I’ve been watching old Maverick episodes on Netflix. The episode, “Gun-shy”, does a very good job of spoofing Gunsmoke. U.S. Marshall Mort Dooley repeatedly runs Maverick out of town & even faces off against him in a gunfight that looks like the classic Gunsmoke opening. There are even counterparts for Kitty, Chester, & Doc.
Another episode called “Three Queens Full” does a similar (though somewhat less humorous) job on the cast of Bonanza. It’s worth watching just to see “Moose” Wheelwright though.
What makes it interesting to me is that Maverick, Gunsmoke, & Bonanza were all in production at the time on different networks.
In its fourth season, “The OC” took several pokes at Grey’s Anatomy by having a supporting character, Doctor Roberts, take a job at Seattle Grace. They referred to well-known Grey’s characters, (like ‘The Nazi’ Bailey,) and even had an episode with Seth going to Seattle to visit Roberts (and pretend to ask permission to marry his daughter,) and Roberts was in the middle of an exaggerated Greys-like plot with a child being impaled by the fake horn of a birthday party unicorn.
This was after the show was moved to the Thursday 9pm slot, where Grey’s was more established with better ratings than the OC, if I recall.
It doesn’t happen in every episode, for sure, but House takes shots at other Fox series and shows as well as other medical shows (comedy and drama).
One that I recall well enough to describe is where House screams at one of his patients (maybe one of his team) and then explains that that approach works for Jack Bauer.
A Comedy Central show I’ve been following, Tosh.0 takes digs at other CC shows and hot comics, along with everything else in the Known Universe.
And I loved the way Boston Legal was self-referencing in most episodes.
Not really spoofing, but Married w/ Children used to make fun of its network Fox all the time. The family would have to get in the “Fox Viewing Positions” to watch a Fox program. Alluding to the fact that Fox was on UHF and UHF channels were sometimes hard to tune in with antenna.
They even spoofed their own show when Kelly was trying out to be an actress on a TV show.
Whose Line is it Anyways spoofed many different shows as does SNL.
Burn Notice (set in Miami) recently made fun of CSI: Miami. Sam disguised himself as a forensic investigator and punctuated dramatic lines by putting on a pair of sunglasses.
When The Simpsons ran opposite The Cosby Show, one of the Cosby kids wore a Bart Simpson mask on the show. And the character of Dr. Julius Hibbert on The Simpsons is a parody of Cosby’s Dr Cliff Huxtable.
Going back to the sixties, The Avengers did a loving, all-out tribute to Batman in the episode The Winged Avenger. There was even a fight scene interspersed with words representing sound effects, like “WHAM” and “BLAMMO”.
Chicago Hope had one episode where they were hiring a PR firm to make an ad. The advertisement was a parody of the opening credits for E.R.. This was especially funny since both shows premiered the same season, both showing Chicago hospitals, and both originally in the same time slot. I think a character in Chicago Hope had Hector Elizondo say something like, “We don’t like to talk about that other Chicago Hospital.” (E.R. was dominating them in the ratings.)
On Law & Order, Lennie Briscoe got in a cheap shot at the competition replying to a mouthy Crime Scene tech: “Around here, the detectives make the arrests, not the CSU guys!”
On a episode of The Venture Bros. titled “Action Jonny”, they did a funny riff on Jonny Quest, and I believe that in another episode they killed off Race Bannon.
Another recent one: on an episode of White Collar, FBI Agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) compared the criminal-of-the-week to regular character Neal Caffrey by calling him “the Bizarro Neal.” DeKay himself played “Bizarro Jerry” on Seinfeld.
Satirical shows like Simpsons and Family Guy do it all the time.
I can recall an episode of Family Guy where Lois goes to work for Fox News, with Brian decrying Fox News as basically evil incarnate (and he turns out to be not far from the mark because of the actions of the fictitious executives in the story). For a show airing on Fox, I thought that took a lot of chutzpa.
ETA: OK, so that’s the same network (misread the OP) but IMHO that should be more rare (who wants to bite the hand that feeds them?)
As I recall, this was actually during a Picket Fences crossover episode. Jill Brock visited the Chicago Hope hospital and was displeased for some reason. She said that she should have gone instead to that other Chicago hospital.
More likely Moonlighting, than Cosby. Different nights.
The final scene of Max Headroom referenced both Miami Vice and Dallas, its ratings competitors (or should have been; I think Max had changed its timeslot by the time the episode aired).