This insane fan theory explains how almost every TV show ever is connected

Are you familiar with how the TV show, St. Elsewhere, ends? If you’re not, so sorry, because I’m about to spoil it for you. But listen, the ending is important, and it’s being spoiled so you can better understand how almost every single TV show out there is connected, in one giant TV fan theory. And it all hings on St. Elsewhere.

Glazing over literally the entire plot of the show, St. Elsewhere ends with a major reveal: The events on the show took place inside the mind of a young autistic boy, Tommy Westphall. So everything we saw during the show was simply a dream.

Now taking that idea and running with it, two true television fans have come up with the “The Tommy Westphall Universe” that suggests every show, and they mean just about EVERY show, took place inside of Tommy’s mind. During its run, St. Elsewhere crossed-over with other TV shows. And that would mean that Tommy imagined those show cross-overs, so he also imagined those shows, and everything in those shows, and so on and so forth for forever and all of eternity. It’s all a dream. Make sense?

Keith Gow and Ash Crowe came up with this idea, and have been curating it for over ten years now. They recently partnered with Huffington Post to breathe a little bit more life into their theory, and really flesh it out. HuffPo even created a chart that shows us exactly how 419 television shows are connected to one another, all through the events of events of St. Elsewhere.

And these guys are detailed with their research. They’ve got a 19-page master document detailing how all 419 shows they’ve included in their theory fit together. According to them, St. Elsewhere is connected to Degrassi, which is connected to Home Improvement, which is also connected to Full House and Clueless and Boy Meets World. And also Breaking Bad. They’ve also got some pretty strict rules for shows that cannot be connected to their theory, such as reality programs. Everything else though, including a handful of shows still currently on the air (and a few that haven’t even aired yet!) all connect back together.

It’s best if we just go ahead and believe this theory to be true, because does anyone really want to challenge this idea? Anyone got a spare hundred years to binge 419 complete TV series? While that certainly sounds like an awesome challenge, we’re going to take Gow and Croew’s word for it. In our perfect TV world, everything is connected.

(Images via Fox and Giphy.)