Maintaining quality across the twenty-plus episodes of a single season of a television sitcom is difficult enough; 30 Rock's dense writing, quick dialogue, and audiovisual complexity would have presented an even more complicated challenge. Figure 6.8 suggests that one strategy for coping with that difficulty might be an increasing reliance on intertextuality. Another possible answer is that the commercial opportunities of derivative media became more apparent as the show continued and the intertextual market deepened.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on serially and long-form television, where later seasons often escalate self-referentiality as a coping strategy for narrative fatigue. SEED: Potential angle: how derivative media/commercial spin-offs reshape the writing of long-running shows — a piece on the economics of intertextuality in modern TV.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 378