‘Abbott Elementary,’ ‘It’s Always Sunny,’ and the Art of the TV Crossover

The choice to introduce ABC’s genteel Abbott Elementary cast to the battery-acid rabble-rousers of FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia hardly seems like peanut butter meeting jelly, yet it makes for an intriguing combination. The shows joined forces for two episodes—one on each’s home network. While the Abbott episode, “Volunteers,” brought the Sunny gang to help out around the school, it’s going to be a hot minute before we see the complementary show, which allows plenty of time to reflect on TV crossovers of the past.

To be clear, overlapping the boundaries of two show worlds to throw unlikely characters together isn’t the same as a backdoor pilot, where brand-new characters introduce themselves before shuffling off to their own domain, enticing the audience to follow. In the late 70s and 80s, America was in a heightened state of Fonzie fever, and let ABC’s Happy Days backdoor pilot anything. So, while it seems like Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley crossed over, they actually showed up in Milwaukee intending to sneak into the backdoor of our hearts. It worked.

Logistics should dictate that crossovers need to involve shows from the same network, but while the Abbott/Sunny multi-network switch feels novel, it’s not that uncommon. In 1997, David E. Kelley was a minor TV God with the hit Ally McBeal on Fox, and the failing show The Practice on ABC. Both took place in Boston, and both networks wanted Kelly to be happy, so they synergized. The Practice then stayed on the air long enough to visit (and be visited by) FOX’s Boston Public, which crossed over to ABC’s Boston Legal. It’s like the couch potato version of Pong.

At its best, a crossover celebrates the essence of its characters while combining them in a surprising but somehow organic way. It should be fun enough for the audience not to care that they’re watching a commercial for another show.  For instance, Abed from NBC’s Community shared an anecdote about the time he pooped his pants on the set of ABC’s Cougar Town. Then, Cougar Town’s second season ended with Abed in the background intently watching the scene before dashing off…and only Community fans knew why.

Intermingling shows can also feed their audiences a dose of nostalgia by providing a surprise check-in with characters they once loved. NBC’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air didn’t just perform for NBC’s Blossom and watch his cousin Hilary go on a date with Joey. Will once bumped into CBS’s The Jeffersons in his therapist’s office, and then in the finale, George and Weezie bought the Banks family mansion. Of course, they were only able to make the deluxe purchase once the Drummonds from ABC’s Diff’rent Strokes chose not to buy.

Sometimes, crossovers exist for the silliness factor. What else could explain the CW’s Supernatural joining forces with Scooby-Doo? In a show where magic and monsters are real, it was only a matter of time before someone ended up in the world of animation to solve a mystery with the greatest cartoon gang of detectives ever. In the same vein, Disney’s Phineas and Ferb’s villainous Dr. Doofenshmirtz needed to aim his evil at the Marvel heroes at some point, leading to a world-saving team-up and some juice boxes.

Sadly, not all crossovers are created equally. FOX never needed to let Booth from Bones interact with anyone from Family Guy.  ABC could have said no to Patsy and Edina from the BBC’s Absolutely Fabulous hanging out with Roseanne. And NBC should have passed on Black Out Thursday, the gimmick where three of their four hits had an exciting crossover of a power outage. The marketers who created the low-logistic crossover character of “weather” are probably the same dumbs who birthed Green Week, where all of the network’s shows thematically joined forces to care about the planet. That’s a tax write-off, not character development.

With television’s rich history of characters who should meet, the Abbott and Always Sunny mashup could lead to a whole new generation of world mixing. Maybe the streamers will find inspiration and that dude from Squid Game will move from Netflix and end up doing some Severance work on Apple+. Or in the final scene of Stranger Things, Joyce can wake up in bed next to Jerri Blank from Comedy Central’s Strangers With Candy in the most Newhartian way. After all, part of the appeal of a crossover is that anything can happen. Someone call Amy Sedaris.