41 Insider Facts About Your Favorite TV Shows

Red vs. Blue is the second longest running web series of all time, behind only Homestar Runner.

2. The Seinfeld episode, "The Contest" where the four main characters see who can go the longest without masturbating, never once contained the word "masturbation" and won an Emmy for achievement in writing.

3. Chris Hansen, who was the host of “NBC’s Dateline: To Catch a Predator” (a show that featured him conducting a sting operation on online sex predators by catching them on hidden cameras), was fired from NBC after he was caught cheating on his wife by a hidden-camera sting operation.

4. The pilot episode of LOST was so expensive (approximately $14 million) that the network president was fired for green-lighting it.

5. Nearly 40% of the medical advice given on the Dr. Oz show has no scientific evidence backing it up.

Out of the 403 episodes of “The Joy of Painting” with Bob Ross, 91% of them contain at least one happy tree and 2% of them contain bridges.

7. In the World of Warcraft episode of South Park the Blizzard people made a private server for them to "film" on, and during the shoot, a random person came in and started trying to kill people, just like in the plot of the episode.

8. Over the course of 144 episodes, only one character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer died of natural causes. The following episode, which examines Buffy's mourning/reaction to the first death she couldn't have prevented, is consistently ranked as one of the best television episodes of all time.

9. The show 'Firefly' has been permanently added to the International Space Station as a form of entertainment for the station's crews.

10. The certificate behind Michael Scott in The Office is not a degree/diploma, but a certificate of authenticity for a counterfeit "Seyko" timepiece. 

There is an episode of The Cosby Show, where after consuming Cosby's "special barbecue sauce", women stop fighting, become passive, and become more affectionate towards their lovers.

12. 'My Love From Another Star' is a Korean TV show is about a 400-year-old Harvard-educated alien who falls in love with a human woman. The show is a huge hit in Korea and elsewhere; Chinese fans were hospitalized for binging on too much-fried chicken and beer (the woman character's favorite food).

13. Japan has a popular TV show called "My First Errand" where little kids are sent to do minor tasks for the family on their own while a camera crew secretly follows them.

14. The writers of Arrested Development intended to use a different actress for Ann Veal (George-Michael's girlfriend) in every episode in an effort to show just how forgettable and unnoticeable she was.

15. TV series Captain Planet was the first children's show to deal with HIV-AIDS. The episode involved a villain brainwashing a community, making them think HIV could pass on just by casual contact, making the entire town hate a young man infected by HIV, who was voiced by Neil Patrick Harris.

There is an episode (The French Mistake) of Supernatural in which the two main characters are sent to an alternate universe in which they play the actors that play their characters on Supernatural (themselves) who are in the middle of filming an episode of a TV show called Supernatural.

17. The season 6 Blu-ray of Dexter had an unskippable trailer that spoiled that season's finale.

18. The Dana Carvey Show, which aired just 7 episodes in 1996, had a writing team that included Louis C.K., Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Bob Odenkirk, Charlie Kaufman. Robert Smigel, Dino Stamatopoulous (Starburns from Community) and more.

19. On Johnny Carson's final show, Comedy Central went dark, leaving a video gone-fishing sign saying the people are out "watching Johnny Carson's last show and so should you."

20. The name for the show "Black Mirror" was created after the shows creator (Charlie Brooker) noticed how being able to see your own reflection in turned off technology (iPads, television, cell phones, etc) is essentially a "black mirror."

"House of Cards" is extremely popular in China, especially among Communist Party leaders, with one fan on social media writing about the show, “I’m just amazed that their propaganda ministry isn’t mad about this.”

22. When the creators of the TV show Sledge Hammer! learned it would be canceled, they had the main character fail to disarm a nuclear warhead, destroying San Francisco. The episode got such good ratings that ABC renewed it, so the second season had to be a prequel since the entire cast was dead.

23. The X-Files episode 'Home' which was about a murderous inbred family was loosely based on a story from Charlie Chaplin's autobiography where a family introduced him to their quadruple amputee son by pulling him out from under a bed after which he "flopp[ed] around" while they sang and danced.

24. "Ed, Edd, n Eddy" was the last major animated series ever made using traditional animation techniques; the first 4 seasons were made using cel animation, and everything else since has used at least some CGI.

25. In the 571 Episodes of Lassie, the only character that actually fell down a well was Lassie. Timmy never fell down a well.