When people talk about Seinfeld, Kramer's first name will never be mentioned, not even to state his full name. Even if the other three leads are mentioned by their full names, Kramer will always be called just Kramer. In fairness Kramer didn't have a first name for the first 5 seasons and it was a bit of a Running Gag. Newman is the only side character that is likely to warrant a mention.
The first show ever aired on television was I Love Lucy. This is consequently the only show of the very old ones that is still remembered. No one seems to remember Texaco Star Theater, the show that made Milton Berle a legend. Or Your Show of Shows, which did much the same for Sid Caesar and company. Or Life of Riley. Or The Goldbergs. Or, for that matter, Meet the Press — launching in 1947 and still going strong today, it's the longest-running TV show of any kind.
Not even Mary Kay and Johnny, the very first sitcom on U.S. television, which tackled pregnancy four years before I Love Lucy did and showed a couple sharing a double bed (averting Sleeping Single), is remembered today. To be fair, most of the show had been destroyed, which doesn't help.
If a Preschool Show is referenced, there are only a few choices:
Sesame Street. The only Sesame Street characters are Big Bird, Elmo, Bert & Ernie, Cookie Monster, The Count, Grover, and Oscar. And sometimes Zoe, Rosita, Baby Bear, Telly, Snuffy, and Prairie Dawn. There are no human (non-Muppet) characters, except maybe Gordon and Maria. Who the heck is Abby Cadabby?
Consequently the only puppet TV shows that exist are Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. In the UK Spitting Image, but only to those who were young in the 1980s and 1990s.
Science shows? Mythbusters. How It's Made might get mentioned just because so many episodes have been produced and reruns are a fixture of the Discovery networks as filler programming.
Naturally American television will be most recognized and famous across the globe. British TV is close second, followed by Japan (mostly Anime). Most TV shows from other countries that are broadcast elsewhere are children's shows.
Japanese TV? Mostly anime, Iron Chef, and sadistic game shows.
Swedish TV? Wallander and other brutal detective series.
Belgian TV? The Mole. De Ideale Wereld may also get a mention, but only from the most savvy internet users. The rest never really got exported anyhow.
In most parts of Western Europe outside of the UK the BBC is well known for its TV-documentaries. It is pretty much the only thing that airs on their channel.
Shows by network:
A&E's only claim to fame is for giving us Duck Dynasty.
Breaking Bad: All pop cultural references will be limited to Walt and Jesse. This has gotten much better in recent years, with Skylar, Hank, Marie, and Walt Jr. all becoming recognizable on their own, along with Saul/Jimmy, Mike, Gus, and the Salamanca family receiving more attention thanks to Better Call Saul, where Kim, Chuck, Howard, and Nacho have also all become iconic in their own right.
Generically: No matter how long a classic TV series ran, it always has the same theme music and the same opening titles.
Non-Japanese Toku shows can be easily written off as Power Rangers or worse Power Rangers rip-offs if acknowledged at all.
Angel flirts with this, albeit occasionally. Perhaps the best example is a quote from Wesley. (She, naturally, fails to get the reference at all.)
Wesley: You'd be locked up faster than Lady Hamilton's virtue! [looks at Cordelia] My apologies
In the 2014 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Ascension, the library of the titular Generation Ship naturally doesn't include any works created after 1963 (the year it was launched). And when Executive Officer Gault tries to check out a book on police procedures to help investigate a murder, his sister the librarian tells him they didn't think to bring one along. He ends up watching crime movies; the classic film M gives him an idea of how to follow one of the suspects.
Marcus Cole of Babylon 5 makes reference to Alexander Pushkin. Very common in Russia, common in Europe, special in America.
Possible example: The 1966 Batman episode "The Bookworm Turns (While Gotham City Burns)" features a villain called The Bookworm (Roddy McDowall), whose crimes are based on book plots. Most of the books referenced are fairly well-known, but at one point Bookworm, having threatened to "blow up" a valuable book, surprises Batman and Robin not by exploding it, but by making a much larger copy of it. This is obviously a pun on the "blowing up" of photographs, and just might be a hidden reference to the Julio Cortazar short story "Blow Up" (on which, yes, the Michelangelo Antonioni film about enlarging a photograph was based). On the other hand, since that story and the movie based on it were not yet widely known when the episode aired, this might be more of a coincidence than a Genius Bonus.
The very first Joker episode, "The Joker Is Wild", had the Joker disguising himself as Pagliaccio, the white-faced, sobbing clown of the Leoncavallo opera of the same name. Batman even lampshaded this fact, mentioning to Robin that most people would picture the typical circus archetype when they thought of clowns, and Joker was counting on Batman's knowledge of opera when he sent him a Pagliaccio doll as a clue.
Although Beakman's World would a lot of times reference the more famous Famous Dead Guys, quite a few were more obscure. For example, in their segment of the microscope, they skipped using Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (the Father of Microbiology) and went for the more obscure Zacharias Jansen, who though credited with creating the compound microscope is far less well-known than Leeuwenhoek (and the FDG Jansen makes sure the kids know it in no uncertain terms).
Averted in The Big Bang Theory. While the bigger names are more likely to come up (because they are bigger names), the cast of geeks will reference virtually anything big or small, from the last thirty years of geek culture. Played straight in-universe by Penny, who can only pay attention long enough to absorb the larger things.
"Stay back or I'll pull a William Burroughs on your leader here." — Buffy, in "New Moon Rising", threatening to kill the Initiative colonel by referring to the beat poet who shot and killed his lover in a drunken game of William Tell in 1951. In this example, the joke is that no one gets the reference and Buffy has to explain her threat.
"Scream 'Montresor' all you like, pet." — Spike to Buffy, referring to the Edgar Allen Poe story "The Cask of Amontillado".
And, finally, a historical reference that actually takes two episodes spaced three seasons apart to complete. Anya has a throwaway line in "Superstar" describing the vengeance wishes she'd enact on wronged women's ex-boyfriends: "I'd wish he was a dog or ugly or in love with President McKinley or something." Three years later, chastising Anya for going soft, Halfrek says: "You were the single-most hard-core vengeance demon on the roster, and everybody knew it. Do I have to mention Mrs. Czolgosz?" President William McKinley was assassinated by a man named Leon Czolgosz. Leon Czolgosz never married. Which is probably an even smaller reference pool.
Just before a big battle Buffy gives a rather lackluster pep talk followed by Spike claiming it was "not exactly the St Crispin's Day Speech" which was only understood by Giles, the only other British person there and the only one, except maybe Willow, likely to have read Henry V.
Giles: We few, we merry few. Spike: We band of buggered.
Lampshaded in one episode. Vamps are preying on college freshmen, killing them and stealing everything from their dorms. They have a running contest to see which artist has the most posters: Monet or Gustav Klimt. Monet is winning, if only because the only Klimt people have posters of is The Kiss.
Promos for an episode of Community made it seem like it was going to be a parody of the more popular Pulp Fiction when in reality it was an homage to a more obscure arthouse film, My Dinner with Andre.
Criminal Minds begins and ends most episodes with a quote, and there is a huge variety in the sources for these quotes. Plus, one episode had the team only able to solve a case because of knowledge of Geoffrey Chaucer's poem Parlement of Foules and the John Fowles novel The Collector. Then there's all the obscure knowledge Reid spouts on a regular basis... Also, the serial killers who are referenced as precedent are usually real-life examples, indicating that someone did their homework. Unfortunately played straight with the psychology they feature on the show, which is one massive example of at best only doing half the research.
Hari Seldon (of the Foundation series) was referenced in The Daily Show by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (2009-09-28). Given that Bueno de Mesquita is working to create something he doesn't call psychohistory, the only possible surprise is that he was on The Daily Show at all.
In Doctor Who, when they travel to the past, they only hit relatively big events, but a lot of the events are obscure enough that most people only vaguely remember hearing of them in school.
On Home Improvement, the well-traveled and learned Wilson constantly referenced the ideas of various philosophers and thinkers, both famous and obscure, and took interest in the odd traditions of obscure cultures. A lot of the humor was derived from Tim, who exemplified Men Are Uncultured, reacting to and being confused by Wilson's knowledge.
Ted is a big fan of Pablo Neruda. It would be Small Reference Pool in Latin America, but for the States, it's something special.
In-universe: When asked his favorite Bible verse at a very religious household, Ted says, "Whoa, I don't know, how you choose your favorite passage? It's the Bible, there's so many... great... ones in — that one from Pulp Fiction is pretty good..."
Robin makes a lot of references to Canadian history, media, etc. that nobody gets.
Not only is Inspector Morse more than knowledgeable of classical music and opera, so are the writers on the show, leading to the use of works far outside the limits of this trope in the mysteries, and obscure jokes that only viewers with an interest in music will ever get.
For a while in the 80's, the only poet TV characters had ever heard of was Byron. And the only poem he ever wrote was "She walks in beauty like the night..." Which apparently only consisted of that line. Then on an episode of Kate & Allie, a character quotes this line and wrongly attributes it to Keats. The best part? The character in question was a professor of literature.
Completely turned on its head by Lost. Numerous works, especially novels, are explicitly mentioned and many, many more are alluded to. Often being seen on the show increases interest in a particular book.
While Mystery Science Theater 3000 has plenty of the more common ones, they fit in plenty of less common references, often to the area that they live in.
As an extreme example, Mike and the bots pile on so many Chicagoland references in the final act of Beginning of the End that if you aren't familiar with the region you'll probably be bored to tears.
The Hamlet episode had lots of increasingly obscure Shakespeare references, including a few cracks about seating arrangements at the Globe theater.
Servo can't see a frog without making the (Ancient Greek!) frog noise from Aristophanes' The Frogs, and then there was the time (in The Deadly Bees) that Mike said, "This must be the 'bee-loud glade' that Yeats spoke of."
This trope is the point of the British Game ShowPointless. The show's researchers give 100 people a short length of time to name as many things in a certain group as they can (e.g. types of shark, John Grisham novels, Clint Eastwood films), and on the show itself, the contestants have to try to score as few points as possible by giving the answers they think none of the research group has said, with answers no one said landing you an ideal 0 points. Therefore, the larger the reference pools of the contestants, the better they'll do.
Psych is an exception to Small References Pools in general; some of the references will fly over the heads of people not born in the 80's or 90's, since Shawn and Gus are well-versed in more obscure media. Lampshading: In an episode, a character refers to Shawn as Iago, to which he responds, "What does the parrot from Aladdin have to do with this?"
Red Dwarf includes Rimmer talking about the cream of Earth's classical music: "Why don't you listen to something really classical, like Mozart, Mendelssohn or Motörhead."
The show in general is packed with references to all manner of pop culture, especially those significant to the gay male and drag communities. Where this becomes a problem is that the average contestant age is about 27, and a queen is considered "old" if she's over 34. This means Ru and the other permanent judges sometimes make references that go over the younger queens' heads. For instance, one time judge Carson Kressley said a queen's runway look reminded him of Wayland and Madame, only to be met with blank stares. Ru quickly explained that Wayland and Madame were a puppet act from the 70's and 80's.
This happened to RuPaul himself on Drag Race Down Under, where the queens frequently made references to Aussie and Kiwi culture that Ru and Michelle Visage knew nothing about.
Although She Spies tended to go after mostly pop culture, sometimes a slightly more high-brow reference would pop up. In this case, with a bit of Lampshade Hanging:
Cassie: It looks like something Kandinsky threw up on. What? Dennis Miller's gone, somebody's got to make pretentious semi-obscure references.
Stargate Atlantis takes place in the Pegasus galaxy. And yes, it actually exists. In fact there are two galaxies by that name, one 2.7 million light-years away, the other 3 Mly.
Star Trek is pretty bad for this, but will occasionally surprise. The conclusion of one Voyager episode prominently featured Dante's Vita Nuova.
It's not like many viewers know that much about Urban Legends anyway but Supernatural has devoted itself to doing every single Legend that it can cram in, no matter how known or unknown it is.
Reverend Jim from Taxi recites the entire first stanza of "She Walks in Beauty", but when asked who wrote it says that he doesn't know. Some punk spray-painted it on the side of his van.
Artemus Gordon read 'She Walks in Beauty' on The Wild Wild West (in the '60s.) The show featured a variety of literary allusions, though they are sometimes anachronistic, like when Dr. Loveless (in the early 1870s) quotes "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde, not written until about the turn of the century.
to help combat this issue.
