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Then there’s the subtle Farscape reference in the Stargate SG-1 episode “200”
Actually the entirety of 200 does a great job lampooning common sci-fi and action tropes…
Teal’c “I do not understand why everything in this script must invariably explode?”
Chalke went on to play Stella on HIMYM.
There was an episode of Andromeda where they were looking for some McGuffin on the ship, and Capt. Hunt(Kevin Sorbo) reaches into a cubbyhole and pulls out the sword he used on the show Hercules.
It’s fairly well-known that the large ring Gary Cole wore in his role as the obnoxious boss in *Office Space *was his character’s class ring from Crusade, which had left him kicked to the curb about the time he filmed this role.
There is also a scene in the pilot of “Andromeda” when the crew of the salvage ship first encounter Dylan Hunt and remark “he is built like a Greek god”.
Scarlett Pomers, who played Kyra on the sitcom Reba, took some time off from the show to seek treatment for an eating disorder. When she returned, there was an exchange that went something like this:
“Kyra, where have you been?”
“I went to get something to eat.”
I believe the studio audience cheered.
Ordinarily, I hate shout outs. They tend to break the fourth wall and interfere with my suspension of disbelief. I especially hate them when they are a call back to another, usually more popular work for the actor. Does no one else feel that way?
But there are certain things that should be acknowledged. If there is something obvious going on with the current show, I don’t mind them drawing attention to it and acknowledging that they know that we know what’s up. The *Roseanne * musical Becky chairs is one of them. Reba was another.
Soap operas used to acknowledge that a new actor was taking on a role by a voice over. As far as I know, Bewitched just dropped Dick Sargent into the role without so much as a wink and a nod. That doesn’t seem to have worked nearly so well as Roseanne preempting the jokes.
Isn’t there a “Columbo” episode where guest villain Patrick McGoohan uses some gestures from 'the Prisoner"…the two finger salute as he leaves saying “be seeing you”?
There is a “The Lucy Show” parody of “The Untouchables” (a Desilu show) that has Robert Stack as the government agent ("Do you know who you look like?), Bruce Gordon as the gangster, Steve London as Stack’s assistant and narration by Walter Winchell. It’s also the only show Lucille Ball ever did where she and her guest stars bow and acknowledge the audience.
I’ve got another Firefly allusion.
On the show Chuck, regular Adam Baldwin tells guest star Summer Glau he “doesn’t care what crew you served on before you came here.”
Chuck was full of stuff like this. For example, Chuck Creater Josh Schwartz also created the O.C. Now compare these two scenes:
The only difference is that instead of getting to a New Year’s Eve party to kiss his girlfriend, Chuck was trying to get to a Halloween party to play part of a two person sandworm from Dune costume.
^Yeah, Chuck had a lot of guest stars and would often include some wink to their famous roles.
Linda Hamilton played Chuck’s mom and uttered the line “Come with me if you want to live,” a recurring line from the *Terminator *movies.
Scott Bakula played Chuck’s dad and at one point says “Oh boy” in a nod to his Quantum Leap catchphrase.
I’m trying to think of any nods to Bruce Boxleitner’s other work. He played Devon’s dad on a couple of episodes of Chuck, and Chuck had a *Tron *poster displayed prominently in his bedroom, but I can’t remember if there were any *Tron *or *B5 *references made.
There were a couple of jokes on “All my Children” concerning Bobby Martin, a son of Dr. Joe Martin who went to the attic to wax his skis and never returned. The creators decided the family was too large and eliminated his character with no explanation. Years later Opal (birth mother of Joe’s adopted son Tad) was trapped in the Martin’s attic and came across as skeleton with a ski cap that was labelled “Bobby”. Also Jake, also a doctor, once referred to a skeleton as one of his older brothers.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tv/soaps/all-my-c/characters/#b
In an episode of “The Wild, Wild West,” the guest star is Skipper Alan Hale Jr. At the end of the ep, he mentions something about taking a vacation, then strolls offscreen whistling the theme from “Gilligan’s Island.”
There was a scene in Stargat SG-1 in which they ripped apart the network for not supporting them. A not so subtle reference to the money they were putting towards Eureka. Of course the network later abandoned Eureka in order to put on more cheap ghost shows. Anyway here is theclip. I don’t think I’ve seen another show blast their network like that on air.
One episode of the Bob Newhart/Judd Hirsh show George and Leo was entitled “The Cameo Show”, and was filled with 19 (!) cameos by former co-stars of Newhart and Hirsh from The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, Taxi, and Dear John
The clip:
From 1968 to 1970, CBS had Bob Denver starring with Herb Edelman in a series called The Good Guys, in which Edelman’s character owned a diner. Alan Hale guest starred on that show a couple of times too; in at least one episode, a drunk staggering out of the diner looked at Bob and Alan and said “Hey! Didn’t I see you two guys once on an island?”
A movie example: Near the end of Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats,” Ethen Suplee’s character is trying to see the image in one of those Magic Eye posters when Shannen Doherty’s character walks up and sees it right away. He turns to her and says “Brenda?”. Brenda was Doherty’s famous role on 90210.
Not sure it really fits in with these examples, but I’ve long thought that one of the cleverest ways to shoehorn in a highly visible actor as a guest star in a TV show has to go to The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Typically, if a Big-Name Guest Star shows up, you have two choices – the Big Name Guest Star can play some random, non-celebrity character, although everyone can’t help thinking “It’s Julie Andrews!” (or whoever). Or else you have to have some plausible reason for the Big Name to be meeting your regular Joe Scmoe character. Lucille Ball did this a lot on her shows (in i Love Lucy it was marginably plausible, since Ricky was a band leader, ijn the entertainment biz, but she met way too many stars, well above Ricky’s supposed level), but a good examnple would be the time Carroll O’Connor’s archie Bunker picked up Sammy Davis, Jr. in his part-time cab gig.
For the Dick Van Dyke Show episode It May Look Like a Walnut, the one in which Rob dreams that the Earth is invaded by the plart Twilo, and the leader of the Twilo-ites “Looks like Danny Thomas, butr with a British Accent”. An excellent episode for lots of reasons (one of them being a closet-ful of walnuts), but the inside gad is that The Dick Van Dyke Show was a Danny Thomas production, and this was an interesting way to have Thomas himself guest-star without using either of the usual Big Name Guest Star tropes.
“I have twenty-twenty-twenty-twenty vision.”
Another Danny Thomas related in-joke. On the Marlo Thomas (Danny’s daughter) series “That Girl!”, one episode has Marlo’s character Ann Marie visiting a Catholic rectory. At the end of the episode, Ann is leaving and stops to get a drink at a water fountain. As she is walking away from it, she accidentally bumps into another priest and they exchange this dialogue:
Ann Marie: Oh, I’m sorry, Father.
Priest: That’s quite all right, my child.
The priest was played by Marlo Thomas’s RL father Danny.
I think her RL sister was also in that episode, playing a nun. Am I right? 
And her RL brother, also playing a priest. Or have I totally gone off the rails?