Over the past few years, television shows, especially sitcoms, have become increasingly self-referential, increasingly willing to poke fun at and highlight their own generic conventions, pretensions, and limitations. And, despite the many negative connotations of that troublesome term, that's not such a bad thing. Virtually every episode of Fox's The Simpsons comments on the act of watching television itself or on shop-worn conceits endlessly recycled by movies and TV shows.
Homer goes berserk after being denied the symbiotic pleasures of watching TV and drinking beer.
Mere seconds away from killing his family, Homer picks up a small, hand-held TV set in the snow. As the show's producer is explaining to them that the animators save time and money by reusing the same background footage over and over again, we see them walking by the same woman mopping the floor over and over again. Last season, for instance, the episode that introduced a new actress in the role of Becky Connor ended with the family watching a rerun of the 1960s sitcom Bewitched . One by one, the characters note how much more they prefer Dick York in the role of Darren to his replacement, Dick Sargent. When it's Becky's turn, however, she looks at the camera and professes a fondness for the successor.