I’ve got one from Parks and Rec. This one get pretty obscure.
The lawyer, Trevor Nelson, who is played by the awesome Mark Evan Jackson.
He’s a member of the firm Fwar, Dips, Winshares, Gritt, Babip, Pecota, Vorp and Eckstein.
These are all obscure baseball stats developed by the Sabermetric community to better try and establish a players true value toward winning baseball games. But man, that’s really a one-in-ten-million get the reference event.
I actually caught the birth part in the background but didn’t realize it was him until it was brought up when Shirley gave birth in the classroom. I mentioned it here and someone pointed out that there was an entire storyline in the background with Abed. In fact, if you didn’t see that playing out, you might not even realize Abed was in that episode.
I always wonder how often that do that given that given that in an entirely different episode, where Abed is ‘dating’ the secret service woman Troy asks if he constantly has his own side adventures.
I’m on my third (kinda, I’m skipping around a bit) run through it and still noticing random things.
I’m fairly certain I caught a reference on the HBO Watchmen series. In one episode, someone presses a button on a remote, causing a trapdoor to open, and the person sitting in the chair on top of it to be dropped into an underground lair. The remote had a brand name on it: Wilson. I can’t prove it was a deliberate callback, but they didn’t have to put a brand name on the remote at all. 
Ringo: “Who’s the old man?”
John: “He’s Paul’s grandfather.”
Ringo: “He’s very clean.”
I always loved that for the absurdity. Now that you’ve explained it, I love it even more.
In the movie Bohemian Rhapsody the main actor plays a character that wears a mustache. This is supposedly a subtle nod to a singer called “Freddie Mercury”, who also had a mustache.
Picture for reference.
BoJack Horseman is full of animal jokes. Some are obvious, while others only someone who knows about the animal’s natural history will get. And they are usually accurate. For example, when Diane went to Vietnam, many of the animal characters were birds and other animals found in the region that only a serious birdwatcher or wildlife enthusiast would get.
Sometimes I’ll catch something out of the corner of my eye in the background and when I rewind I burst out laughing when I see what it is.
Once Homer Simpson was falling through endless caverns beneath the Earth, passing several humanoid monsters as he did, and said appreciatively (in a tip of the hat to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine), “Ooo, Morlocks!”
I have recently been re-watching Psych and the two main characters make tons of movie and tv references when they talk to each other as well a when interacting with other people. Often the episode title is a reference, and there can be throw away lines that refer to work that actor has done outside of Psych. Sometimes I get the reference, sometimes I don’t as they vary in obscurity, but it is a definite feature of the show, not something hidden in the background (though of course there are such things in there as well).
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I don’t know if this is a deliberate reference, but back in the 1990s “L. A. Law” had a running plotline abut freeing a falsely convicted man named “Earl Williams.” “Earl Williams” is the name of the deathrow inmate the main characters are trying to save in “His Girl Friday.”
Ha! I know an Earl Williams.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t know if it’s deliberate - Earl Williams is not an uncommon name.
There’s stuff like that in Bojack Horseman, too. The Margo Martindale ones are probably obvious. But there was also a throwaway line where Todd randomly mentions that he once narrated a Mazda ad (something Aaron Paul did in real life). I’m sure there are others that I missed or forgot about.
Oh, and Princess Carolyn was from North Carolina, where Amy Sedaris is from in real life.
The law firm name actually goes through several iterations throughout the show. It started out as “Babip, Pecota, Vorp and Eckstein”. Then they clearly had a merger, and became “Fwar, Dips, Winshares, Gritt, Babip, Pecota, Vorp & Eckstein” and finally “Fwar, Dips, Winshares, Gritt, Nelsson, Woba, Eraplus, Zswing, Range-Factor, Heart, Babip, Pecota, Vorp & Eckstein, LLC”.
The creator of the show is Michael Schur, who used to write for a small baseball blog called “Fire Joe Morgan”, where they would routinely make fun of announcers who overvalued things like grit and hustle, especially as embodied by David Eckstein.
I only watched a season or so of Bojack, but Psych is almost based on 90’s pop culture references. I’d bet each episode has at least a dozen of them.
In the early episode of Batman where Alfred is kidnapped and brainwashed by the Penguin, he’s shown photos of known criminals in the Batcave to jog his memory. The first two people in the rogues’ gallery are producer Howie Horwitz and executive producer William Dozier.
In Frasier, obscure references in the dialogue were usually explained by the intertitle cards. F’rinstance, it was once mentioned that someone (Maris, I think) had a pet stoat. The previous intertitle card said (IIRC) “It’s an animal like a weasel,” thereby setting up the joke.
In that movie Cary Grant’s character says “Listen the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat.” Archibald Leach was Cary Grant’s given name. It’s also used for John Cleese’s character’s name in A Fish Called Wanda.
I remember an episode in the first season of “Lost” during a Charlie flashback where he was in a young woman’s home and asked where her father was. She replied that Daddy was away purchasing a paper company in Slough. It could be implied that she was referring to Wernham Hogg, which was the paper company located in Slough in the British version of “The Office”. At the time, the show was pretty obscure to American audiences.
In Some Like It Hot (1959), Tony Curtis imitates Cary Grant’s voice when he’s masquerading as a millionaire. When his buddy Jack Lemmon finds out what he’s doing, he says something like “Where did you come up with that accent? Nobody talks like that!”
SLIH is set in 1929, and Cary Grant’s first movie (This Is the Night) came out in 1932, so of course Joe and Jerry (and Sugar) wouldn’t have known about him.
My favorite CG quote is:
INTERVIEWER: Everybody would like to be Cary Grant.
ARCHIE/CARY: So would I.
In “Trading Places” a woman tells the same “stepped on a pingpong ball” story we hear in “Mame” from a different point of view
That is the episode the caused me to fall in love with the show. When I first started watching I had no idea what to make of the concept or the characters. But when Abed said that he had been featured too much and he was going to play the background in that episode, then he literally had a most excellent adventure in the background I just couldn’t stop laughing.
Been a fan ever since.
