Recently, I fell down the rabbit hole of Cyclic TV Reference Paradoxes. These occur when a chain of fictional TV show references form a cycle. Each show’s reality depends on another being fictional, so a cycle of these dependencies would be a paradox.

I wanted to know if these paradoxes actually occurred and figured it would be an interesting programming exercise to try and find out. It was effectively a graph problem, where each node was a TV show, the directed edges were references between them, and any cycles were instances of this paradox. To build this graph I scraped, indexed, and searched over 40,000 subtitles across ~300 popular TV shows, finding 2000+ fictional TV references.

I built a small web app to visualize the data and perform depth-first searches to find these cycles amongst the references. 72 paradoxes were found!

Here’s a set of screencaps illustrating a paradox across 4 shows: https://imgur.com/a/4Ej6lr2

Here’s a gif of the tool in action: https://imgur.com/a/1a9WqtC

You can try it out for yourself - https://jamiepinheiro.com/cyclic_tv_reference_paradox_finder