Hands up: who wants to see a How to Get Away with Murder/Scandal crossover episode? No? Nobody particularly interested in seeing the dynamic, well-honed worlds of their favourite shows get bogged down in a wet morass of unnecessary compromise? Nobody? Well, tough, because there’s going to be a How to Get Away with Murder/Scandal crossover episode soon.
According to Deadline, while nothing has been officially announced yet, the episode looks to already be a done deal, with Kerry Washington and Viola Davis Instagramming each other from the other person’s set. And while this might not be the worst news in the world – both Scandal and How to Get Away are Shondaland productions, so at least benefit from a tonal similarity – it isn’t exactly the best, either.
Television has a long history of crossover episodes, and yet it arguably hasn’t produced a single successful example to date. Even though the sheer oddball novelty factor of such a stunt usually brings a larger audience than usual, they tend to all be creative duds, full of floundering tone and superfluous characters.
The absolute best that a crossover episode can do is just about get away with it, as Arrow and The Flash tend to do when their characters jump into bed with each other. The worst, though, is much more grisly. One wrong foot and neither show will ever be able to fully rid itself of the stench of corporate synergy again.
For about a decade the various offshoots of CSI spent so long bundling up together that it became genuinely impossible to tell any of them apart, with the whole franchise transforming into a vast homogeneous mass with no discernible beginning or end, like a sourdough starter gone Little Shop of Horrors. An episode of Becker once featured a scene where two characters from Everybody Loves Raymond, Kevin James from The King of Queens and Bill Cosby from Cosby all shared the same waiting room, which would have been terrible even if Bill Cosby was still a lovable old man and not an actual monster. And let us not forget the monstrosity that happened when Magnum PI ran into Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote.
The worst, most undeniably harrowing crossover episode of all time, though, came in 2014. Titled The Simpsons Guy, it was a 45-minute clashing of The Simpsons and Family Guy where all the creative gruntwork came from the wrong side of the formula. The Simpsons – even flawed, lazy, upsetting late-period The Simpsons – might have pulled off a no-score draw had it yanked Family Guy into its orbit and shined it up a little. But no. The Simpsons Guy was an episode of Family Guy, written by Family Guy writers, and featured The Simpsons’ voice cast alone and adrift in the knuckle-dragging Family Guy universe. Aside from one good joke – where James Woods from The Simpsons is briefly caught having a conversation with James Woods from Family Guy – the whole thing was a miserable exercise that managed to please nobody at all. Had it been a Simpsons episode, The Simpsons Guy would have been the worst episode of The Simpsons ever made. But it was a Family Guy episode, so its fate was even worse: it’s doomed to go down in history as a slightly above-average episode of Family Guy.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. In 1994, the NBC promotions department schemed up Blackout Thursday, a two-hour block where the characters of all four of its New York-based sitcoms would experience the same power cut. In Mad About You, Helen Hunt fiddled with cable on her roof and cut off the city’s electricity, then on Friends Chandler got caught in an ATM, and finally, on the barely remembered Madman of the People, a character got arrested for looting. However, the third show in the block – Seinfeld – refused to take part, but only after Larry David and the writer Peter Mehlman briefly entertained the idea of inviting Ross Geller on to the show purely to murder him. In retrospect, maybe that’s the only possible way to make a crossover episode palatable: kill Ross Geller.
