WARNING: Spoilers for season three of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt below, so read with care
If you weren’t aware, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is toying with the idea of one big shared television universe. At least it is in a silly way. The idea that all television shows exist within the same universe is nothing new. The Tommy Westphall Theory takes the twist ending to St. Elsewhere and traces connections to other shows like a weed, tying together everything from Seinfeld to Breaking Bad. All are either in the head of the autistic Tommy or connected in some manner, sometimes in odd little ways. It is a fun way to waste a couple of hours or years of your life.
Kimmy co-creator Robert Carlock talked a bit about their crossover with another prominent Netflix series in season 3 in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, joking about the idea of these fictional worlds sharing the same space:
We thought it was funny to suggest we lived in that same world as Orange Is the New Black, and of course, we’re always looking for Netflix synergies. That’s our main thing that we do day-to-day. We’re gonna have a lot of stuff with Fuller House coming up — any opportunity we can to crossover with other Netflix shows.
We emailed Jenji Kohan just asking if it was okay that we said she was going to that prison, and then I think we added the idea of, “Oh, it’d be nice to have one of their actors to make it really real.” And, we asked if that was okay. Jenji was very open to us just trampling all over the world she created, which we were very appreciative of…
I don’t know that Jenji will allow us to do a Gretchen episode of Orange Is the New Black, but we just like the idea of these fictional worlds intersecting. It seemed funny to us.
Now it’s not like this is some serious push to create a shared Netflix universe but neither is the Tommyverse. It’s all for fun and something for fans to mull over, at least before the official shared universes kill interest for everybody. If anything, this slight crossover is a nice treat for fans of both shows.
This doesn’t mean that Kimmy Schmidt isn’t sharing the same universe as another show on Tina Fey’s resume, just on a much smaller scale:
This season we actually tried to do a [30 Rock cameo], but we didn’t pull it off, and I hope some day we will. Tina and I have been joking for a while about just having Jack McBrayer just cross in the background at some point on his way to work as Kenneth, the president of NBC, in one of his 1970s suits. Jack happened to be in town on a day that we were shooting at Rockefeller Center. We called him and asked him to come be in the background. He came down, got in makeup, and our costume people somehow tracked down a Kenneth suit, but he was working another job [and] had to go back. At the end of the day, what we want is a unified field theory where every fictional show in the world is actually real in our universe.
Could we handle a Kimmy Schmidt/Kenneth Parcell team-up? Would it be too much positivity? Even a background cameo could be too much to handle, but worth the risk. Besides, the grand history of television crossovers would be right up Kenneth’s alley. Let’s hope something happens in season four.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
