It's only a matter of time before a long-running show gives an explicit nod to its fans' more vocal concerns. Especially in the age of social media and all our whining.
Writers just can't help but put a mini fourth-wall-breaking moment in, as if to say: "it's alright, we get your point".
Here are some of the funniest times where TV shows lovingly trolled their fans:
1. Davos mentions the rowing Gendry meme in Game of Thrones
Oh, how we loved to mock the fact that we hadn't seen Joe Dempsie's beautiful bastard Gendry since Davos sent him off in a boat several years ago.
Then, suddenly, he turned up in season 7. The writers had clearly loved all the memes and jokes about Gendry's current whereabouts, and brought the subject up instantly.
"Thought you might still be rowing," says Davos. Which doesn't make much sense in the context of the show when you think about it. Why would he have a fear that Gendry would still be out at sea? But it made us giggle.
2. Legends of Tomorrow mocks a rubbish character
Remember the first season villain Vandal Savage? Yeah, he wasn't very good. And fans made that point clear.
Fast forward to season two and Arthur Darvill's Rip Hunter loses his memory, ending up working as a film director in '60s Hollywood, as you do. His subconscious leads him to make a film about 'Rip Hunter' and his adventures from the first season.
However, he's frustrated by the performance of his movie's villain (who's a version of Vandal Savage). "A film is only as good as its villain and I have an antagonist who's as threatening as a wiener dog," he says.
Call us paranoid, but we reckon that was definitely a dig – an admission that the actual Vandal Savage was pretty lame.
3. Sherlock trolls fans over the death-leap theories
After the season two episode finale 'The Reichenbach Fall' aired, every single Sherlock fan came up with a theory as to how the hell Sherlock was able to survive such an obviously deadly fall, especially after John actually saw his dead body.
Forums and social media were awash with theories involving a mask, a lorry, a dummy, drugs and all sorts.
When the series three opener aired, the long, long wait for answers was somewhat spoofed in the show itself, with antagonistic cop Anderson standing in for every frustrated fan out there, as he went nuts trying to work out how Sherlock did it. Sherlock himself presents various explanations, some of which include real-life fan theories, with one even featuring illusionist Derren Brown.
In the end, Sherlock gives Anderson his "real" explanation, but even then we're not entirely sure if he's telling Anderson, or us, the truth.
4. Two and a Half Men knew all too well how crap it had become
This sitcom had been limping along for many years, especially after the departure of Charlie Sheen. By the end, it was a shell of a show that should have been put out of its misery ages ago.
When it did finally end, creator Chuck Lorre (the man behind The Big Bang Theory) decided to just say "F**k it" and went all meta, like that's totally fine.
To save you from having to watch it, the final scene saw 'Charlie' (obviously not really him) return to the house, only for him to be killed by a piano falling from the sky. And then the camera pans out to Lorre in a director's chair saying Sheen's real-world catchphrase "winning", before a piano drops on him too.
It's like he knew just how bad the show had become and didn't care about any kind of fan service, instead just choosing to reference his real-life beef with Sheen, like that was the most important thing to fans.
Two fingers proudly held aloft towards all the idiots who bothered watching in the first place.
5. Kiefer Sutherland makes 24 fans get drunk
We all know that Kiefer enjoys the odd beverage or three, and he found it hilarious when he discovered a 24 drinking game, in which fans would have a drink every time his character Jack Bauer said "Dammit!" in 24.
If students weren't already sozzled from a normal episode, Kiefer made sure they were well and truly gazeboed when he deliberately inserted several more dammits into several scenes in one episode.
"Boom, boom, boom, and that was just one scene. By the end there had to be 14 'dammits'," he joked. "I could just see all these college kids going, 'Oh, f**k!'"
6. Lost kills off two characters after everyone hates on them
Lost showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse made a bold step by introducing brand new plane-crash survivors in season three, while making out like they had been there from the start. To be fair to them, this was itself a response to fans who had been asking for backstory on all the extras.
However, fan reaction to Nikki and Paolo was so bad that they had to act fast and kill them off almost instantly.
In came the episode 'Exposé', which was actually one of the show's most fun episodes, but one that was purely made so that they could correct their horrible error and apologise to the fans.
Lindelof admitted that the couple were "universally despised" by fans, and that "back when we had more good faith with the audience, we could have gotten away with these shenanigans. Given the backlash against them, we had to clean up the mess."
Not only that but their deaths were pretty horrific, even for Lost. They were buried alive by their fellow survivors, thinking they were dead. However, they had actually been bitten by a spider, paralysing them for a certain number of hours. If they had waited a few more moments, they would have been fine. Yeesh.
7. Rachel mentions her haircut phenomenon in Friends
So many women decided to copy Jennifer Aniston's haircut in the mid-1990s, and it soon became known as 'The Rachel'.
Despite Aniston herself hating the haircut, Rachel kept it for longer than she would have liked, and it became a gag in the show itself.
In the season two episode where Rachel learns that her mother is divorcing her father after becoming inspired by Rachel's independent lifestyle, Rachel freaks out and says to her pals: "couldn't she just copy my haircut?"
"When I first met Chris McMillan, my hairstylist, at his salon in LA, he sat me down and gave me a fantastic haircut. About a month later he gave me what became known through Friends as 'The Rachel'," Aniston later told The Telegraph.
"I had to see him every six weeks to keep this darn thing up, though, because it was a 'hairdo'. It was a pain in the butt, to be honest, one of the hardest hairstyles to maintain, unless Chris did it."
8. South Park creates a character to mock its growing commercialism
After a few seasons of South Park, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were aware of how heavily merchandised and exploited their show was becoming, and so they purposely created the worst character ever: Towelie.
They designed Towelie to be a shallow, two-dimensional stoner who had no real purpose except to "spout catch phrases and merchandise the hell out of". Even Cartman called him the "worst character ever" at the end of the episode.
Ironically, shortly after 'Towelie' was broadcast, the official South Park website started selling Towelie-branded T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts.
