What TV Show Gets Referenced Most in Our Online Discussion Today?

If I had to guess I would say The Simpsons, with Seinfeld perhaps in second place.

That may seem odd, given the age of both shows, but I think it has to do with their arriving at the right time--their being around, and indeed at their peak, just before television viewership began to fragment, but after the dawn of the Internet, while going on to have a good long life through the earlier years of the Web's development by way of fond memories sustained by intensive reruns.

By contrast shows like Bewitched, MASH and even Cheers (the last episode of which aired in early 1993) were already receding into the past by that point--all as later shows such as The Office arrived in that more thoroughly web-connected but pop culturally fragmented world. (Some 76 million people watched the finale of Seinfeld, over a quarter of the country. By contrast about 5.7 million people watched the last episode of The Office--not quite 2 percent of the country's population at the time.) And of course later, non-network, prestige TV, with its streaming and cable outlets, its tendency to short runs, and toward idiosyncrasy and pretension rather than broad appeal and certainly the kind of light entertainment appeal that makes a show easy to watch over and over and over again, has been even less promising that way. The result is that if some of the content of these shows has proven memeworthy, none of them compare with those giants of '90s pop culture for plain and simple ubiquity.