Weirdest TV Crossovers of All Time

The acclaimed medical drama St. Elsewhere loved its odd crossovers. It frequently featured actors reprising small roles from older series like The Bob Newhart Show and The White Shadow, and for added confusion would pair them with former co-stars who were playing different characters at the hospital. But by far the strangest blurring of series boundaries was the third-season finale, when senior doctors Westphall, Auschlander, and Craig stopped by the bar from hit sitcom Cheers to decompress after a long day, and bantered with surly waitress Carla and barflies Norm and Cliff, the Cheers regulars telling jokes without a laugh track.

In a 2000 X-Files episode written by future Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, Mulder and Scully pursue a monster that feeds on fear, while everything they do is filmed by the documentary crew from Cops, theme song and all. And it turns out, this wasn’t the only unusual adventure for the FBI agents… 

A 1997 Simpsons episode shrinks Mulder and Scully down to two dimensions when they arrive to investigate Homer’s reports of an alien-like creature wandering the woods on the outskirts of town. “The Springfield Files” more or less takes its guest characters seriously, understanding that showing their reactions to life with Homer and friends would be funny enough on their own. And the explanation for what Homer saw doesn’t feel that far afield from what might have been in an actual X-Files episode of that period.

For a relatively straightforward crime procedural, Bones took some unexpected detours over the years. There was a two-part crossover with Sleepy Hollow — a fantasy series involving a time-lost Ichabod Crane and various demons and monsters — plus a 2009 episode that finds Booth hallucinating conversations with baby Stewie from Family Guy. Even stranger, Stewie’s appearances are explained as a side effect of Booth developing a brain tumor.

H. Jon Benjamin’s two animated comedies — one full of sex jokes, the other meant for parents to watch with kids — intersected in a 2013 Archer where an amnesiac, mustachioed Sterling finds himself working at a burger restaurant with a wife and kids who look an awful lot like Linda, Tina, Gene, and Louise.

Honestly, we could make a whole list just of all the series where Richard Belzer played Detective John Munch, a character who originated on Homicide: Life on the Street and eventually appeared on 10 different shows across five networks and cable channels. But we’ll just stick with Munch — who at the time was in the midst of a 15-season stint as a supporting player on Law & Order: SVU — posing as the teacher of a scrapbooking class so he could trick Tobias Fünke into giving up incriminating evidence on the Bluth family.  

The Dukes of Hazzard wasn’t the most self-serious of dramas, since pretty much every episode was reverse-engineered from the question of what object the Duke boys could leap their custom Dodge Charger over. Still, in 1983, it wasn’t the norm to have characters from dramas turn up on sitcoms. And this one was a particular geographic stretch, with Boss Hogg and Deputy Enos traveling all the way from Hazzard County in rural Georgia to Phoenix, Arizona, in an attempt to swindle Mel into selling his diner for $1. The show’s justification for it: Boss Hogg was a distant cousin of Alice waitress Jolene.

This one may have come together more quickly than any other on the list. Community had previously established that pop-culture nut Abed loved the ABC sitcom Cougar Town. So when an episode was written as a parody of the cult Eighties film My Dinner With Andre, the Community writers thought it would be funny for it to include an Abed monologue about his disastrous stint as a background extra in a Cougar Town episode. Since the two shows were friendly with one another, the Community producers texted their Cougar Town counterparts and asked if Danny Pudi could actually appear in the background of a Cougar Town scene — and as it turned out, both the Community monologue and the Cougar Town cameo wound up being filmed all on that same day the speech was written. (To return the favor, Cougar Town co-stars Busy Philipps and Dan Byrd appear briefly in that season’s Community paintball episode. Are they playing themselves? Random Greendale students? Something else? Only Abed can say for sure.)

This is TV’s first notable crossover, and the level of weirdness depends on a question it goes out of its way not to answer. Daffy I Love Lucy heroine Lucy Ricardo is determined to get Superman to appear at Little Ricky’s birthday party, and when all else fails, she puts on a costume (complete with football helmet for some reason) to impersonate him. Eventually, she winds up on a window ledge, and who should turn up to save her but the Man of Steel himself, a.k.a. The Adventures of Superman star George Reeves. But is Reeves actually playing Superman, or is he playing George Reeves playing Superman, since Lucy and Ricky had lots of famous showbiz friends? Reeves was uncredited in the episode, and his name is never uttered, since Ball and company wanted to preserve the magic for any of their younger viewers. But “Superman” also doesn’t do anything that would require powers (he shoves aside a piano, but Reeves was a big guy and pianos are often on wheels), so it’s up to you to decide who saves the day, and whether this means the Ricardos live in a world with real superheroes. 

While we generally outlawed episodes where characters from one show dream that they’re interacting with characters from another, we made an exception for this one, which was just too strange to leave out. Mr. Robot, you might recall, was an intense cyberpunk thriller about a mentally ill man trying to take down the corporation he felt was hellbent on destroying the world. So how exactly does the furry puppet-like alien Alf (real name Gordon Shumway) fit into such a milieu? Well, it turns out that when Elliot is suffering a savage beating in the real world, his brain retreats into a show he loved as a kid, only to find that even Alf is now colored with memories of his abusive childhood. Look, it made sense at the time we watched it, OK?

This Strange New Worlds episode not only brings animated characters (the hapless Boimler and the reckless Mariner from Lower Decks) into a live-action show, but imports them from comedy into (mostly) drama, and also plays around with tones, since Lower Decks is geared at a slightly older audience than Strange New Worlds. It shouldn’t all fit together, but somehow, it does.

Over a long TV career that’s ranged from L.A. Law in the Eighties to more recent hits like Big Little Lies and Presumed Innocent, David E. Kelley has never had a better year than 1998, when he made Emmy history by winning both Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Drama Series for, respectively, Ally McBeal and The Practice. A few months before that yet-unmatched feat, Kelley brought the two shows — the former a quirky, fantasy-laden sex farce with occasional pauses for legal arguments, the latter a gritty and serious tale of attorneys who care too much, darn it — together for a story where the series’ respective Boston law firms teamed up to defend an accused murderer who believed she was Lizzy Borden in a former life. Somehow, the tones of the two shows proved just elastic enough to work together. Towards the end of that year, Kelley did a second lower-profile and more meta crossover, where Lara Flynn Boyle appeared on Ally as her Practice character, Helen Gamble. Without any setup (or follow-up), Helen and Ally (Calista Flockhart) run into each other by an elevator, and — in a commentary on how the two actresses were constantly being mocked for being too skinny — Helen snarkily tells Ally, “Maybe you could eat a cookie,” and Ally bitterly replies, “Maybe we could share it.”