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I've not seen much of the sitcoms that inspire the setting -- certainly not the earlier ones, although I've heard of a few of them. I suppose especially early TV is very much a case where "before my time" is a decent excuse, given how hard it can be sometimes to come across old recordings.
Still, I loved even the first episodes, because of how weird the premise was if nothing else, and because the whole show feels like a perfectly-crafted mystery box where the clues are (mostly) there waiting to be solved. Just how a mystery box should be, in other words, rather than what happened in Lost or, more recently, with the Star Wars sequel movies that were so obviously improvised afresh each movie.
It's also delightful how self-aware the show has been, especially through the character of Darcy, and of course with today's ending sequence!
The only annoying thing is having to wait another week for the next layer, and then several months more for the films that this is going to tie into. How did people cope when this was the norm?!