGB. You can hear the voice on the radio say "El Salvador." Last time, in "Give the Boy a Hand", she called, "come in, KA6ZGZ." That was the callsign for her compadre in Puerto Rico. The last few letters of a callsign in amateur radio are unique to operators, while the letters at the beginning indicate location.
This is a great episode for commentary on health care costs. Edward Copeland assembled an excellent video essay on St. Elsewhere's treatment of money in medicine in his 30th anniversary retrospective at PressPlay.
The use of the name "Tony Clifton" is a tribute to the recently departed Andy Kaufman (who died of cancer in 1984).
It's kind of surreal to me that in the finale of season three, Drs. Westphall, Craig and Auschlander decide they could use a belt or two (at the urging of an ailing Katherine Auschlander, due for heart surgery to be performed by Craig in the morning), and drop into a local watering hole that Westphall had heard Ehrlich talking about, Cheers. Rhea Perlman, John Ratzenberger, and George Wendt are the only Cheers cast members involved. (They had wanted Nicholas Colasanto as Coach, but he died.) It's very strange to see St. Elsewhere's handheld tracking shots on the Cheers set.
Levine gets the story from St. Elsewhere writer John Masius, titled by Masius, "How St. Elsewhere Came to Cheers: A Revisionist History." He offers some interesting background on how the episode came together. The most interesting bit to me is the one bit of negative feedback they got from Cheers writers Glen and Les Charles, who didn't like the dialogue written for Carla and Cliff. I feel the same way. I've always found their appearances to be weird approximations of Carla and Cliff that just don't quite ring true. However, I've always enjoyed the bit where it turns out that Norm was Dr. Auschlander's accountant, and had previously prepared tax returns that stuck Auschlander with a $17,000 penalty.
Daniel (Norman Lloyd) is reunited with his former
accountant, Norm Peterson (George Wendt).
It's not the only crossover between the two shows. There's a Cheers episode from October, 1983, "Little Sister, Don't Cha", where Carla, about to deliver yet another child, announces to the bar that she'll be having her baby at St. Eligius. In this episode of St. Elsewhere, which aired March 27, 1985, Carla reacts with disgust when she finds out the doctors are from St. Eligius, where she had been "forced" to have one of her kids.
In preparing this post, I came across several links about St. Elsewhere's crossovers, including this one. There will likely be a post on those in the future.
Update, September 20, 2012: YouTube comes through again... here's a twelve-minute clip of the scene from "Cheers". The poster refers to it as "one of the most bizarre crossovers in television history."
Update, July 20, 2013:TIME magazine just put this crossover on its list of '10 Classic TV Crossovers'. They used the same YouTube clip I posted here.
