Take That / Live-Action TV

Series with their own pages

• The Good Place
• Psych
• The Golden Girls

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• 30 Rock:
  • The Show Within a Show MILF Island, which is basically a gigantic spoof of Survivor that takes Lowest Common Denominator to new lows. Coincidence that Survivor comes on at the same time as 30 Rock and regularly slaughters it in the ratings?
  • 30 Rock has also been happy to dance on the corpse of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, most notably in their parody of the infamous episode which features Timothy Busfield's Director touring the studio with a writer from the "golden age." 30 Rock cast member Tim Conway as an aged and irrelevant old hand from 30 Rock's past, being led around by Kenneth the Page, while Conway spouts such lines as "We called that the Jew room!" about the writers' room.
  • During the second season episode "Rosemary's Baby," 30 Rock also took a shot at the career of former Production Posse recurring guest star Rachel Dratch, whose film Spring Breakdown, about a group of 30-something women who go on spring break and attempt to relive their college experiences, was having trouble finding a distributor at the time. During the episode, a senile former comedy writer (played by Carrie Fisher) pitches a film about... cougars going on spring break.^note Making this more shocking, Spring Breakdown also featured Amy Poehler, who's famously Tina Fey's BFF.
  • "Lee Marvin vs. Derek Jeter" delivers a Take That at Liz, which is very shocking given that she's Tina Fey's Author Avatar. Liz seems very flippant when the subject of affirmative action comes up, and states that a black co-worker got his job because of his race while as a white woman, she had no such advantage and had to work hard to find success. In the end, she is told that she owes her entire career to programs designed to help women, such as Title 9, a revelation that humiliates her.
  • A bit in which Tracy does a terrible job of Corpsing was likely a snipe at Tracy Morgan's former SNL castmate Jimmy Fallon, who frequently cracked up during skits, much to Tracy's annoyance.

A

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • When the scientist Dr. Radcliffe creates an android that, surprise surprise, goes rogue, we get this between Yo-Yo and Mack:
    Yo-Yo: Someone needs to make Radcliffe watch all the Terminator movies.
    Mack: ...even Salvation?!
    Yo-Yo: He brought this onto himself.
  • And in a Bad Future when someone is blown away by how dangerous and effective guns are, they get a good dig in at the issue of gun control:
    Deke: Guns, man! It's like cheating! They shouldn't give these to anyone that's not a really really good person!
    May: You'd think there'd be a law.
  • The time-displaced Daniel Sousa (it's a long story) complained once that nobody really looked each other to the face in the 80's compared with the 50's. May just tell him to wait until people get smartphones.
• American Gods (2017): The self-appointed border patrol thugs murder several devoutly Christian Mexican migrants... along with Mexican Jesus. Which symbolizes that their hate of illegal immigrants is far stronger than all of their supposed Christian values.
• On the episode "Charlie and Kate Battle Over A Patient" of Anger Management, Charlie enters Patrick's workplace wearing a shirt similar to that of Charlie Harper from Two and a Half Men. They insult the shirt, and Charlie ends it by throwing the shirt away, saying how he'll 'chuck it'.
• The Apprentice: After Donald Trump called Sir Alan Sugar (who hosts the UK version) a small-timer, Sugar had the mention of his worth (over a billion pounds) reinstated to the show's opening. This was just weeks before Trump became US President(-Elect), unfortunately for Sir Alan's ego.
• Towards the end of its run, Arrested Development took so, so, SO many shots at everything from Fox to Desperate Housewives.
  • Lampshaded in one episode where GOB makes a reference to do-gooding George Michael as "Opie", the narrator (Ron Howard, who played Opie) promptly calls him out on it.
  • Inverted with yet another nice Actor Allusion.
  The Narrator: No one was making fun of Andy Griffith. I can't emphasize that enough.
• Arrow gets on the "mock The Twilight Saga" fad right in the first episode when Oliver and Tommy are eyeing a girl at a party.
  Tommy: She looks like the girl from Twilight.
  Oliver: What's Twilight?
  Tommy: You're so better off not knowing.

B

• Babylon 5 was not shy about insulting other works:
  • The series took a big swing at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this way^note Deep Space 9 was alleged by some to have been plagiarised from an early B5 pitch, when Ivanova complained about a gift shop on the station: "This isn't some deep-space franchise, this station is about something!" For added humor, the line was written by Peter David, best known as one of the most talented Star Trek tie-in writers, and he was surprised that J. Michael Straczynski was going to use it.
  • The same episode also saw the appearance of the infamous "Ba-bear-lon 5" teddy bear. Later on, David and Straczynski would trade Take Thats over teddy bears.
  • As well, a TV Guide writer with the last name Jarvis predicted after watching the pilot movie that the show, planned from the beginning as a single story told over five seasons, wouldn't last a month, resulting in the occasional line such as "The Jarvis toilets are acting up again." The fourth season finale, the first episode written after JMS knew for sure that he would get to tell the whole story, takes a far more direct approach: it ends with a simple shot of text on a black background that says, "Dedicated to all the people who predicted that the Babylon Project would fail in its mission. Faith manages."
  • It's mentioned that San Diego got nuked in a terrorist attack sometime in the past, and a covert government group has a base in its ruins. Word of God has that JMS picked the city because he had been mugged and almost killed there.
  • At the start of the second season, Executive Meddling made the creators sex up Ivanova's appearance. She started wearing redder lipstick and had her hair loose instead of pulled back. When Garibaldi came out of his coma and returned to duty, he commented on her 'new look'. Ivanova snapped back "With everything that's been going on around here I'd think you'd have other things on your mind besides my look!" Take That, Executive Meddlers!
  • During the first battle with the Shadows, Delenn says that it is hopeless. Sheridan replies "No offense but I've heard that before." Which is a polite way of saying, "I'm Starkiller and all you Minbari better be grateful for it too."
• The Baby-Sitters Club (2020): Laine snarks that if the hermit from the legend cursed the theater because the people were rehearsing Cats it would be understandable.
• Beakman's World took friendly jabs at the competition on occasion. Beakman, on letting his mom do a challenge: "But none of the other TV science guys let their moms do stuff!" His mom replies with the "Jump Off a Bridge" Rebuttal.
  • In the last episode, the show managed to pull off the mother of all Take Thats.
    Beakman: You wrench 'em, I'll drench 'em, let's Macarena!
    Everyone in the entire friggin world, including the makers of the song: LET'S NOT!
• An episode of Beauty and the Beast (2012) ("Basic Instinct") has this exchange-
  J.T.: Call that CSI guy again.
  Catherine: CSU. CSI is a TV show.
• In the first two episodes of The Best Years, Dawn was a former teen actress whose never-seen Show Within a Show existed solely to poke fun at Degrassi: The Next Generation. In one case, it parodied a specific Degrassi episode. When Dawn gets cast as Lady Macbeth in a college play, she can't understand the role at all, and says, "if Lady Macbeth were buying her first bra or discovering the dangers of under-age drinking, I could do this." The producer of The Best Years worked on Degrassi: The Next Generation for almost its entire run, and a few of the D:TNG cast has shown up on guest roles — in fact, on The-N's website, Jay from Degrassi was on one of the clips they showed from Dawn's TV role — so this could be more of an Affectionate Parody.
• Bewitched had an episode called "Three Wishes", in which Endora does Exactly What It Says on the Tin to Darrin - granting him three wishes. The real meaning is about I Dream of Jeannie, which stole many ideas from Bewitched.
• There was an episode of the Christian superhero show Bibleman where Scott Baio (former co-star of the actor who played Bibleman) is heavily implied to work for Satan.
• The Big Bang Theory: Early into "The Closure Alternative" Sheldon talks about how various TV series gave their fans forms of closure: Buffy the Vampire Slayer continued in a comic book and Firefly had a movie. His comment on Heroes? That it gradually lowered in quality season by season until fans were thankful it was over.
• Big Wolf on Campus:
  • One episode featured a Werewolf-Slayer named "Muffy". Three guesses who she's supposed to be poking fun at.
  • In another episode, they poke fun at The Lost Boys. And, who was the special guest of that episode? None other than Corey Haim.
• Black Mirror often explores and takes swipes at modern culture. First and foremost, the target is humanity's propensity to adopt new technology without taking ethical or societal consequences into account, but there are others:
  • Fifteen Million Merits is one to reality TV culture and consumerism. People in this dystopian future do pointless work to earn pointless money to buy pointless things and the only distraction is tedious games and reality television.
  • White Bear, Shut Up and Dance and to an extent Hated in the Nation is one to the concept of "justice porn". The protagonists are no saints themselves (the protagonist of White Bear abetted in a gruesome child murder and the protagonist of Shut Up and Dance is a pedophile), but it's made very clear that Humans Are Knight Templars.
  • The Waldo Moment is a take that to the cynicism of modern politics and to populist politicians who rely more on public spectacle and personality than sound policy or ethics.
  • Nosedive is one to social media stars like Instagram models and Facebook personalities.
  • The Entire History of You and Arkangel are attacks on insecure partners and overbearing parents.
• In the third season of Blue Mountain State all of the college football team's litany of misdeeds (drugs, drinking, hazing, recruiting violations, bribery, and more) finally come to roost as the NCAA launches a full investigation. In the middle of it all, Alex openly asks why the NCAA cares so much about punishing the school for messing with their rules when their entire organization would lose the hundreds of millions of dollars a year they make off of the college players who are legally prevented from getting any of that money for themselves.
• An episode of Bones ended with the characters and suspects describing in detail how useless and unreliable luminol is; luminol is one of the most popular pieces of Forensic Phlebotinum on CSI.
• The short-lived series The Book of Daniel was basically one long Take That on, well, practically everything, but mostly religion, as it concerned a priest named Daniel Webster (yes, really) who has visions of Jesus (yes, really). You'd think that would be more than enough, but the show also gives the priest an alcoholic wife and a gay Republican son and a teenage druggie daughter and an adopted Chinese son who's dating a girl whose parents hate Asians and a brother-in-law who runs off with church funds and abandons his family and a lesbian sister-in-law and a female bishop who is sleeping with Daniel's married father and a mother with Alzheimer's disease. ...it was basically crystallized Up to Eleven smoked through a Take That! bong.
• One episode of Boy Meets World, in which Mr. Feeny starts a lunchtime radio show at school, took some shots at a few then-contemporary musicians:
  Mr. Feeny: [over the school intercom] And now, because the halls of our school beat with the lively heart of contemporary youth, here is the happening sounds of Mr. Michael Bolton!
  Everyone: Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!
  Cory: Make it stop! Make it stop!
  Shawn: It's hard to cut the wires with a plastic spoon!
  Cory: Just rip the whole speaker down!
  Later:
  Mr. Turner: If you guys are serious about [taking over the radio show], I'll talk to Feeny after lunch.
  Mr. Feeny: [over the school intercom] And now for you kiddos, Menudo!
  Mr. Turner: I'll talk to him now.
• Brookside: In its final months, the writers had a drug dealer named Jack Michaelson show up and later get lynched in the last ever episode. It was a Take That! against Michael "controller of Channel 4, as opposed to the Moonwalk guy" Jackson, who had cancelled the show. The finale ended with the longest-serving character giving a thinly veiled rant about TV and society, before vandalizing the titular "Brookside Close".
• Buffyverse:
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel both take shots at each other, and Hilarity Ensues.
  • Arguably the best one was in "Tabula Rasa" when, upon losing his memories, Spike believes that he is a vampire with a soul, a good guy on a quest for atonement who "helps the helpless". Buffy replies, "A vampire with a soul? How lame is that?"
  • "The Girl In Question" gives us this:
    Angel: "How'd she (Buffy) ever fall for a centuries-old guy with a dark past who may or may not be evil?"
  • In Spike: After The Fall a character complains about "that awful show with the three witch sisters." The bad guy thinks it's great.
  • Something bad always happens when the characters drink ("Beer Bad" and "A New Man").
  • In Season 4 of Buffy, when Giles asks Buffy\Faith who's president she replies they're testing to see if it's really her, not a concussion. Could easily be either of them.
  • The Season 8 comic series of Buffy started over a year before the success of another franchise that featured a human girl in love with a vampire, so no-one thought much about the Big Bad of the season being named Twilight, with Buffy's only interaction with the villain coming before the other series became well known. But when they come face to face for the first time since then, Buffy points out the she did the whole Human-Girl-In-Love-With-a-Vampire thing first, and her vampire was so much better than the other one.
  • Spike has his dislike of his rival for Buffy's affections programmed into the Buffybot.
    Buffybot: Angel's lame. His hair goes straight up, and he's bloody stupid!
  • Along with ties to fictional corporations like Weyland-Yutani and Yoyodyne, Wolfram & Hart also works with Newscorp.
  • Season seven just got petty with this with one of the first potential slayers killed is a girl in Germany wearing black leathers and red hair, ala Sydney Bristow of Alias. That would have been enough but the techno music and spy cutting left utterly no doubt who the show was slamming. The rest of the series would show the scene of Slayer!Bristow being killed at every single opportunity possible.
  • In a meta example, when the show moved from WB to UPN, a WB executive said that UPN stood for "Used Parts Network". A UPN executive countered that WB stood for "Without Buffy".
  • The Angel episode "Harm's Way" starts off with a video apparently made to introduce new Wolfram & Hart employees to the firm. It lists off three companies that are clients of Wolfram & Hart: Yoyodyne, Weyland-Yutani... and News Corp, parent corporation of FOX, the network that screwed Firefly a year earlier.
  • Also any time Lorne mentions Andrew Lloyd Webber.

C

• On Castle, Nathan Fillion mocks CSI: Miami almost every week. CSI: Miami, of course, is their main timeslot competition. He also got in a good shot during the 2009 Emmys, during his appearance as Captain Hammer.
• The Heritage Trust in Charley's Grants was intended to be a piss-take of organisations such as arts councils that distribute taxpayers' money to nourish creativity of one kind or another, the joke being that someone as un-artistic as Lord Charley could be able to take them for all they were worth.
• Charmed (1998):
  • Season 3 seemed to be throwing these toward Shannen Doherty as Prue is Put on a Bus to Hell. In "Sin Francisco", she was possessed by the Deadly Sin of Pride, turning her into a raging egomaniac. "Look Who's Barking" turns her into a literal female dog, and she also was responsible for destroying Piper's wedding in "Just Harried". It seemed like everybody was grateful to see her leave.
  • The episode "Witch Wars" features a demonic reality game show of the same name, where the objective is to kill witches on television while a demonic audience watches. Naturally there are a few digs at reality shows in general, and Survivor in particular.
• As much Self-Deprecation as a Take That!: On a crossover episode with Picket Fences, Chicago Hope gave a bitter nod to then-ratings powerhouse ER. When Kathy Baker's guest-star character became frustrated at what Chicago Hope's doctors were telling her, she irately declared, "We could have gone to the other one!" The hospital director's reply? "We never mention the other one." The backstory on this and other such moments is that the two shows premiered in the fall of '94, in the identical Thursday@10PM time slot. Despite Hope's better reviews and predictions that it would win the ratings battle, ER quickly buried its competitor, forcing CH's move to Monday nights, where it had a respectable multi-year run.
  • Additional swipes taken:
    • Dr. Shutt was constantly told how much he resembled ER star George Clooney and always professed not to know who Clooney even was.
    • At one point, a corporate executive made a promotional video for the hospital that was a straight ripoff of the ER opening credits, complete with ethereal music, a giant CH logo appearing on the screen repeatedly, and all of the cast members replicating the poses from the then-current ER opening credits. After the video was over, the staff was thoroughly unimpressed, one member saying, "Hmmm. Looks familiar."
• Cobra Kai: Counsellor Blatt advocates for an anti-violence program called "Hugs, Not Hits!" She describes it as being "... like D.A.R.E., except it works!"
• Interestingly, on The Colbert Report during the Star Wars portion of the Colbert Green Screen Challenge, Star Wars Scrappy Jar-Jar Binks makes an appearance, asking who would represent democracy, and hopes it's not that annoying boy from the desert wasteland who later joined the empire. He then whispered Darth W Vader. He even goes as far as poking fun at himself in the scene. Now why can't Jar-Jar be more of a Deadpan Snarker in Star Wars?
  • And now "the new Crossfire''" - Jim Cramer. It's not an interview, it's an execution.
  • On his part in getting Crossfire canceled, Stewart said he had no idea that all he had to do to get a show canceled was say that it was hurting America. He then announced that According to Jim was hurting America.
• Commander in Chief:
  • The show with Geena Davis as the country's first female president, did this pretty blatantly in one episode. There was an episode where a coastal city was hit by a hurricane. Within hours, the president was there helping oversee the relief effort. Guess who that was a swipe at. The president was later shown reading to children when an aide came up and told her something important was happening. She immediately handed the book to one of the kids to continue reading, got up, and walked away.
  • They actually did work in a shot at The West Wing — they had Geena Davis' president handle an almost-identical situation to Martin Sheen's President Bartlett. The situation was similar enough to be a "Our fictional prez is better than your fictional prez" moment.
• Community:
  • In "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas", Abed goes on a journey inside his own mind to find the meaning of Christmas. But all he finds in there is a present containing a DVD boxset of the first season of Lost.
    Pierce: That's the meaning of Christmas?
    Abed: No, it's a metaphor. It represents lack of payoff.
  • The series has more than a couple Take Thats against Glee:
    Jeff: I hate Glee.
    Pierce: Eh, I'm not crazy about Glee either.
    Jeff: (sobbing) I hate it. I don't understand the appeal at all!
    • Jeff and Britta fondly remembered a time when they filled in for Greendale's Glee club, who died in a bus crash. Their version consisted of melodramatically going "sing sing singaling ling ling" for several minutes. For which they apparently won "lots of awards".
    • Dan Harmon went above and beyond in Season 3, devoting an entire episode to parodying Glee. Though it is surprisingly more subtle than one would expect with emphasis on smaller details (the ascending level of chairs, the never mentioned piano player, Mr. Rad's sweater vests, the clipped dialogue delivery, the constant mash-ups and remixes and an apparently endless supply of costumes and props that come out of nowhere), there are some more blatant moments (Jeff shouting "Not liking Glee club doesn't make us bullies and implying that is reverse bullying", characters constantly talking about regionals, the extreme seriousness with which they take the club). It also played out as a riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the study group lose their individuality one by one as they each join the Glee Club.
  • Surprisingly, there was actually an INVERSION in one episode. Community fans have made no secret about their intense dislike of The Big Bang Theory, so naturally a lot of them were elated in an episode where Jeff goes on about how much he hates the Barenaked Ladies, saying he doesn’t understand why so many people love them, a complaint many Community fans have about TBBT. However, this was actually NOT a jab at TBBT. The online backlash was so severe that Dan Harmon had to come out and clarify that it was not a potshot at The Big Bang Theory and had nothing to do with the show. It was genuinely his feelings about the Barenaked Ladies, saying he doesn’t hate them, he just doesn’t get their appeal, and that it had nothing to do with The Big Bang Theory.
• Countdown With Keith Olbermann: Keith Olbermann's Worst Person In The World segment on MSNBC — an, ah, enthusiastic expansion of an old Bob & Ray routine — consisted of nothing but Take Thats. Unsurprisingly, the most frequent "winner" of the title was Olbermann's arch-rival in political commentary shows, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News.
  • However, Olbermann did "ban" O'Reilly from the lists for two months following the murder of Dr. George Tiller, believing that O'Reilly's show indirectly drove Tiller's murderer to commit the act and, because of that, Billo could no longer be considered "funny". He finally put Bill back on the lists to dispel rumors that MSNBC forced him to stop mentioning O'Reilly.
  • When Olbermann returned to TV with his self-titled ESPN2 program, the segment came back as "Worst Persons In The Sports World". Other than a few shots at the staff of WFAN radio in New York (a competitor to ESPN's New York radio station), Olbermann has avoided taking on other media personalities.
• During a late season episode of The Cosby Show, a young member of the Huxtable family approaches Heathcliff wearing a Bart Simpson mask, and Cliff snaps at her to take it off. At the time, The Cosby Show was losing its ratings battle with The Simpsons, and Bart Simpson was considered a bad role model for young children. The Simpsons took aim their former time-slot rival The Cosby Show when "Bleeding Gums" Murphy does a cameo on the show. The children complain that wedging him in as a grandfather makes no sense, and Cosby degenerates into nonsensical ramblings instantly while Bleeding Gums just looks around nervously.
• The fourth series of Coupling is maligned for many reasons, not always entirely fairly. But was totally worth it to hear a line that in one fell swoop buried the failed attempt at an American version. Steve to Jane: "Jane, could you stop doing this? Could you stop just wandering through my front door? Because this is not, I repeat NOT, an American sitcom!"
• Criminal Minds:
  • One episode has Prentiss explaining that the poor preservation of a crime scene was due to "the crime scene investigators" who "all want to play cop instead of just being scientists". And where exactly were they working the case? Yes, Las Vegas.
  • The episode "JJ" was intended to be JJ's last episode and is a Take That! to CBS for trying to get rid of AJ Cook (The actress who plays JJ). They transfer JJ, making it beyond everyone's control. Then the quote at the end spoken by JJ talks about "taking the high road" and "not wanting to be angry" and just about leaving family, like the team (and the cast) so obviously were. Fortunately JJ returned to the show after all.
• Ironically, on an episode of CSI itself, when a reality TV crew was filming the CSIs while they were working, Grissom remarked that there were too many forensic crime shows on TV.
  • Never mind that William Peterson, TV's Gil Grissom, was against the splintering of the CSI franchise, even refusing to appear in character with anyone from the Miami cast.
  • The Chuck Lorre written episode "Two and a Half Deaths" was a long "Take That" against Cybill Shepherd, Roseanne Barr, and Brett Butler, all of whom Lorre worked with in the past.
  • "Who do you think I am, the Ghost Whisperer?" was also said on an episode of CSI.

D

• The Daily Show hands out Take Thats on a regular basis, most memorably when host Jon Stewart was invited onto the CNN political op-ed show Crossfire, as a really, really ill-judged ratings grab. Stewart announced right off the top that he was no-one's 'monkey', and proceeded to demonstrate by spending the entire hour attacking the hosts, accusing them of irrelevance, partisan hackery, and just generally a complete lack of journalistic integrity. He wound up by calling one of the hosts a 'dick' to his face. Not entirely coincidentally, Crossfire was cancelled a few months later.
  • The Colbert Report took the idea and ran with it. White House Correspondents' Association, anyone?
• Dear White People: Chapter I of Season 3 features a mild one toward The Handmaid's Tale, noting how what July (the expy for June) complains of is something many black women already had to bear. Not to mention the fact that the lead actress is part of a real cult, but doesn't notice the irony. In spite of this, Sam says that she's addicted and has watched the show religiously.
• Diagnosis: Murder once had a Take That! against the game show 21, where Dick Van Dyke's character went on a corrupt game show called Thru The Roof, featuring soundproof booths. He noted that it was difficult to breathe in the booths.
• Jim Henson's Dinosaurs delivered one to Unsolved Mysteries, which played in the same timeslot on another network. After being asked how they keep their material so fresh, the host of "Mysteries Which Haven't Been Solved Yet" answers that they have four mysteries that they show over and over again. "Luckily, nobody seems to notice."
  Earl: Why are we even watching this show anyway? I wanna watch the puppet show on the other channel!
  Fran: That's a kid's show.
  Earl: Not so! They do some very sophisticated juxtapositions of reality!
  Fran: It'll last a year.
• Doctor Who:
  • Prior actors of the Doctor bicker non-stop whenever they happen to meet each other. Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton turned this bickering into an art during convention appearances, and Colin Baker and Peter Davison have traded insults on DVD commentaries.
  • In "The Stones of Blood", a damaged and derelict spaceship seen at one point is recognisably derived from a licensed toy of an Eagle Transport from rival show Space: 1999.
  • "The Sunmakers" has a villain with large eyebrows who taxes people to death, as a caricature of then-Chancellor Denis Healey.
  • "The End of the World": When Rose tells the Doctor that she's going to talk to Lady Cassandra, the self-proclaimed "Last Human" who has had so many plastic surgeries that she's just a face on a piece of skin stretched in a frame attached to her Brain in a Jar, Rose refers to Cassandra as "Michael Jackson".
  • "World War Three" has aliens take over the British government and contrive a situation so they'll be given access to nuclear launch codes under the pretense of stopping nonexistent "massive weapons of destruction".
  • This classic moment in "The Parting of the Ways", where Russell T Davies expresses his ambivalent and nuanced feelings regarding the TV movie's claim that the Doctor was part human:
    Rose: But that makes them... half-human!
    Dalek Emperor: THOSE WORDS ARE BLASPHEMY!
    Daleks: Do not blaspheme! Do not blaspheme! Do not blaspheme!
  • This line from "The Christmas Invasion":
    Harriet Jones, Prime Minister: You may tell the President this, and please use these exact words: He's not my boss and he's certainly not turning this into a war. ^note  That line was also a bit of a shot at Tony Blair, who (in the show's canon) had preceded Jones as PM. Blair's critics often accused him of being little more than a lackey for his "boss" George W. Bush. Its a Broken Aesop anyway, since she opens fire and destroys the aliens after the Doctor defuses the situation.
  • Fandom is divided on whether "Love & Monsters" is an Affectionate Parody and loving tribute to the things that make fandom special, or just a huge Take That! to its fans. The truth is it's kind of both; the "good" fans are presented as being slightly geeky and socially awkward but fundamentally decent and good people who come together, make connections, are inspired creatively and even fall in love as a result of their fandom, whereas the "bad" fans are humourless jobsworths who treat fandom as a joyless ritual, establishing pecking orders and sucking all the life and creativity out of the whole thing for the sake of their own ego-fulfillment. It might not be coincidental that it is sometimes suggested that the Absorbaloff is based on Ian Levine, a well-known fan who arguably represents more than a few of these negative traits.
    • In a similar event, some have suggested that the pretentious, overly-analytical and unpleasant nerd in "Blink" was named Lawrence as a swipe at Eighth Doctor Adventures writer Lawrence Miles, who was known for being extremely negative about the revival series in general and Steven Moffat in particular.
  • "Gridlock" takes a swipe at metropolitan traffic jams, London's in particular. The people stuck in what has to be the universe's worst traffic jam ever think that going 5 miles in 12 years is making good time.
  • "Blink": While exploring Wester Drumlins, Kathy suggests to Sally that they call themselves "Sparrow and Nightingale" if they're going to be investigating things, which Sally dismisses as "a bit ITV". Kathy agrees. This doesn't stop Sally and Kathy's brother Larry from calling the shop they own at the end of the episode by that name, though.
  • "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords" clearly flipped the bird at the American government when the Doctor manages to turn back time a whole year to avoid a vast majority of the deaths that occurred... and stops just short of saving the US president as well; with the Doctor specifying that "everything is back to normal". This aspect is arguably justified in it is clearly established that the Timey-Wimey Ball effect that allowed him to do this only kicked in after the President was killed — however, the President's depiction as a arrogant, buffoonish jackass who bore a certain resemblance to a certain then-current President definitely belongs here — and vitriolic comparisons made in that vein on the US DVD Commentary fuel the fire even more.
    • "The Sound of Drums" also features Martha suggesting the Master could be the Doctor's brother, only for the Doctor to shoot down the idea as silly and suggest she's been "watching too much TV". This could be a Take That at the proposed storylines for a potential US Doctor Who series from the early 1990s in which the Master would have been the Doctor's "evil brother".
  • "The Sontaran Stratagem" has this moment early on where the Doctor is letting Donna fly the TARDIS.^* The Doctor's response is so vague that it could reference any person involved with a negative 1980s event; it could be John Nathan-Turner, Eric Saward, or Michael Grade in relation to the DWU; hell, it could even be a Cold War joke or a joke about the fashion and music. Given how weird this universe is, it might even be a Noodle Incident.
    The Doctor: Getting a little too close to the 1980s.
    Donna: What am I gonna do, put a dent in them?
    The Doctor: Well, someone did.
  • "Vincent and the Doctor":
    • There's a minor example when, after Vincent's sketch of the Krafayis confuses the Doctor's species scanner, he rants in frustration that he wouldn't be having this problem with a "proper" painter.
    • Later, to cheer up Vincent when he's painting The Church at Auvers, the Doctor puts down Michelangelo for agreeing to paint the Sistine Chapel while being acrophobic and Pablo Picasso for needing to be reminded that people have two eyes.
  • During the moment in "The Almost People" where the Doctor's Ganger is going through the memories of previous regenerations, there is this line most likely aimed at the fans still bitter about David Tennant leaving the show.
    Ganger!Doctor: [David Tennant's voice] Hello, I'm the Doctor... [Matt Smith's voice] NO, LET IT GO! WE'VE MOVED ON!
  • "The Bells of Saint John":
    • Moffat, notably not a fan of Twitter, makes a dig at it:
      The Doctor: Just think of it. Thousands of people, trapped in the Wifi, unable to escape, crying for help.
      Clara: Isn't that basically Twitter?
    • Also from that episode, this time aimed at the Tenth Doctor:
      Clara: What chapter are you on?
      Artie: 10.
      Clara: 11's the best. You'll cry your eyes out.
  • "Arachnids in the UK" has American Corrupt Corporate Executive Jack Robertson, whose illegal business practices result in several deaths, and who is a Bad Boss who throws other people under the bus to save himself and refuses to admit fault in the incidents of the episode. And he plans on running for President in 2020. However, he hates the real person he's a skewering of.
  • "Resolution": The Doctor discovers, while attempting to phone for assistance with the villain, that UNIT operations have been suspended pending a budgetary review — obvious shade in the direction of Brexit and the then-current British government's Skewed Priorities regarding budgeting.
  • "Revolution of the Daleks" has Jack Robertson taking the credit for stopping a Dalek attack he was responsible for with talk he may be awarded an honourary Knighthood. This can come across as a dig at the often cronystic-looking British Honours System, with honours often being awarded to unscrupulous business people who have helped out whichever Government is in power at the time.
    • The Prime Minister in this episode Jo Patterson is a Sleazy Politician who works with the Trumplica Jack Robertson to help her political career and supports brutal security measures with his Dalek Drones. She can come across as an Expy of Theresa May, who was the Prime Minister at the time this episode was written (though by the time it had aired she had been out of Office for well over a year).
• In an episode of Dog with a Blog, the eponymous Talking Animal Stan says that he in order to be a celebrity, he will need an agent, sunglasses, and a political cause that he doesn't really understand, in which he is probably referring to Brian from Family Guy.

E

• Eerie, Indiana:
  • Several per episode. These include an evil businessman who calls himself "The Donald" in "Zombies in P.J.s".
  • In "Just Say No Fun", Nurse Nancy, who brainwashes children to eliminate their need for fun, is a reference to the former First Lady Nancy Reagan.
  • In "The Broken Record", Simon is very taken with the Carpenters song "We've Only Just Begun". Marshall says, "Simon, we have a lot to talk about." He tries to convince Simon how uncool it is but to no avail.
  • In "No Brain, No Pain", it is revealed that Ronald Reagan was given the brain of MacGyver (quadrupling his IQ) so the Republicans could win that election. The same episode had Dash threaten to destroy Simon's brain by saying he'd make him "Vice-Presidential."
• ER even took a swipe at ITSELF. An episode that had a doctor who worked with a news crew hovering outside the hospital and giving incorrect information to the public had a character commenting, "Ugh. TV doctors."
• Euphoria: Episode 3 takes a rather vicious shot at horny fangirl writers of homoerotic Real-Person Fic with an explicit, fully-animated extended sequence from one of Kat's fanfictions where Harry Styles fucks Louis Tomlinson.
• The second series of Extras was largely a Take That towards sitcoms that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant don't like — primarily catchphrase-based, broad and unnaturalistic shows such as Little Britain.
  • And the Christmas special series finale was greatly pointed at Big Brother.
  • Gervais and Merchant have noted, however, they were not attempting to label people who do "broad" comedy as being bad, but that you shouldn't settle for less if you want to aspire to greater things. Granted this does not mean they necessarily like such shows, but it's not quite as venomous as the show would make you think...
  • Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse aimed a Take That at Extras with a bemused couple watching a tv show featuring a Stephen Merchant sound-a-like ranting about how he's good friends with Ben Stiller.

F

• Feel Good: James Bond as a role model is brought up by the addict Mae relapses with, and by George's immature dad.
• Ferris Bueller's pilot episode opens with the title character trashing the film his show is based on as a heavily fictionalized account of his real adventures, even going so far as to take a chainsaw to a cutout of Matthew Broderick. This evidently left a very foul taste in fans' mouths, as ratings were pretty good for the show's sneak preview but then dropped like a rock afterward, and the show was cancelled at only one season. If there were a guidebook on adapting films into TV shows, "Immediately set the tone for fans of the wildly popular and successful source material by denigrating and attacking it within the first few minutes!" would surely be found in the "DON'T" column.
• When Fox executives complained that Firefly should have aliens because it was a sci-fi show, Joss gleefully inserted a carnival barker claiming that "aliens are among us!" It turned out to be a mutated cow fetus. Note this was in the last filmed episode of the series.
• Frasier:
  • The series did one to its parent show Cheers. In the parent show Sam and Diane have a vicious argument only for Sam to ask "Are you as turned on as I am?", to which Diane responds "More!", and they kiss. When Frasier tries this when arguing with a coworker, it is met with a horrified "NO!"
  • The Emmy-winning season six episode "Dr. Nora" is one long take-that to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the most popular radio psychiatrist of the time (and a competitor of Dr. Joy Browne, another radio counsellor and Frasier consultant). The entire episode portrays Dr. Nora as a sadistic, mean-spirited satire of the famously ultraconservative Schlessinger, though she does have several Villain Has a Point moments.
• A French Village: Geneviève is told by the US Army Colonel that one of the soldiers who attacked her will be hanged... the one who had not committed rape, because he's Black, which he freely admitted was due to American racism. Antoine is very disgusted by this, saying it's a joke for the US say it represents freedom and democracy while they do such things.
• Future Man: Bill Cosby and James Cameron both get it. Josh is shocked to learn in 1969 that Cosby had joked about drugging women even back then. When his impression of Cosby makes one black student say he almost stopped liking him, Josh says "Get used to it". Cameron is portrayed as completely egotistical, having programmed his house AI to sing his praises in an over-the-top manner.

G

• Ghost Whisperer had an entire episode dedicated to knocking The Twilight Saga in general and the Stalking is Love aspect of it in particular. In it, Melinda has to help out a teenage girl who believes one of her classmates is a vampire, because of the weird stuff that's been happening around her. This being Ghost Whisperer, it of course turns out that she's actually being haunted by the ghost of a friend who'd died after they'd lost contact and was upset that they'd never be able to have a relationship.
• Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz named the Castaways' boat, the Minnow, after Newton Minow made his famous "vast wasteland" speech.
  • A TV movie about the making of Gilligan's Island was narrated by the original show's cast: except for Tina Louise, who was the only surviving cast member to not participate. It's probably not a coincidence that she's portrayed as a bitchy, slutty moron in stark contrast to the downright saintly portrayals of everyone else.
• Glee:
  • The series took a shot at The Twilight Saga in the episode "Theatricality", where Principal Figgins informs Tina that she must abandon her Goth look due to the pseudo-vampirism caused by the popularity of the book series.
  • "The Sue Sylvester Shuffle" has a barrage of Take Thats in the top ten losers of the year.
  • The show took shots at Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan ("You have Britney and her shaved head, Lindsay Lohan looks like something out of lord of the rings" - Emma Pillsbury, season 1, episode 14) before having them both guest star on the show in later seasons! Even after Britney appeared, they took shots at her in season 4, having a whole episode dedicated to parodying her depression back in 2007.
  • The episode "Guilty Pleasures" in which Jake wants to perform a song by Chris Brown, and upon learning this the girls of the Glee Club (even shy girl Marley) corner him to change his mind because of how much they hate him, particularly Tina, who states with a yell "the dude is a psychopath!" (Ironically, they don't have a problem with his doing "My Prerogative" by another singer called Brown known for beating up his partner.)
• Good News Week has one of these about every five minutes, besides news stories politics and religion get the worst. It's not uncommon for someone to comment "we're going to have pissed off everyone by the end of the episode" this just results in more Take That!'s.

H

• In the Haven episode "Shot in the Dark", Jennifer comments that she read a book called Unstake My Heart and it is even worse than Twilight.
• In the smart cop drama Homicide: Life on the Street impressionable Detective Bayliss became awed after interviewing an emergency-room doctor about the death of a patient and said, "It's like she was doing God's work," he enthused. "How can we compare?" Not long after, his cynical, veteran partner, Detective Pembleton was sick of it. "You want glory? Go work at ER," he snapped. "Homicide's fine by me." A not so subtle jab at the wildly popular hospital show.
  • And the producers of Homicide: Life on the Street had good reason to do a take that against ER. Originally, Homicide was supposed to replace L.A. Law on Thursday nights at 10:00 PM in the fall of 1994, which at the time was one of the best time slots on NBC. However, ER tested so well, that the executives at Warner Bros., ER's production company, campaigned NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield to give that series the prized Thursday slot, which he did. The producers of Homicide felt that if they had been given that time slot instead of ER, the show would not have had to constantly deal with ratings struggles which, in their minds, were the prime reasons why the show was constantly dealing with Executive Meddling throughout the run.
• Horrible Histories:
  • The show got in on the "mock The Twilight Saga" fad; their sketch about Lord Byron included some lines based on the movie, and was ended with a bumper reading "twit light" in the same font as the movie titles.
  • Horrible Histories also really loves to mock Simon Cowell. Among other things, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I sing in their song "The Tudors," "At least we're not as rude as... Simon Cowell!"
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Had an interesting in-universe Take That. Ted finds out that his ex-fiance's ex-boyfriend made a movie called The Wedding Bride, which is a retelling of the whole marital drama between the trio except blatantly skewed in favor of the ex-boyfriend. To Ted's horror, the main antagonist of the film is called "Jed", and is played up to be the biggest, most unsympathetic Jerkass in the history of the world.
  • There is also a Take That! at Friends in an episode where the guys go to a coffee shop.
    Ted: So I guess that settles it.
    Marshall: Yep.
    Barney: Hanging out in a coffee shop, not nearly as much fun as hanging out in a bar.
  • In an episode where Ted imagines what the future will be like, when he imagines a good future he's reading a newspaper with the headline "Al Gore signs new bill into law." Later, when he imagines a horrible future, the headline says "Bush elected for surprise third term".
  • There's also one aimed at George Lucas:
    Marshall: I can't believe you threw up in your Stormtrooper helmet.
    Barney: Eh... I did something worse in it after The Phantom Menace premiered.
  • The Season 8 episode, "The Fortress", has Barney explaining his feelings to Robin by using the first two Superman movies as an analogy. Then, he disregards Superman III by calling it "a complete trainwreck".

I

• iCarly has an entire episode setup as a shot at the Disney Channel (transparently disguised in-universe as the "Dingo Channel") for ripping off stuff the creator of iCarly had done, to the point where the characters invade the bowels of the studio, and steal Walt Disney's (or his closest Fictional Counterpart) cryogenically frozen head.
  • To top it off, the stuff the Dingo Channel creates is said to be completely bland, stale, and devoid of anything even remotely resembling entertainment value.
    • Disney seems to have fired back. Notice So Random!'s resemblance to All That in Sonny with a Chance. The resemblance is because one of the creators of All That is the creator of Sonny with a Chance.
    • Another funny thing about that is that there is a studio called Dingo Pictures that steals ideas from Disney.
  • They actually kind of lampshaded that (sort of), with Spencer commenting on the stupidity of the adults on the Dingo Channel shows, only to have Carly remind him that he forgot to put on his pants...
  • In case you still have doubts about the reference to Disney: In Europe, "Dingo" is the French name for Goofy.
    • And then there's "iCarly Saves TV," a subtlety-free Take That! to network television's idea of TV for kids.
  • Another Take That was aimed at the fans (or more specifically, the ones who are constantly nagging about Seddie or Creddie pairings) during the episode "iStart A Fan War", by showing them as crazy losers who don't care about the show itself, only about the Shipping.
• Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the creators of Inside No. 9, have stated publicly that they based the character Angel (an annoying, demanding vlogger) in the episode "Thinking Out Loud" on the influencer Elle Darby. At the time of writing, she had been publicly criticised for asking for a free hotel stay in return for a review; which they considered a very entitled thing to do.
  • In "Wise Owl", Wilf is a former actor who voiced Wise Owl, the mascot of a series of public information films in the 1970s. He says he was invited to reprise the role for a new CGI version of Wise Owl, but declined because "it would have been crap." This is a swipe at several attempts in the real world to revive characters from public information films in CGI (including Charley Says, and Joe and Petunia), which Shearsmith and Pemberton didn't like.
• The IT Crowd takes a jab at Microsoft when a bomb-disposal robot starts playing up:
  Moss: What operating system does it use?
  Bomb-Disposal Expert: Vista!
  Moss: We're going to die!
• In the iZombie episode "Grumpy Old Liv", Liv ends up temporarily saddled with the personality of a rude, cantankerous old man. At one point, she refers to a lab rat (which Bollywood Nerd Ravi has nicknamed "New Hope") as "Final Hope". Ravi responds that if he'd wanted the rat to have a depressing name, he'd have gone with "Phantom Menace".

J

• In the JAG episode "Tiger, Tiger", A frigate has been taken over by terrorists. Harm and his girlfriend’s ten-year-old kid are cut off in the hangar.
  Josh Pendry: Under Siege!
  Lieutenant Commander Harmon Rabb: What?
  Josh Pendry: Steven Seagal in Under Siege. He got the Pentagon on a satellite radio from a lifeboat.
  Lieutenant Commander Harmon Rabb: Well, unfortunately this isn't a movie, Josh. These lifeboats have satellite radios with an emergency beacon and a short-range voice transmitter. We could activate one. The Coast Guard would come, but before we could inform them of our situation, who knows what these terrorists are likely to do.
  Josh Pendry: It's so cool in the movie.
  Lieutenant Commander Harmon Rabb: Well, I'm sure it was.
• Jane the Virgin was NOT subtle with jabs at Donald Trump either before or after the election. The show pulled off a spectacular one in "Chapter Seventy-Nine": When Alba becomes a U.S. citizen she looks at a framed picture of President Trump...which then morphs into a picture of Barack Obama.
• Just the Ten of Us: In "Dreamgirls", Connie says she'd rather be a novelist than help her sisters become a famous singing group. Wendy says that if Connie gets famous, it will guarantee that anything she writes will be published. To exemplify this, she contemptuously points out how Suzanne Somers published a book of poetry (which Cindy likes but the other sisters view as trash). ^note  Somers actually wrote that book before becoming famous, though.

K

• Knight Rider:
  • A HUGE one on The Dukes of Hazzard in the episode "Give Me Liberty... Or Give Me Death". In a race with alternative-fuel powered cars, there is one car run on moonshine and driven by Bo and Luke Duke expies - the brothers are even named Prince (a higher rank than a duke) - and while other contestants are threatened, the Prince brothers are the only ones killed. For good measure, their car, which is the General Lee without the Confederate flag (same orange color) is blown up with them in it!
  • After Product Displacement enforced by General Motors declared the words Pontiac, Trans Am, and everything related off-limits, the writers responded by having KITT (the lead talking car) praise rival Ford Motor Company's founder's color choice.

L

• The Land of the Lost (1974) episode "Hurricane" includes a line from visiting Texan astronaut Beauregard Jackson, “That shimmer just took off like a bat out of Philadelphia!”
• A lot of Craig Ferguson's jokes on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson are (admittedly mostly joking) Take Thats towards CBS and TV in general. He has also said a direct Take That! to M*A*S*H, saying that his upcoming Robot Skeleton Sidekick will be the "the most awesome thing not just in late-nite television, but in all television, ever!"
  • It's become one of Ferguson's catchphrases. These days, when he feels he's been mean towards someone who didn't deserve it, he'll often inverse this trope, jokingly saying things along the lines of "Take that, nice woman in the audience!", or "Take that, single mothers!".
• The last episodes of Late Night hosted for David Letterman are full of Take That moments against NBC, but the finale include a subtle one: "The World's Most Dangerous Band", led by Paul Shaffer, played as a musical interlude the song titled We Gotta Get Out Of This Place. The lyrics of this sixties' song say: "We gotta get out of this place / If it's the last thing we ever do / We gotta get out of this place / Girl, there's a better life for me and you".
• Two different sketches on Laugh-In made fun of the other two networks.
  • In a quick sketch, we hear the voices of cast members Alan Sues and Henry Gibson as network executives. One has just pitched a show and the other likes it and wants to call it "Laugh-In". The first says it's already taken and suggests they call it "Hee Haw". To ram the point home, the only thing we see is a door labeled "CBS Program Development".
  • In a little longer sketch, Dan Rowan and Sammy Davis, Jr. are Mexican stag film producers talking about the recent slump in the stag film economy and that they're stuck with their first full-length film. As the sketch ends, Sammy suggests that they sell it to California school boards under the title Leave It to Beaver. Dan quips "Makes no difference. We put it on ABC, nobody gonna watch it, anyway."
• Speaking of which, an episode of Law & Order had Lennie disgusted at a lab tech, saying "Those crime scene guys are highly overrated. The problem is, they all think they're cops." A fairly clear dig at CSI and other Forensic Dramas. More than a few cops feel that way in Real Life too.
  • On another episode after arresting a wannabe mafioso who did a lousy job covering his tracks, one of the police officers looked at the other and said something to the effect of "It's The Sopranos. Makes them all think they're invincible."
  • A later episode featured a sinister, scientology-like cult that was portrayed as litigious, greedy, psychologically and possibly physically abusive, kept secret files on their own people, and were strongly suspected of driving the victim to her death however, this particular Take That ended on a rather weird note: not only was the cult not directly responsible for her death, the real killer joined them in order to find peace, and one of the prosecutors quips that he might be involved in the influential cult as well.
    • The confusion may be resolved by noting that this episode was Ripped from the Headlines inspired by a real-life case. Naturally, a few details were changed to avoid litigation.
  • The series finale didn't even try to hide the fact that they were ripping from the 4chan/Anonymous headlines, with the main antagonist's online screename literally being "moot". In particular, one of the suspects (trying to be "moot") was stand-in for one of moot's longtime rivals, a pedophile rival message board owner who had a history of trying to destroy 4chan via spam bots flooding 4chan with spam for his rival website.
  • An early episode had a spoiled, rich, adult man firmly under his mother's thumb. He got sent to Riker's Island for breaking bail (by taking his children to Barbados on vacation). The DA's office decided to send in an informant to very carefully not elicit information as the rich man broke under the unpleasant pressure of prison.
    Schiff: Who can we send in?
    Stone: We've got an armed robber... a landlord... they're both ripe for deals.
    Schiff: Send in the armed robber. The jury will find him more sympathetic than a landlord.
  • The show was also a fan of doing episodes where they mocked existing shows, ranging from "The Real World" (cast member kills another cast member, manipulated by a corrupt MTV executive), Rescue Me (two episodes were done that criticized that show's take on firefighters), Nip/Tuck (plastic surgeon accidentally kills a patient), and the various TLC shows about families with large numbers of kids.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent features as a recurring character an obnoxious, loudmouthed, blond cable news anchor named "Faith Yancy", no points for guessing who she's an Expy of.
  • Yet another episode featured a video blogger named WeepingWillow17 who owned a stuffed monkey puppet and got kidnapped, obviously based on Lonelygirl15, a series co-created by one Miles Beckett. The episode in question also featured a scene where an amateur video maker named Miles was criticised for including too many cuts; his show was described as "visual masturbation", with "no depth, no theme, no narrative..." Ouch. Just in case the viewers didn't get it, the videos were then compared directly to WeepingWillow17.
  • CI somehow managed to deliver a Take That to Tom DeLay on both the show and in real life.
• In-Universe example in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: in the episode "Authority", Elliot Stabler arrests Merrit Rook for tricking a fast food restaurant worker to tie-up and sexually assault a female co-worker. Rook is found not guilty, then the following day, appears on a talk show about his campaign for people to not be subservient sheep, bring a live sheep on the show named "Elliot".
• A poster for the showings of Lost season 4 on Sky said in big letters ANSWERS ARE COMING and underneath in much smaller letters [Unless you have Virgin Media or Freeview]! To clarify, Sky One, the channel that premiered seasons 3-6 of Lost in the UK, was pulled from Virgin Media between 2007 and 2008 after a dispute between Sky and Virgin.
• Lost in Space took a potshot at I Dream of Jeannie in "The Thief From Outer Space". The titular character and Dr. Smith spend most of the episode fighting over a magical genie bottle. At the end, it's revealed to the horror of both men and the Jupiter II crew that the genie is an overweight, shrill woman who is unnervingly creepy about satisfying their desires. The genie is shoved back into her bottle and is promptly forgotten about. The only one who takes any interest in her is The Robot, who proceeds to lean over to the bottle, pick it up... and tell her his life story.
• Spanish puppet show Los Lunnis once did a truly spectacular one to both promulgate a "Reading Is Cool" Aesop and to attack competitor TV channel Cuatro and its broadcast of Dragon Ball Z.

M

• MADtv (1995):
  • One episode had Santa Claus (played by Michael McDonald) erasing a kid's memories of himself. Santa remarked that while he was erasing memories, he wanted the audience to forget about a show called Saturday Night Live. In another sketch, Martin Short (who guest starred on MADtv and was a cast member on SNL in the mid-1980s), "Live from New York!" and is told that that's another show.
  • In an episode cold opening, George W. Bush (played by Will Sasso) calls for a manhunt against Chris Kattan after seeing Corky Romano. And in another episode cold opening, Nicole Parker insults an old man who only came on MADtv because he thought Jimmy Fallon was a cast member on the show.
  • The parody song "What's on TV" (a take-off on Eminem's "Without Me") is one long-winded "Take That!" against pretty much every television series of the late 90s and early 2000s. The targets are Frasier, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson's Creek, Friends, ER, The King of Queens, The Drew Carey Show, Becker, Just Shoot Me!, Touched by an Angel, Charmed, ED, Yes, Dear, Judging Amy, The Practice, The View, 7th Heaven, JAG, Big Brother, According to Jim, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Crossing Jordan, and the channels that show them. It's capped off with "Em" declaring that MADtv is the best show on TV. Wow.
• An episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show had Lou Grant stuck babysitting Bess Lindstrom. She wants to watch TV, so he asks about "The Clancy Clan". Bess unenthusiastically describes it as a show about a family that has a lot of kids, and they have all these laughs because...they have all these kids. Lou notably did not ask, "What's their story?"
• Medium does this to Ghost Whisperer when Allison investigates what seems to be the spirit of a dead author going into an injured man to reunite with his wife. It turns out the "new" husband is a fraud who found the dead man's unpublished autobiography.
• Adam Buxton's Sketch Show Mee BOX has a sketch involving an interview with a fictional actor "Famous Guy" which has several Take Thats within. The first and most obvious is a jab at the popularity of actors, as Famous Guy is referred to as a "pretending man" and "the best at pretending". It also parodies the movie industry's constant rehashing of the same ideas with nondescript movie titles like "Horse Chase", "The Exploding Car" and "They Came From Space There". American actors trying to duplicate a British Accent is sent-up with Famous Guy's bad attempt at a Cockney accent. There's a more subtle jab at men's magazines in the first part of the sketch: if you pause at the "Man Magazine" you can read headlines such as "Articles about sex inside here" and "Are all feelings homosexual? Why the answer is yes". This is perhaps aimed at the Daily Sport, which has relaunched itself as being about nothing but "Sports, girls and funny stuff".
• Millennium (1996) was apparently the subject of so much Executive Meddling from the Broadcast Standards and Practices that series writer Darin Morgin parodied him in the episode "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me", with a segment about how a demon drives a Broadcast Standards & Practices guy insane. This eventually results in the hilarious line, "You will not get away with this! The final scene is gratuitously violent! Aliens would not carry an Uzi! They are a superior race and they would not carry or utilize automatic weapons! I will not approve this! I am Broadcast Standards and Practices!"
• Misfits has had a couple of pretty overt jabs at Heroes. Very early on there's a scene where all of the characters break down laughing at the idea that they should all start fighting crime and saving the world (although that could just be superhero stories in general). But S2 has a wimpy Soapbox Sadie champagne socialist rich-boy who jumps to the conclusion that he might become the most important of the characters... and instantly gets killed off. And the villain of the S2 Christmas episode is a handsome dark-haired guy who wants to be the most powerful person in the world, collects other people's powers but mostly uses telekenesis... and is an utterly pathetic douchenozzle who dies ludicrously well before the end of the ep through stupidly misusing one of his own powers. Anyone get the idea that the writers don't like a certain trustafarian male nurse or a certain guy named after a watch brand?
• Mock the Week is about 28 minutes of this per half-hour episode, but the August 29, 2009 example takes the prize for being the most...direct. Dara O'Briain, the host, had fluffed his "That's right, the answer is [X]" several times, and announced "Just in case this gets on one of those outtake clip shows, Anne Robinson's a cunt."
• Monk:
  • The episode "Mr. Monk and the TV Star" has a a scene where Monk and Sharona are on the set of a CSI stand-in called Crime Lab: SF while investigating their lead actor. We later see a summation bit from the show being redubbed. What we see of the scene demonstrates many of CSI's distinctive visual effects where the killer of the episode in question took out his own blood and froze it into a bullet mold, just so that it would melt without a trace later.
  • "Mr. Monk and the Really, Really Dead Guy", where Monk outwits the FBI's state-of-the-art computer technology, just to demonstrate that it is actual thinking and thought processing that closes cases, not computers and flashy technology.
• Promos for Monsterquest have shown Bigfoot and a swamp-creature living casually in suburbia, with the caption "If they lived among us, there would be no quest". This may be a Take That! against Lost Tapes, a competing cryptid-themed show with the tagline "Do they live among us?" The poor quality of the promo costumes may also be a Take That!, as Lost Tapes monsters are usually pretty fake-looking.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus:
  • The series aimed a few Take Thats at programme planners, who had irritated the team by moving the programme about in the schedules seemingly at random. Among the brickbats include John Cleese's comment in the second series "I'd like to be in programme planning, unfortunately I've got a degree" and an extended sketch in the third series where penguins were discovered to be more intelligent than programme planners.
  • The Python team also aimed a few Take Thats at former employer David Frost; in one instance parodying him as the narcissistic Timmy Williams whose TV show credits proclaimed him as sole writer, followed by a neverending list of names under "Additional Material".
  • They also aimed at British politicians in specific ("Number 26: Margaret Thatcher's brain") and in general ("It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are concerned more with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government...").
  • Their "Upper-Class Twit of The Year" skit is just one big Take That! against the British upper class.
  • The Piranha Brothers sketch talks about Dinsdale's "warm interest" in associations that are implied to be populated by gay men: "boys' clubs, sailors' homes, ... and of course the Household Cavalry."
• Morecambe and Wise had a long-running faux feud with Des O'Connor, with Take Thats on almost every show. In a Julius Caesar sketch:
  "The people in the Colosseum are rioting!"
  "Des O'Connor wasn't singing, was he?"
  "No we'd thrown him to the lions- but they threw him back.")
• Mork & Mindy:
  • A third season episode actually has Mork meeting Robin Williams, but before he actually meets him, Mork spends most of the episode being horrified that people think he looks like Robin, making the first part of this episode Robin doing a Take That at himself.
    Mork: Do you know what "Robin" means on Ork?
    Mindy: What?
    Mork whispers to Mindy
    Mindy: That's disgusting!
    Mork: Don't look at me, I didn't give him that smutty name!
  • And later...
    Mork: He looks like he does his hair with a Cuisinart! Man, he's got a road map for eyes! You could pack a family in that nose, man! I mean, look at that mouth, "Duuurrr...". They had to airbrush his entire face, are you kidding? I mean, I'm bright and cheery and this guy's got big problems!
  • The episode "Mork's Mixed Emotions" had a brief Take That! against Steve Martin. Mork, after a wild night of overwhelming emotions, bursts into the record store and throws a cardboard cut-out of Steve across the room and yells Steve's trademark "EXCUUUUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEE!". Perhaps not really intended as a Take That, since Steve and Robin were good friends in real life, but it sure comes off as one.
  • And one of the more bizarre episodes was a Take That! against commercial television, with Mork becoming a zombie consumer and then having a nightmare about all his friends becoming tools of the advertisers. Of course, being on a commercial network, they had to add a coda that "advertising is okay and it's up to the consumer to decide whether to buy or not." It even had a Fourth Wall breaking ending, with Mork saying "If there's something on television you don't want to watch, you can simply just press this butt-"... followed by the screen shrinking down to a dot like when older TVs turned off.
• During the MTV Awards in 2003, when Gollum of Lord of the Rings accepted his award, he went on a profane-filled rant, ripping apart the entire movie cast, and even ripped into Dobby. Anyone wanna sign Gollum up for his own talk show?
• The Muppet Show:
  • Statler and Waldorf are the anthropomorphic personifications of this trope. If they aren't being snide about the actors on stage, they're aiming at the (theater) audience. And got popcorn thrown at them a couple of times. There's a reason that them doing their schtick on a couch at home didn't work so well.
  • A moose tried to get on the show, saying his name was "Mickey". Kermit shooed him away, saying that Mickey Moose was a dumb name.
• The Muppets (2015):
  • According to the episode "Going, Going, Gonzo", not even Joseph Gordon-Levitt understood the plot of Looper.
  • From the same episode, Piggy's water brand (which is full of fat) appears to be a shot at Coca-Cola's Vitamin Water (which has as much sugar as soda).
  • A parody of One Million Moms shows up in "A Tail of Two Piggies", protesting Piggy showing her tail (there's an inexplicable in-universe prejudice against pig tails despite the other Muppets who are animals leaving them uncovered). There's only three of them; they like to round up.
• One of the later episodes of Murder, She Wrote featured a rather savage attack on Friends (the fact that the episode was titled "Murder Among Friends" should have been enough of a hint) in the form of a Show Within a Show called "Buds", among whose cast there was, of course, the requisite murder. And murderer. This was because TPTB were angry that CBS executives had inexplicably moved the show from its comfortable Sunday-night timeslot where it had been a ratings powerhouse for nearly a decade, to Thursday nights, opposite Friends, where it was now being slaughtered.
  • There's also the series finale, which could be a very symbolic Take That. The episode involves the murder of a radio station manager who is murdered after deciding to gain younger viewers by firing all employees over a certain age and switching the format from classical music to hard rock (symbolism much?) The title? Death by Demographics (Murder She Wrote was moved to Thursdays and fed to the sharks because it wasn't picking up enough 18-39 viewers.)
  • There was an obvious spoof of then-rival Cagney & Lacey on Murder, She Wrote — the cops of the week were female partners, one blonde and one dark, both with rather outrageously blue-collar accents, shown as almost constantly on the phone trying to solve personal/family issues.
  • And another episode took place on the set of Danger Doctor - an obvious Diagnosis: Murder spoof. Jessica became involved because the writers had stolen one of her stories.
• Murphy Brown was famous for mocking politician Dan Quayle with attacks ranging from subtle to outright. It got to the point that when the titular character became pregnant and decided to raise her child as a single mother, Quayle took the opportunity to publicly denounce single motherhood. Murphy Brown gave it right back by having Murphy tearfully complain to Frank that Quayle was mocking her lifestyle. Frank, incredulous at Murphy's trauma, responded simply, "Murphy, it's Dan Quayle." In the following episode, Murphy responds in an apparently mature way by having a special edition of FYI focused on several kinds of families... then hires a truck to dump several tons of potatoes on Quayle's front door.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 does this all the time.
  Crow: This movie is like Porky's, only without the charm.
  • They also subverted it, with a deliberately unfunny "lampoon" of Love, American Style.
  • They also had a history of doing this to Leonard Maltin. In the episode "Laserblast", Dr. Forrester mentions that Maltin gave this movie 2 and a half stars. Mike and the bots then take out his movie guide and mock him during the credits. In the episode "The Undead", they find out he gave the movie three stars. Mike dressed up as him and apologizes. Maltin actually got back at them by appearing on the show and suggesting that Mrs. Forrester force them to watch Gorgo, which he actually also liked (though he admitted it put two of his book editors in intensive care).
  • Show creator Joel Hodgson considered fellow prop comic Gallagher something of an arrogant dick after a pre-MST3K encounter, and would regularly drop Take Thats on him.
  • The "Avalanche" episode has Jonah and the Bots mocking movies like Birdemic and Sharknado by buying the rights to a Long List of names for "stupid-on-purpose hybrid B-movies" to keep them from being made.
  • The "Cave Dwellers" episode drops one in a scene where the heroes are slaughtering some mooks: "They're kinda dumb, they're easy to kill — the American Gladiators!"
  • In "Mitchell", Joel escapes from the Satellite of Love on a single-seat escape pod because it was hidden in a crate labeled "Hamdingers", which Gypsy comments that no one likes.

• On the Duct Tape Island Survival episode, the MythBusters had this advice: Don't drink your own urine.

N

• The first episode of NCIS has Gibbs talking to a security guard when arriving at a crime scene.
  Gibbs: Gibbs, NCIS.
  Guard: Is that like CSI?
  Gibbs: Only if you're dyslexic.

O

• Odd Squad:
  • Soundcheck, a generic boy band whom Otto loves, is a jab at other generic boy bands like One Direction. In "Disorder in the Court", they treat claims of them having "manufactured sound and meaningless lyrics" as compliments by remarking that that's what they do best. Likewise, the Villain People, featured in the Season 3 episode "Music of Sound", is a jab at girl groups.
  • The episode "Oscar the Couch" has a Cold Open of Delivery Debbie being unable to deliver her Hawaiian pizza because the house she needs to deliver to is in a "No Hawaiian Pizza Zone", referencing the ongoing debate about pineapple as a topping on pizza.
  • In "O is Not For Over", Olive and Otto take a potshot at the people in the fandom who ship them by way of Otto asking Olive if they have to be married now that they are Mr. O and Ms. O, and Olive responding in shock and horror before telling Otto not to make things weird.
  • Oprah's justification as to why Party Pam isn't selling any sandwiches with her marketing tactic in "First Day" ends with a clapback at the show's critics, who often berate Oprah for yelling too much at other characters even though she's a parody of real-life bosses. At the end of the episode, she yells her catchphrase at Olympia and Otis, stating that she still has one yell per day.
  Oprah: If you're always yelling, that's all people think you do, and they don't see that there's a lot more to your character.
  • The Cold Open in "The O Team" has Dustin call Mr. Fonts a sellout for expressing his desires to turn his newly-written novel into a movie.
  • Similarly, the Cold Open of "O is for Opposite" takes a potshot at businesspeople by having its starring client laugh with someone on the phone, suddenly say "stocks", and then hang up on them.
  • In "Agent Orchid's Almost Half-Hour Talent Show", Olympia suggests that Orchid make her talent show longer, giving 30 minutes as a duration. Orchid fires back by saying that no one likes shows longer than 20 minutes, which is a dig at PBS Kids and all of their shows, most of which are a half-hour in duration. Doubles as Biting-the-Hand Humor, since PBS Kids is the network where the show airs.
  • "The Ninja Situation" is one entire episode-long jab at the MacGuffin trope and its use in various works.
  • The show has taken two potshots at Segways and their poor popularity — first in "Oscar of All Trades", where Oscar tells Olive that he simply drove a Segway around Headquarters as a job, and "Nature of the Sandbeast" where Omar refers to the machine as a "strange two-wheeled scooter".
  • The stoic sound operator that helps Oppola out in "Welcome to Odd Squad" mentions how cynical he is and how he has lost all hope for the world, which is a Take That at people who feel the same way due to the COVID pandemic.
  • One scene in "Monumental Oddness" slams tourists by painting them as people who refuse to be smart and run away from danger because they dismiss it as not important and want to see the sights instead.
• On the House: In "Take Me to Your Leader", Arnold rudely calls Dr. Stanley "Malcolm Muggeridge on wheels".
• The Orville has a very clever moment in this trope during its second episode, "Command Performance". The episode focuses on a zoo which houses sentient beings. Captain Mercer and Commander Grayson are held captive there until the Orville bargains for their release. Alara Kitan trades an archive of Earth's 21st Century Reality Television in exchange for Mercer and Grayson. We see a huge gathering outside the cell as it plays an episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey to a vast number of aliens. The owners of the zoo describe it as their best exhibit yet.

P

• In Parks and Recreation:
  Tom: Well, Entertainment 720 is dead. It's up in company heaven along with Pets.com, Blockbuster, and Ask Jeeves. My company is no better than a company where you ask a fake butler to Google things for you.
• Patriot: The episode "Fuck John Wayne" features a disabled cop talking about how John Wayne's real name is Marion Morrison and that he shirked fighting in World War 2 while later acting in films where he pretends to fight bravely. He goes on to argue that Wayne's phony bravado has convinced lots of men to be ashamed of their own suffering, so he wears a shirt reading "Fuck John Wayne" when exercising to remind himself not to try to hide his pain.
• Power Rangers had this happen at various points in the show's history.
  • The first season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had the episode "Mighty Morphin Mutants," a Take That! against rival show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They later made up when the Saban-produced Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation had a crossover early on in Power Rangers in Space.
  • Power Rangers: Dino Thunder had the trading card game Dragon War, which makes a mockery of Yu-Gi-Oh! and dragon-based monsters such as the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. The cards get turned into a monster which is promptly destroyed by the Power Rangers.
  • Power Rangers Jungle Fury was aired around the time Naruto was popular, and spent quite a lot of time mocking Naruto's concepts of Sharingan, Rasengan, and other types of powers.
  • They've even mocked themselves on occasion- Power Rangers Wild Force's Milestone Celebration "Forever Red" featured a Take That! at the infamous episode of Power Rangers Turbo where the Rangers got baked into a giant pizza.

R

• On a 1980 episode of Real People, one of NBC's few primetime hits in that era, one of the hosts, John Barbour, joked "If you base a TV show on another TV show, it's called a spinoff. Unless you work for ABC, in which case it's called a ripoff." "Oh, that's incredible!" responded Sarah Purcell, referring to that network's Dueling Show.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Beyond a Joke", Kryten drives a tank into a virtual reality adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. According to the accompanying article in the Radio Times, the sentiment was: "Can't the BBC do anything later than the eighteenth century?" Judging by how well that season was received... probably not.
  • An in universe example from the same episode. The fussy, obsessive nature of entire 4000 series of androids are a caricature of their creator's ex-fiancé, Kryten included.
  • The episode itself had Kryten compare something thoroughly unsurprising to Tales of the Unexpected.
  • The Last Day has Kryten speculate he might have just realised the value of friendship. Lister instructs him to can the Star Trek crap.
  • In "Back To Reality", when the crew are hallucinating that they've been playing Red Dwarf: The Total Immersion Video Game very badly, we see a brief snatch of the next players, who are supposedly doing "better". Lister is a stereotyped American action hero, Kryten is just a bald human in a mechanoid suit, and Cat and Rimmer simply don't appear very distinctive. Now look at Grant Naylor's criticisms of the failed US pilot...
• Near the end of Remington Steele, there was an episode with an elderly British spy who said "We in MI5 thought James Bond was a sissy." Pierce Brosnan was in the running to play James Bond when Roger Moore left the role, but had to back out due to commitments to Remington Steele. It all worked out in the end...
• Remote Control, the TV trivia game show that was MTV's first venture out of music videos, took a potshot at similar game show Couch Potatoes shortly after the latter debuted. One of the skits in between episodes of a "best of" marathon featured the new Remote Control hostess thinking she had walked onto the set of Couch Potatoes after host Ken Ober described the rules for her... at which point Ober openly accused Couch Potatoes of ripping them off.
• The second-to-last episode of Riptide had the team helping out an obvious-but-stupid version of Moonlighting (the show that beat it in the ratings).

S

• Saturday Night Live: During his time on SNL, David Spade had the recurring "Weekend Update" segment "Spade In America", where he'd make wisecracks about celebrities. His most infamous one was in 1995, when he mocked former SNL superstar Eddie Murphy, saying "Look, children, it's a falling star! Make a wish!". This really enraged Murphy, who then refused to have anything to do with SNL for nearly 20 years.
• In Scotch and Wry, Frankenstein's monster is rather unimpressed by his bride:
  "I see Avon didnae call... Did your mother come fae Ireland or were yer teeth ay that colour?"
• On the last episode of the game show Scrabble, Chuck Woolery addressed the show's cancellation and said, "I kept telling 'em, "Look, find somebody else to do it, it'll be a huge hit. Look what happened to Wheel of Fortune!" This is, of course, a reference to Chuck's having left Wheel of Fortune in 1981 over a salary dispute.
• Scream Queens (2015):
  • When Hester is trying to convince Chanel that Ouija boards work, she asks if she saw "the movie", to which Chanel responds, "Of course not, no one did."
  • After Pete outs himself as an accomplice of the Red Devil killers, he tries to justify it with a bit of He Who Fights Monsters. Grace isn't impressed.
    Grace: You're quoting Nietzsche? You're already a murderer, Pete. You don't have to be a douche as well!
• Scrubs has a pretty mean Take That! against Grey's Anatomy disguised as a compliment.
  J.D.: I love Grey's Anatomy. It's like they took our lives and put it on TV.
  • They did another one against House, when Keith mentions seeing a disease on House and Cox goes on a rampage.
    • But they also did the episode "My House", which definitely falls in the Affectionate Parody category.
  • In the episode "My Own Worst Enemy," J.D. wins a "Who-Cares-y" award from Doctor Cox, and thinks "Suck on that, Tony Shalhoub". Zach Braff has been nominated for a Best Actor Emmy twice, and lost to Shalhoub both times.
    • And in "My Jerks" JD delivers a very meta-textual speech at the end in which he says "now, I know we never do great come medical awards season - well, except for Dr. Shalhoub, he wins everything".
• When SCTV moved to CBC in Canada, they had two fewer minutes of commercial time than the U.S. syndicated airings, so the network requested that they pad this time out with two "extra" minutes with "distinctively Canadian content." The writers and performers mocked this idea: "What do you want us to do? Throw up a map of Canada and sit there wearing tuques and parkas?" They ended up doing exactly that to prove their point of how ridiculous the CBC mandate was... and ended up creating Bob and Doug McKenzie — the most popular characters in the show's history.
• Sesame Street:
  • More of a loving parody, but the feature "Monsterpiece Theater" parodied Beckett's much celebrated Waiting for Godot, calling it a "play so modern and so brilliant, that it makes absolutely no sense." Even the tree gets fed up with the play by the end of the sketch, and walks off the stage, muttering about how he wanted to be in Oklahoma instead.
  • They also parodied High School Musical with the sketch "Pre-School Musical". It has the Muppets hold notes for exceedingly long periods and naming an odd number of sequels.
  • One sketch serves as a parody of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, featuring Mr. Johnson as the sole attendee of the seventeenth opening night of Spider-Monster: The Musical, starring Grover. Grover attempts to "fly" by jumping off the stage and onto Mr. Johnson, and it just goes downhill from there.
• Demi Lovato claimed they were a victim of this after Disney made a joke about eating disorders on an episode of Shake it Up. This was only shortly after Demi left Disney, partially due to the actor's struggles with bulimia. Lovato took to Twitter to criticize the channel for its insensitive choice of humour. Whether it was actually a "take that" to Demi remains unclear as Disney refused to comment.
• Silicon Valley is about opinionated hacker geeks, so this trope is common.
  • "You know who else comes from Canada? Justin Bieber, the Hitler of music!"
  • Gavin Belson's use of unreliable holoconferencing technology is in reference to CNN's much-derided tendency to trot out such tech during US elections.
  • Richard states that no one could watch more than one minute of Cloud Atlas
  • Gilfoyle on Big Head: "He's as pointless as Mass Effect 3's multiple endings."
  • Erlich announces that all musicians are either a thieves or assholes, especially Radiohead. Richard is about to object, but Erlich insists, "No... they're assholes!
  • Whenever Russ Hanneman gets into a car, he's exclusively listening to Nu Metal bands such as Crazy Town and Limp Bizkit to further establish him as a douchebag with no taste.
• The short-lived sitcom Sledge Hammer! was filled to bursting with examples of Take That. Series creator and executive producer Alan Spencer had a deep-rooted contempt for other television sitcoms.
  • The show frequently digs at Mr. Belvedere. Ironically, both programs aired on the same network, ABC.
  • Another episode featured Sledge's reaction upon meeting a Max Headroom version of himself: "An hour with you would be hell!" (This was another ABC show.)
  • Sledge is once shown shooting a TV set in response to the announcement of a Miami Vice episode.
  • In "All Shook Up" (where Sledge goes undercover to find out who's murdering Elvis impersonators), Dori tells him he's going after an impersonator from Dallas and before one from Miami. "Between Dallas and Miami? What a terrible place to be," he comments (all three shows aired on Fridays at 9 pm that season).
  • "All Shook Up" contains another jab at Mr. Belvedere with an exchange between the Japanese janitor and Sledge: the janitor says he wants to get home to watch Mr. Belvedere, to which Sledge replies "I guess somebody has to." Just to ram the point home, the Mr. Belvedere fan turns out to be the murderer.
• In the second-season premiere of Smash, the characters read the review of the (disastrous) Boston preview of Bombshell. It says that the musical numbers are great but are sabotaged by Julia's writing. Julia is the character of former showrunner Theresa Rebeck, whose Control Freak tendencies, particularly in the writing department, were widely considered to have adversely affected the show's first season.
• This is pretty much the basic format of Joel McHale's hosting on The Soup, particularly that of his fellow shows on the Guilty Pleasures-saturated E! (especially ones featuring a certain gluteally-blessed Armenian-American socialite). The fact that he clearly has so much fun doing it as opposed to sounding bitter or jaded helps him avoid the usual traps.
• British TV show Spaced did this a few times to The Phantom Menace in series two. For example a parody of the end scene of Return of the Jedi, except instead of Anakin's body being burned, it was a set of boxes of Star Wars memorabilia. Ironically, George Lucas's company gave the series leave to use music cues, etc to do this with because of the homages and shoutouts in the first series.
• In Special Unit 2, one of the main characters explains to the newbie that every monster legend she has ever heard of is true — except vampires, they're complete fiction.
• When Heather Locklear debuted as Catlin on Spin City and declares that Mike isn't going to push her around, Mike replies "Let's not get overly dramatic - this is not some cheesy soap opera" - a clear Take That! at Locklear's previous show, Melrose Place.
• Stargate SG-1, possibly in retaliation to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich expressing their disdain with the series and stressing their uninvolvement with it at every opportunity, pulled a Take That! against their next movie Independence Day in the episode "Politics":
  Daniel: Senator, we have reason to believe that the Goa'uld are about to launch an attack, in force, in ships.
  Kinsey: Then I think they'll regret taking on the United States military!
  O'Neill: Oh, for God's sake...
  Daniel: Oh, you're right! We'll — we'll just upload a computer virus into the mothership!
  • In the episode "Family Ties", Jacek expresses his disappointment at the SGC facility to Samantha Carter. What follows sounds like meaningless banter, unless you know that the SG-1 series was in its last season, and had been replaced with the show Eureka by Syfy.
    Carter: The truth is the Stargate program just doesn't get the support it used to from the people in charge.
    Jacek: Why not?
    Dr. Bill Lee: (yells, from the background) Eureka!
    Dr. Bill Lee: (as they turn to look at him) One down, twelve to go!
    Jacek: That's too bad because after all your Stargate program has accomplished for this network of planets, I'd think that the decision makers would show it the respect it deserves.
  • In an episode where the cast of the Show Within a Show, Wormhole X-Treme!, are discussing a scene, an actress asks a logical question that also serves as a "Take That!" against the ''Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The Next Phase". Her question was, "If we're out of phase, why don't we fall through the floor?" The show creator and director were unable to answer the question. In the ST: TNG episode, out-of-phase characters run through walls and one is pushed through an exterior wall into outer space, yet none of them fell down to a lower deck.
  • Stargate Atlantis had a deleted scene (filmed, but not included) in "Miller's Crossing" where Sheppard and Ronon are watching TV in a motel when Battlestar Galactica (the version running concurrently with Atlantis in Real Life) comes on. Ronon watches it for a bit, and then tells Sheppard "We need to help those people." Sheppard tells him it is just a TV show and people write TV shows to make life more exciting, then jabs at them by saying their lives are more interesting than those of the Galactica characters.
• St. Elsewhere: In "Where There's Hope, There's Crosby", Phil Chandler mentions that Dr. O'Brien has gone to New York City. Jack Morrison replies, "She won't last thirteen weeks in New York." In the 1986-87 season, the medical drama Kay O'Brien, which took place in Manhattan General Hospital, aired on CBS. It was cancelled after only eight episodes.
• Most of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a Take That! directed to everyone who annoyed Aaron Sorkin, but Self-Deprecation drove the show as much as Take That!.
  • The entire concept of the pilot is a massive Take That! towards ABC (which cancelled Sports Night) and NBC (which ran The West Wing, from which Sorkin quit). Matt Albie, the Sorkin self-insert, is an incredibly talented writer. People can't get over how talented he is. He's so talented and classy that they've just got to repeat it over and over again. Sadly, his intelligence and outspokenness are far superior to that of the network, which fires him, after which point his show steadily declines until they are forced to come grovelling back to him. Later, Jordan fights to pick up a pilot for a show written about the UN with striking similarities to The West Wing, gushing over the excellent scripting.
    • It's also worth noting that pretty much the entire second half of season two of Sports Night is a series of Take Thats against ABC, culminating in the line "Anybody who can't make money off Sports Night should get out of the money-making business." Never mind the fact that ABC had actually stuck with Sports Night for two full seasons and spent a great deal of money advertising and promoting the show, despite the fact that its ratings were consistently poor.
  • Also at former West Wing writer Rick Cleveland, with whom Sorkin had a public feud over "In Excelsis Deo", an episode which the two co-wrote. Cleveland is written into Studio 60 as Ricky Tahoe. Ricky is time and again characterised as a hack, a nasty little man who publicly ostracised Matt over a controversial statement Matt had made. He ultimately leaves the show with a crappily written pilot script, petulantly taking the entire writing staff with him.
• Many people see the Supernatural episode "Malleus Maleficarum" as a Take That! against Charmed, since it includes The Book of Shadows and a group of witches who arguably looked and acted like the Charmed girls.
  • The episode "Hollywood Babylon", which is an Affectionate Parody of the show itself, contains some Take Thats aimed at different groups.
    • They do both Take Thats and Executive Meddling with the CW executives, when the horror movie's producers and director all die horribly. Eric Kripke claims that every request that the executive producer made was an actual request that the writing staff received from the CW execs, which included making the show Lighter and Softer, among other things. Gary Cole's character was the first to die—on the film's set in the middle of shooting, no less.
    • Jensen Ackles, who got his first break on Days of Our Lives, has his character Dean make a few jokes about how terrible daytime TV is.
  • There are a few examples in the episode "The Monster at the End of the Book."
    • The episode contained a thorough Take That! to Sam/Dean shippers. Sam and Dean find a series of books that document their lives exactly. Sam then mentions that there's fan fiction of the series. And we get the following exchange:
      Dean: What's a slash fan?
      Sam: As in... Sam-slash-Dean. Together.
      [Long pause as it slowly dawns on Dean what Sam means.]
      Dean: Like...together together?
      Sam: Yeah.
      Dean: They do know we're brothers, right?
      Sam: Doesn't seem to matter.
      Dean: Aw, come on. That... That's just SICK!
    • Sam and Dean want to know how Chuck knows enough about them to be writing these books. At one point Dean demands to know why Chuck wouldn't tell them that he is a Prophet.
      Chuck: It was too preposterous, not to mention arrogant. I mean, writing yourself into the story is one thing, but as a prophet? That's like, M Night level douchey-ness.
    • To show they're not immune to criticism themselves, the writers also took potshots at examples of their own bad writing.
  • There's the episodes "Ghost Facers" and "Criss Angel is a Douche Bag", the latter of which has a Criss Angel expy with his own reality show.
  • At the beginning of season five's "Free to Be You and Me", as Dean kills a vampire: "Eat it, Twilight!"
  • "Changing Channels", the episode where the Trickster throws Sam and Dean into different TV shows, contains Take Thats to CSI: Miami.

    Dean: Calm down? I'm wearing sunglasses at night. You know who does that? No talent douchebags.

    • The episode also contains a borderline Take That! and Affectionate Parody of Grey's Anatomy. (It's established that Dean is an unabashed fan of Dr. Sexy, MD, the Show Within a Show which resembles Grey's Anatomy.) A specific moment of Dr Sexy/Greys involved a plot point about a ghost who was only alive in the eyes of an obviously crazy Doctor. Sam mocked 'Dr Sexy' for being a medical drama with supernatural elements, while a fangirling Dean claimed it was still compelling. There's other instances of Affectionate Parody for the original Knight Rider, Japanese game shows, and old-school sitcoms.
  • In season 1, Dean asks Sam, "Who do you think is the hotter psychic: Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Love Hewitt, or you?" This is a Take That! towards the two other psychic shows running at the time (Medium and Ghost Whisperer respectively).
  • In season 5, Paris Hilton plays a God pretending to be herself. Dean tells her that he is not a fan of Paris Hilton and has never even seen House of Wax (2005), to which Sam gives him an odd look. (Jared Padalecki was actually in House of Wax with Paris Hilton.)
  • In the season 6 mind bender "The French Mistake", the angel Balthazar transports the characters Sam and Dean to a parallel world where they are mistaken for two actors named Jared and Jensen, who star in a TV series called Supernatural. So, the actors are playing characters who then assume the identities of the actors who are playing them. The big Take That! comes though when one of that season's bad guys, Virgil, travels to the parallel world and "kills" actors who are portraying Eric Kripke and Robert Singer, Supernatural's producers, along with Misha Collins, the actor who plays the angel Castiel on the show.
  • Crowley gets an epic one while chewing out one of his followers:
    Crowley: I only have one rule: make a deal, keep it. There's a reason we don't call our chits in early: consumer confidence. This isn't Wall Street, this is Hell! We have a little something called integrity!
  • The episode "Live Free or Twihard" is basically one giant Take That to Twilight.
• Swarm:
  • The very white-passing Hailey's fandom of Halsey might be one to Halsey in general, and the fact that she's also white-passing (it could also apply to Paris Jackson, who's also white-passing).
  • At an afterparty, Dre meets a light-skinned actor called Jesse from Grey's Anatomy who claims to have invented the term "black girl magic".

T

• Taken: In the final scene of "John", General Beers reports on the progress of the search for Allie to George W. Bush over the phone. After hanging up, Beers says, "We have enough to do in the field without having to cover Junior's ass."
• Teen Angel had an episode in which wayward magic made the cast think they were living in the 1970s. Marty, the angel, couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. His list of things that just "didn't feel right" included:
  Marty: ...I was watching Saturday Night Live and it was fresh and inventive!
• That Mitchell and Webb Look:
  • A sketch about a comedian making a cup of tea for everyone in Belgium as the result of a bet, and as a result writing a bestselling book about his exploits, was a dig at comedians who did similarly unlikely things supposedly as the result of bets, such as Tony Hawks (played the entire Moldovan football team at tennis, hitchhiked round Ireland with a fridge) David Gorman (flew around the world meeting people called Dave Gorman), and Danny Wallace (spent a year saying yes to everything).
  • They delightfully skewer James Bond in their "Friends of Moneypenny" sketch:
    Remember that drinks do I had just before Christmas, Moneypenny brings James along - Oh God, but Christmas spirit and all that. So I said, "hi James there's some mulled wine and I think there's some beer in the fridge." Cock asked for a martini...what does he think it is? 1973?
  • There's also a sketch about how The Apprentice was created. "So, it's coverage of idiots behaving idiotically for an audience of idiots?"
    • Not to mention the very concept of The Apprentice is skewered, with the Alan Sugar-stand in pointing out how impractical firing one-fifteenth of his staff every week would actually be.
      Businessman: This is a complete departure from normal. I wouldn't be a millionaire if I fired one-fifteenth of my staff every week. Just to help out, does anyone want to lie pointlessly or take credit for something they didn't do?
      (the contestants shake their heads)
      Businessman: Worth a try...
  • "Fishmonger out of Watermonger" mocks every aspect of Reality Shows like Faking It, with a fishmonger trying to produce a reality show in 2 days. "Tim has just five minutes to come up with his arbitrary deadline". His end result is also apparently good enough for Channel 5, but not good enough for Dave.
  • "My Shags as a Whore," a series by the incompetent screenwriting duo that refuse to do research or make any kind of an effort, is an adolescent male fantasy where being a prostitute is sexy, empowering, and consequence-free. It's also pretty clearly aimed at Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
  • "Coverage Of People Buying A House And Then Living In It" skewers Location, Location, Location and similar property programmes. Both the host and the prospective buyer clearly believe there is nothing exciting about watching complete strangers buying houses and then living in them, and make no effort whatever to appear interested in making a television programme about the process.
    So, to sum up, Geoff, who you don't know, has bought a house and is now living in it, having put up some shelves, and I think we can agree that that's basically a good thing.
  • The "Identity Killer" skit is a Take That! to overly dramatic police procedural shows which insist on making cases that would, in Real Life, be resolved in a few days to be dragged out as long as possible.
  • The "Sunday Chill-Out DVD" claims it has all the establishing scenes of ITV's Kingdom, but with "nothing as jolting as the plot".
  • Several sketches in series 3 and 4, "Late Night Dog Poker" especially, take shots at the channel Dave. The "Dog Poker" sketch has the line "Rejected by the BBC, chosen by Dave", spoofing the "Chosen by Dave" slogan it adopted when its lineup was mostly wall-to-wall BBC panel games and Top Gear.
  • The "every TV show has a behind-the-scenes garden, not just Blue Peter" sketches reveal that the only reason that Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps avoided cancellation was because it had a beautiful garden that the BBC didn't want to get rid of.
    David: I think if people knew how nice the Two Pints garden was, they wouldn't mind the show at all.
    Robert: They'd see it as a necessary evil.
  • A sketch where David Mitchell plays a historian who has to be restrained because he's waving his arms too much is a parody of James Burke on Connections, right down to using phrases similar to his most famous ones.
  • Two different sketches mock alternative medicine and quack nutritionists. In the latter, homeopathy specifically gets skewered, with the two doctors getting homeopathic beers (two drops in water) after explicitly discussing how one kills all but the most healthy patients. The nutritionists meanwhile are (unlike the alt med doctors) knowing con artists who string people along with expensive, impossible diets.
• The Thin Blue Line:
  • "There's a place for fatuous flippant would-be humorous inanities, and that place is on Noel's House Party."
  • "There is a place for smutty innuendo, Constable Kray, and that place is on Birds of a Feather."
• In response to being horrifically dicked around by NBC, Conan O'Brien responded by making the last episodes of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien almost nothing but Take Thats. Just check out the clips in this Gawker article.
• Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear cannot resist a Take That against Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth (about global warming causing the polar ice to thin) after he and co-presenter James May have successfully driven across the sea ice to the North Pole.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • The entirety of "Showdown with Rance McGrew" against the TV westerns of the time. It also serves as a deconstruction of sorts. Serling hated the Westerns of the time, deeming them too unrealistic and predictable, and later went on to make a Western series (The Loner) himself. Furthermore, Rance McGrew is a parody of arrogant, conceited and temperamental actors in general.
  • In "Printer's Devil", Mr. Smith, who is really the Devil, tells Douglas Winter that he is not the first editor that he has helped. The writer Charles Beaumont intended this as a reference to William Randolph Hearst.
  • The hour long episode "The Bard" features a hack writer who, while researching a book of black magic, inadvertently brings William Shakespeare back from the dead, and uses him as a literal ghost writer. Serling uses this setup to parody everything about television at the time including sponsors making inane changes, and the concept of taking a half hour show and making an hour show of it, such as CBS did to Zone that season, much to Serling's dismay.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • In "Ye Gods", the yuppie Todd Ettinger comes to realize that the life that he leads is hollow, empty and calculated as it is all about acquiring money and possessions and he doesn't have a meaningful relationship with a woman. Cupid also twice refers to him as a "yuckie."
  • In "Paladin of the Lost Hour", Gaspar tells Billy Kinetta that he does not want to see a film with Karen Black, Sandy Dennis or Meryl Streep as they are always crying and their noses are always red. However, he later says that he is willing to make an exception for Streep.
  • In "The Once and Future King", the Elvis Impersonator Gary Pitkin does not want to take his act to Las Vegas as he thinks that it killed Elvis Presley and it is nothing but "showgirls, sluts and sleaze." Gary then tells his manager Sandra that Vegas is good enough for Wayne Newton but not for him.
  • In "Joy Ride", Greg sarcastically asks Adrienne if she wants to vegetate like her mother and watch Dynasty (1981).
  • In "The Girl I Married", Valerie Richman becomes irritated with the hippie version of her husband Ira and says that he is beginning to sound like something out of a rerun of The Mod Squad.
• When Ronnie Barker of The Two Ronnies complained that Not the Nine O'Clock News was full of Filth, the NTNOCN team responded with a glorious sketch that showed what a typical Two Ronnies episode would be like if they actually said what they meant, rather than the constant Double Entendres. The best bit? It was written by a disgruntled Two Ronnies scriptwriter. Barker wasn't amused; Ronnie Corbett was.

U

• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has Jacqueline say, "If this is your idea of a joke, you belong in a Woody Allen movie, because I'm not laughing." Given Jacqueline's questionable taste, however, this is probably a bigger dig on her.
• The pilot of Under the Dome does a Take That! to the American Government.
  Joe McAllister: What if the Government built this thing (the Dome)?
  Dale "Barbie" Barbara: I doubt it.
  Joe McAllister: Why?
  Dale "Barbie" Barbara: Because it works.
• In contrast, it's not very hard to find Take Thats in favor of the Bush administration in The Unit:
  • First Responders: Muslim terrorists hijack a plane full of European businessmen that were looking for US investment in their countries.
  • Non-Permissive Environment: Spanish authorities ask the Unit to assassinate a terrorist, then call the assassination off because they want to negotiate with him instead, and then try to arrest the team members when they kill him anyway.
  • The Wall: The French Army is a bunch of asses that prefer to see a war criminal going away instead of cooperating with the Americans.
• Unnatural History took a shot at The Jonas Brothers in "Curse of the Rolling Stone". The only time they're mentioned, they're hiding from a group of mice, and one of them can clearly be heard yelling "Mommy!"
  • Made even more hilarious when you realize that the actor who plays Henry (Kevin Schmidt) is the older brother of Kendall Schmidt, who is one fourth of NICKELODEON'S premier boy band, and one of the stars on the show Big Time Rush—which is, of course, Nick's answer to JONAS.
• UnREAL (2015) is basically one big long Take That! to The Bachelor. Chris Harrison did not appreciate it.

V

• The vampire romance The Vampire Diaries made these against The Twilight Saga into an art form:
  • Evil vampire Damon read Twilight and makes several insults about its myths.
    Caroline: Why don't you sparkle?
    Damon: Because I live in the real world, where vampires burn in the sun.
  • He also has a very poor opinion of Twilight's male lead, Edward Cullen, as he stated earlier on that very same episode.
  • There is also a subtle one where Elena's vampire boyfriend Stefan hasn't called her for a few days.
    Elena: I'm not going to be one of those girls who just breaks down without a boy in her life.
  • Werewolves are mostly extinct except in "books and really bad movies." Another Twilight dig. Word of God has also said this is a reference to the Kevin Williamson movie Cursed.
  • Stefan realizes Elena is watching him sleep.
    Stefan: You're staring.
    Elena: I'm gazing.
    Stefan: It's creepy.
    Elena: It's romantic.
• Vengeance Unlimited did the episode "Critical", which, during the course of the episode, pretty much took as many lines from all the critics that bashed it and put them in the characters' mouths. Gina's rant at Chapel? Pretty much lifted straight from newspapers.
  • Similarly, when it was clear that the show wouldn't last the season, they named their final episode "Friends". Guess which show they were up against during their entire run.
• Veronica Mars was forced by studio execs, early in its run, to include Paris Hilton as a guest star. Later in the same season, they're cracking Paris Hilton jokes. A great Take That at both Hilton and the network.

W

• Though not cocky enough to actually name specific shows, the host of Weird Creatures openly admits that most other nature programs' animal-encounter footage is staged. He occasionally pokes fun at such contrived "lucky chance encounters", as when he introduces a small lizard in extreme close-up, then has the camera pull back to reveal that it's a captive animal kept at a nature reserve (because the wild ones had proven too elusive to film that day).
• The "lemonlyman.com" subplot in The West Wing episode "The U.S Poet Laureate" — in which White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman stumbles upon a web-forum dedicated to him and posts on it only to be widely mocked and told he doesn't know anything about politics — is considered something a of a Take That! to popular online community Television Without Pity, and is reportedly based on West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin's experiences when posting on it. The members of the community are described as "hysterical", and the forum administrator as dictatorial and petty.
  • The West Wing also pretty savagely attacked Dr. Laura Schlessinger, prominent critic of homosexuality, with their own "Dr. Laura" character in this clip.
  • Considering the subject matter and political bias of the writer, the West Wing had fewer Take Thats than you would expect. However, Bartlett's reelection opponent is an obvious expy of George W. Bush. However, in the end he's shown to be a gracious decent if dim-witted sort. Aaron Sorkin seems incapable of writing genuinely hostile or immoral antagonists unless they're an expy for someone who's wronged him personally.
  • While TWW usually avoided direct potshots at government institutions, "Ways and Means" gave CJ a truly hilarious one:
    C.J.: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy or is this not a job for the U.S. House of Representatives?
• Wheel of Fortune:
  • Host Pat Sajak is fond of Take Thats. Most of them are to the puzzle writers if they come up with something absurd like I LOVE MY PASSPORT PHOTO, or occasionally to the subject of the puzzle (for instance, saying after the puzzle I WANT MY MTV that MTV is a network that used to show music videos. He also hated the short-lived Megaword category, and was quick to let everyone know.
  • A particularly epic one came April 29, 2013: On an episode taped in New York City, Pat hauled out a giant soft drink cup and took a drink from it, to poke fun at New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's policies against soft drink sizes.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?: When you blend improv and network-to-network taunting, you get this: For the suggestion "trivial reasons to hold news conferences" in Scenes From A Hat, Wayne Brady said that he would announce UPN's Fall-season lineup.
  • As opposed to all the times they like flinging it at each other, or the host. Or at the director. A fabled YouTube item shows Wayne and Brad about to sing the theme tune for a sitcom. An audience member suggested 'Cosby and Hitler'. This was rejected. During the actually-used song, Ryan (as Cosby!) throws a Nazi salute and goosestep; Colin shakes his head no.
• On the Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein's Money, whenever a contestant phrased an answer in the form of a question, Ben would force that contestant to wear a Dunce Cap for the remainder of the show.
• Season four of The Wire features a despicable cop who completely guts the one unit in the department that's actually doing real work. His name is Marrimow, after an editor at the Baltimore Sun who producer David Simon grew to despise during his time there.
  • Simon then takes it one step further by introducing an unlikeable, two-faced newspaper editor in the fifth season based off of the real Marrimow:
    James Whiting: I don't want some amorphous series detailing society's ills.
  • The police, upon finding out that drug kingpin Stringer Bell is channeling much of the drug proceeds into buying real estate after it's been laundered and become untraceable: "Stringer Bell is something worse than a drug dealer. He's a real estate developer."
• Wizards of Waverly Place:
  • It has taken shots at Harry Potter ("great, now we're accessorizing with ugly") and Twilight.
  • In-Universe. Harper's puppet show to Alex.
• Executive Meddling led to an example during the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati. CBS wanted more broad, kid-friendly comedy in the show. Producer Hugh Wilson wrote "Fish Story" to give them what they wanted while showing how wrong they were - a broad farce with silly costumes (Herb in the WKRP "carp" costume fighting the WPIG pig), pratfalls, and contrived explanations. Wilson hated the episode and wrote it under a pseudonym as the last episode in CBS' initial 13-episode order. The Take That backfired, as the episode got great ratings, and has always been one of the fans' favorite episodes.
• An episode of Wonder Showzen had a character played by David Cross say, "Git-r-done" right before being executed. Two other episodes had the show make fun of redneck humor with David Cross' character dressing similar to his Real Life rival Larry the Cable Guy.
• From VH-1's World Series of Pop Culture:
  Contestant: I'll take "The Talented Baldwin Brothers".
  Host: All questions in this category are about Alec Baldwin.

X

• The X-Files:
  • In one episode, Mulder bought pirated Alien Autopsy footage. Scully believes that it looks hokier than the Fox autopsy. Turns out it's real.
  • Another had them take a shot at Forrest Gump, who at the time had just won the Oscar, when the Smoking Man twists the upbeat "Life is like a box of chocolates..." metaphor into a real downer.
    Smoking Man: Life is like a box of chocolates: a cheap, thoughtless perfunctory gift no one ever asked for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but they're gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth shattering nuts. And if you're desperate enough to eat those then all you've got left is an empty box, filled with useless brown paper wrappers.
  • An episode featuring serial killers behaving like vampires takes a shot at religious zealots, preachers, and just about everyone who commits horrible acts by misinterpreting The Bible (And by extension, other religious doctrines).
    Mulder: [reading a Bible passage written on the wall in blood] "He who eats of my flesh, and drinks of my blood, shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day." They have the same feeble literal grasp of The Bible as all those big-haired preachers do.
  • One episode features hidden messages on television, and Mulder comments on how television does not normally drive people to kill, "Not even Must See TV can do that to you," taking a shot at NBC.
  • The first episode of the series after the movie had a dim-witted skeptic recommend Men in Black.

Y

• The Young Ones aimed a number of Take Thats, notably at Terry and June (with Oh Crikey!) and at Channel 4. "Alternative lifestyle Neil? You're about as alternative as Channel 4."
  • Vyvyan also got in a blistering rant about The Good Life.
  NO, NO, NO, NO! WE ARE NOT WATCHING THE BLOODY GOOD LIFE! BLOODY, BLOODY, BLOODY! I HATE IT! IT'S SO BLOODY NICE! FELICITY "TREACLE" KENDAL, AND RICHARD "SUGAR FLAVOURED SNOT" BRIERS! WHAT DO THEY DO KNOW? CHOCOLATE BLOODY BUTTON ADS, THAT'S WHAT! THEY'RE NOTHING BUT A COUPLE OF REACTIONARY STEREOTYPES, CONFIRMING THE MYTH THAT EVERYONE IN BRITAIN IS A LOVABLE MIDDLE CLASS ECCENTRIC, AND I! HATE! THEM!

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