The treatment center where Lucille (Jessica Walter) is taken is called Shady Pines. This was also the name of the retirement home where Sophia used to live on The Golden Girls (1985) which series creator Mitchell Hurwitz used to write for.
During the discussion of SUGARFOOT, a page from a TV Guide is shown on screen. This is clearly a Chicago publication, because it mentions local TV news personalities including Len O'Connor and weatherman P J Hoff, and the channels listed are 2, 5, 7, 9, and 11, the only functioning Chicago stations in the early 1960s. The date (Tuesday September 13) occurred in 1960.
The images of the Bluths at the beginning of Scandalmakers were from the opening credits. The arrow pointing to Michael (Jason Bateman) can even be seen on his picture.
The narrator (Ron Howard) makes mention of how the narration for Scandalmakers is "real shoddy", "just plain crap", and that his inattention to detail "perplexed the audience, due to the unfocused nature of the narrator's explanation". However, Tobias (David Cross) is seen sitting inside the fireplace on three occasions in the episode, without any precedent or apparent reason, leading the viewer to assume the narrator is guilty of some "shoddy narration" of his own.
The narrator (Ron Howard) states that "Sugarfoot" had stopped airing 12 years before Michael was born. Thus Michael (Jason Bateman) would have been born in 1973, since the show ended in 1961.