Friday, October 8, 2010

TOMMY WESTPHALL IS WORKING OVERTIME: They're not yet linked in to the Master Grid, but last night we established some potential new connections for Tommy Westphall:
  • Obviously, Community is on the air in the 30 Rock universe, even if neither Liz Lemon nor Jack Donaghy can remember Donald Glover's name. (Also, the Queen Latifah character was a funny one-off, but I hope they don't keep on going back to that well, because the joke was wearing thin even by the end of the episode.)
  • Running Wilde's Wilde Oil owned the oil barrel that Annie and Britta were protesting with during last night's Community, which honestly, handled the whole "religion" thing with more laughs and more narrative unity than did this week's Glee, even if the latter standard is admittedly not very high. (And Community also featured our friend Alan in a cameo appearance as "guy leering at oil wrestling.")

10 comments:

  1. Meghan11:05 AM

    The Master Grid is blowing my mind.  And I love this whole phenomenon. 

    ReplyDelete
  2. J. Bowman1:25 PM

    Right, but if Community is a TV show in the 30 Rock-verse, it stands to reason that they do not both belong in the grid.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joseph J. Finn1:42 PM

    I really, really want to know the Buffy & X-Files connection (besides Buffy at one point referencing Scully).

    ReplyDelete
  4. According to the Key, the tie is that both Cigarette Smoking Man and Spike smoked Morley cigarettes.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Joseph J. Finn2:11 PM

    Ahhhh.  See, I missed the key link.  And I'm reminded in how much fun the Angel writers in giving Wolfram & Hart famous evil fictional corporations as clients, like Yoyodyne and Weyland-Yutani (and WY also shows up referenced in Firefly, as the makers of Mal's anti-aircraft gun in the war flashbacks).

    ReplyDelete
  6. Reason does not necessarily apply here.  Mad About You was a show on Seinfeld, yet Paul from Mad About You sublet Kramer his apartment. 

    ReplyDelete
  7. Paul Tabachneck3:24 PM

    The show still belongs in the grid because it is a fictional work written by someone in the fictional universe.  The characters are tertially Tommy's.  Man, this is awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AbbyG8:54 PM

    But at least Community could have a pop-culture reference to something on TGS

    ReplyDelete
  9. So if some character on some show within the universe indicates a connection to Tommy himself, does that lead to the universe imploding or something?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Dan Suitor12:07 AM

    The way I see it, 30 Rock is like Earth-Prime in the DC Universe.

    Earth-Prime was the alternate reality where there were NO superheroes (except for Superboy-Prime, but that's a long story), and the superheroes from the regular DC continuity existed only in comic books. BUT, this was a world that was appearing in a comic book.

    t's still a fictional world, but there are also fiction sub-worlds tethered to it.

    ReplyDelete