Television shows escalate their intertextual referencing as seasons and episodes progress.

Evidence

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. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 378

Categorization

• QUESTION: The author offers two rival explanations (writer fatigue vs commercial opportunity) and the passage doesn’t adjudicate; worth chasing whether either has been tested empirically against the other.