I’m a fan of Doonesbury. That comic strip shows a different way to make a rich story world where the characters are updated to stay current over decades. There’s a range of techniques, and I hope creative people think big.

Do you really think this is the case? I’m not defending intertextuality, cross-overs, world-creation and maintenance in general as something necessary to good story telling, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily always a problem either. Perhaps the problem is simply how it becomes addicting, a kind of fan-bait that can’t be left alone, and so it’s better to avoid it entirely? I could accept that. But I’m not sure how Law & Order was necessarily weakened by placing it in the same universe as Homicide, or how any of the “next generation” Star Trek series were hurt in terms of their ability to tell good stories solely because there were multiple series talking about the Federation, making use of similar sets of referents. (We talked before about the problems, as well as the possibilities opened up by, the Star Trek reboot, and I can see the argument that, by the time you’d gone through decades of story-telling and reruns and improvements in special effects technology and general audience expectations, that locking Star Trek into its own developed mythology and referents would be counter-productive. But I’m curious if you’re making an argument that, if you are telling stories about Picard, you really in principle make certain that Sisko never comes up.)