Longest running TV series

Doctor Who (including each classic, short British serials), new longer seasons, Torchwood, Sarah Jane Adventures and not counting the upcoming seasons:

Spoiler

26+3+1+1=31

A stretch, but technically related: Friends, Mad About You (Ursula Buffay), Seinfeld (Paul lived in Seinfeld's apartment):

Spoiler

10+9+7=26

FWIW, Wikipedia has a list of longest running US TV series.

 

Meet the Press. It was first broadcast in 1947.

 

Regarding All in the Family - wasn't there a spin-off of the Jeffersons for Florence the maid also?

 

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Technically Good Times came from this as well since it was a Maude Spin off.

 

Yes! I don't even think it make it a whole season.

 

Just found the info on same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_In 4 Episodes. (Had good ol' Ferret Face in it too.)

 

There was also a short-lived spin-off of All in the Family with Gloria as a single mother after she broke up with Meat Head.

It was called Gloria, and ran for 21 episodes: http://www.tv.com/gloria/show/657/episode_listings.html?tag=subtabs;list

 

When you start linking spinoffs and such you wander into the St Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street multiverse theory.

Short version: There was a St. Elsewhere / Homicide crossover episode. Of course Homicide links up with L&O. If you follow all the other links, some similar to the Seinfeld / Mad About You connection, you get get 282 separate TV series and all their episodes.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html

 

If you're talking all of TV and not just prime-time, there's probably a Daytime Soap or two that could vie for that title. Days of our Lives? General Hospital?

 

Guiding Light. Always regarded as the longest running drama ever - started out on radio before TV even existed.

 

Well, a lot of that stuff is just plain silly. Having shows make the same pop-culture references doesn't make them occur in the same world.

You might as well say that every show on television that has referenced the Iraq War literally takes place in our world!

 

Star Trek, with 6 series (original, animated, TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise) and 11 movies (if perhaps you count 1 year for each movie, and include the new one that's coming next year)...

Spoiler

Series - (3+2+7+7+7+4)+(11 movies) = 41

...why are these calculations considered spoilers???

 

They seem to be a little more discriminating than that. The connections have to be based on common fictional aspects. Watching Cheers on TV on a show wouldn't count, but visiting the Cheers bar and ordering a beer from Sam would.

Niles and Daphne on Frasier read the Caroline in the City comic strip.
There's a Friends / Caroline in the City crossover episode
Phoebe's sister Ursula is the same Ursula on Mad About You
A Mad About You episode features Alan Brady, the fictional comedian from The Dick Van Dyke Show. This ends up connecting it to the whole Danny Thomas/Lucy/Mayberry section.

More tenuous connections include a common fictional cigarette or soft drink brand. Oceanic Airlines is another loose tie that connects several series.
The Yoyodyne company is what bridges the present to the future of Star Trek. Many connections seem to be the creators of one show getting a chuckle out of reusing a detail from another show rather than making up a new one, like Crossing Jordan's couple mentions of the L.A. area Fisher & Son's funeral home, or a Firefly ship floating in space in Battlestar Galactica.

The 22 page PDF on their site has the details. I can see it starting by a couple guys watching TV and noticing a few connections they hadn't realized where there. They start writing them down and it sort of gets a life of it's own.

 

Don't forget that X-Files and The Lone Gunmen (short lived as it was) also fit into the Homicide/L&O universe.

 

Wrong side of the hall. Paul moved in with Jaime and sublet his apartment to Kramer. Several years later, Paul finally was convinced to give up the sublet to Kramer and he went to pick up a shoebox filled with I forgot what.

" 'But I don't have enough shoes!' Why is that funny?"

--Carlos V.

 

That's the kind of thing I meant by pop-culture references.

(Yoyodyne, by the way, is a pop-culture reference that predates Star Trek. It was originally created in Pynchon's V, and was also a major plot point in Buckeroo Banzai.)

 

And it's all in the mind of Tommy Westphall?

 

The doctors from St Elsewhere did go to cheers and order a beer from Carla in a St Elsewhere episode. So now we have linked St Elsewhere, Homicide, L&0 with the Cheers and Frasier universe.