You imagined correctly.
The theme song to Reba (sung by Reba) is all about how her life is hard but she’s a survivor.
In the episode where she is rushed to the hospital with possibly a heart attack her SIL Van looks at his wife and says “She’ll be fine. She’s a survivor.”
It was only OK.
In one season, *Married with Children * introduced a new kid to the show, apparently in a desperate attempt to boost ratings. It didn’t work out, and the kid disappeared without any real explanation. The next season, Al (or was it Peg?) walks past the kitchen and does a double take when he sees the kid’s picture on a milk carton.
*The Monkees * broke the fourth wall all the time. In one episode, Mickey walks off the set in disgust, walks through a bunch of other studio sets where other shows are being shot (followed by the camera, of course), goes into an office, and tells the writers, “Look, guys, the story’s really dragging. Do you think you could come up with something else?” The writers start typing and produce a new script in seconds. Mickey takes the script, smiles and says “Thanks, guys!”, retraces his steps back to the Monkees set, then scatters the loose pages of the new script into the air and shouts, “How we overpay those writers!!!”
The third season of ReBoot was a leap forward from the first two, both in terms of animation and plot. The series was reworked for an older audience, and an involved story arc was created. The recap song was welcome.
As for self-referential, well, there was the stand-up comedian who told a joke in binary, and a little YTV-logo shaped sprite, and…too many to list. 
Raguleader, the show was Family Matters, and the character was Judy Winslow, played by Jaimee Foxworth
“All My Children” had a character named Bobby Martin who went up to the attic to polish his skis and was never seen again. Well, years later, there was a shot of the Martin attic that included a * skeleton*.
“I will not demand what I’m worth”
“I should not be 21 by now”
“I will not defame New Orleans” (after the Streetcar Named Desire episode)
“Nobody reads these any more”
“I am not a 30-year-old woman”
Ugly Betty does this somewhat obliquely.
From time to time, a character will be watching a telenovella. I take this as a nod to the fact that UB is a remake of Yo Soy Betty la Fea, itself a telenovella.
Hey, I remember that show!
Some of the telenovellas are great, there was one that was a romance version of Zorro, but with a female Zorro. It was called “Queen of Swords”, IIRC, and one of the things in the show was that the alter ego of this vigilante, a young aristocratic lady, was in a relationship with the main bad guy, whose plans she routinely foiled.
In The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle motion picture, while talking to Boris and Natasha over the video phone, Robert DeNiro, as Fearless Leader, references his monologue from Taxi Driver:
**
“Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? Then who else are you talking to? Are you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. So you must be talking to me. AND YOU ARE LYING!”**
The final season of Becker, starring Ted Danson, was greenlit for only 13 episodes, as I recall. In the final episode, John steps into his office and Margaret says, “Here, John. Here are Mr. Neilsen’s results.” Becker looks at the chart and says, “Hey, these numbers aren’t that bad,” an apparent reference to the show’s Neilsen ratings.
Not exactly self-referential, but 30 Rock - the Walk and Talk was a perfect parody of the other show about SNL and Aaron Sorkin’s trademark “walk and talks.”
30 Rock has been having fun all season, though especially in ads, about there being two SNL-derived shows on simultaneously this year.
The was an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air where Will Smith is planning to return to Philadelphia and confront a bully from his past. He mentions the bully by name, and when another character asks who the person is, Smith answers something along the lines of “You know, that dude that spins me over his head in the opening credits each week”.
Mork & Mindy once attended a signing of the new record called “Reality…What a Concept” by stand up comedian…Robin Williams. Hillarity ensues when people mistake Mork for Robin.
Kings play chess on fine grained sand. Keep the lyrics, I have plenty of my own! 
Hehehe, yup. I almost busted a gut at that one. I also remember when Little Nicky went from 6 months to 5 years old in between seasons. Jazz enters, sees him, and says, “Who’s that?” Will replies, “Dude, that’s Little Nicky” and gives the camera a look that says “C’mon, work with us here.”
The best one, though, is how they close that Philly arc. Will decides to stay in Philly, and that cliffhanger ends season 3. The opening of the next season finds him working in the sandwich place, when an NBC executive shows up, points out that the name of the show is “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, and throws Will into the back of a white van. Then the exec gets in and says to the driver, “Yo holmes, to Bel Air!”
Watching the entire series in about a month, I was surprised how often I heard some variation of that line. It was amusing the first time but quickly got less cute.
Several Looney Tunes shorts have this - some have silouettes of audience members (one even gets shot, IIRC, by Yosemity Sam), the fourth wall is broken on a regular basis, and then we have Duck Amuck, in which poor Daffy is tormented via cartoon logic – and the animator is Bugs Bunny.
Lots of cute little running gags can get ruined by watching a show in a marathon. When watching SDF Macross, I wanted to kill someone by the 20th time I heard “Zoom Zoom, Zoom Zoom! My boyfriend is a pilot!”
In an episode of Veronica Mars, Roni was asked if she knew a particular girl. She wistfully responded, “We used to be friends… a long time ago.”
It was great! I’m glad to know I’m not alone in my Reboot love.
At one point in a classic Dexter’s Laboratory he realizes that he is trapped in a continuum of cartoon buffoonery.