I was just in a thread that got my blood pressure up. I intend to wind down with this bit of silliness. Okay, so Dick Wolf had this shared universe thing knocked on television long before the MCU. From the time Captain Creegan got moved from L&O to SVU and Detective Munch came to SVU from Homicide: Life On The Streets, Dick Wolf has been weaving his TV Producer spider web into a pocket universe of first responder TV shows that is the envy of other producers, and the recent addition of Law & Order: Organized Crime got me thinking about a potential problem that might have time travel paradox ramifications. Follow me on this: First came Law & Order, then SVU, then Criminal Intent and the short-lived Trial By Jury. The connections are the aformentioned Creegan to SVU, Briscoe to Trial by Jury, a handful of crossover stories between the shows and the DA's being seen across the board. Then came Chicago Fire and Its spinoff Chicago P.D., crossovers between those shows and further crossovers between P.D. and SVU, connecting the burgeoning Chicagoverse with the established L&Overse, to which was added Fire and P.D.'s shared spinoff Med. And then, Dick goes to CBS to create the FBIverse with FBI and FBI: Most Wanted, to which he connected the Chicagoverse by sending a detective from Chicago PD intelligence to work at the New York FBI field office. With me so far? Okay so now that you have all that swimming in your head, think about this: If all these universes are one shared omniverse, then how do you think its creators reconcile the fact that Lt. Sylvia Van Buren at Manhattan Homicide has a doppelganger on the staff at Chicago Med and the Special Agent In Charge at the New York FBI office has her own doppelganger working in the Manhattan DA's office? Things that make you go "Hmmmm..." (No, I'm not expecting serious answers. I just find the idea of this potential reality-bender funny.)
Considering where we are right now: it's all Janeway's fault. The whole multiverse thing. Or omniverse. I'm waiting for Q to show up in Organized Crime....
Like in the soaps: Evil identical twins/triplets/cousins. Somehow it all works. That is, for the people who care about whatever 'verse may apply. It's been many years since I last watched L&O.
Just wait until you start to get into the wider Det. Munch-verse and how it anchors the Tommy Westphal-verse (it's the blue cross at the center) and connects hundreds of shows. Thankfully the X-Files are there, so any lost time shenanigans can be investigated by Mulder and Scully. https://thetommywestphall.wordpress.com/
I just remembered something. The intelligence room guy at the FBI field office is also a doppelganger, but Det. Lupo from L&O beats that by being scruffier in appearance, complete with facial hair.
The X-Files is fictional within the shared L&O/Homicide/Chicago universe. FWIW. And @Admiral2, Dick Wolf loves to re-use actors. There's dozens, perhaps hundreds, who've played multiple roles on his shows. So that doesn't really mean anything. I mean, look at the cast of SVU. Mariska Hargitay is one of the few actors in that cast who hasn't played many different characters in that universe! (Raul Esparza, Kelli Giddish and Peter Scanavino, for example, have ALL played two other characters each in various L&O shows. Ice-T was in the Mike Logan TV-movie, as somebody other than Fin. Etc. etc.) And before anybody else brings up that Tommy Westphall crap, just think of one thing: just because the show St. Elsewhere was Tommy's dream, it doesn't mean he actually made the whole thing up. Tommy could have dreamed about a real place, couldn't he? Maybe he was a patient at the "real" St. Eligius, and based his dream on that... Besides, logically speaking, Tommy can't dream about scenes he wasn't even in...
Wow. Way to kill a thread, MLB. Of course I know all that, and I'm pretty sure everybody else does, too. The joke was to ignore the obvious real life answer to try and figure out if Wolf and company could explain it in-universe and try to speculate what that explanation might be, because "Hey, wouldn't it be fun?"
In the comedy judgement system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The Fun Police, who take things way too seriously, and everyone else, who are just trying to play along with the premise of the thread. These are their stories. Duh Duh.