characters on TV don't tend to watch TV

Very true, in the main. I cannot recommend too highly (AD's ex girlfriend) Caroline Aherne's show The Royle Family, which is about a slobby working class Northern family who spend every episode sitting in front of the telly smoking and drinking tea. It's entirely possible, of course, that it's too culturally specific in terms of both humour and pathos, but I swear I've not seen anything better on stage or screen, imho. She's a f*cking genius. It's poised perfectly between comedy and drama, totally accessible (to a UK audience, at least) but still very subtle and true and cringe-inducing. And moving. Bathetic and pathetic both, in the best sense of the word.

t / gushiness.

Caroline Aherne is AD's ex-girlfriend? No way! I didn't know that. (I love The Royle Family too.)

Well, they don't spend a lot of time showing them watching TV, though they often make references to it, and will often show a few minutes of it. "Friends" has shown characters watching soap operas, Baywatch, videos - though typically it's just for less than a minute at a time. "Roseanne" often showed the characters spending a lot of time in front of the TV - though it probably was supposed to be a statement on working class lifestyles.

Hec, absolutely. That was believable, organic, and in character. My bitch is only about fanfic in fanfic.

I'm sure a good writer could pull it off, though.

I've seen it. Livia Balaban has two XF stories set during seasons 8 and 9 which posit Mulder as a writer of "SETI Troopers" (basically Enterprise) fanfic. The first one is structured as snippets from the weekly "Feedback Day" on a big fic list. The second one is structured as a series of LJ posts. Livia's a designer, so half the story is in the format. I thought they were pretty fun, and a great spoof of the mailing list and blogging communities.

My concern about the Doogie Howser thing is that Willow's way too young for that. The show went off the air before she was in her teens. If we assume real-time, Willow was far more likely to be writing XF fic than Doogie Howser.... *grin*

I'd peg Willow for either "Young Indy" or maybe some DS9 - definitely some Bashir/Garak or Kira/Dax.

As noted by Ple, Doogie Howser was in syndication for a while.

As with the "Dorothy Hamill hair" Buffy had, many of the pop-culture references on Buffy are cued to the writers' age, not the characters'.

"many of the pop-culture references on Buffy are cued to the writers' age, not the characters'."

Wrodily. Though some stuff, I mean knowledge of Captain & Tenille is known even among those born during the Bush administration. But since Willow is about my age, when Doogie Howser was on she probably would have been one of the many kids creeped out by NPH's big head and the short adult man in his window.

The majority of the "[character] writes fan fiction" in stories I have read are clumsily executed and excessively wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

I'm sure there are instances in which it is well done, but I'm not interested in reading it. Perhaps it's too meta for me with the TV characters writing about other characters, or perhaps the sudden jar of it, reminding me that I'm sitting in my uncomfortable desk chair in front of a monitor and doing this thing -- well, I'm knocked completely out of the narrative and back into reality.