GIFs are starting to become prevalent on TV shows

Slate

"Usually, moments from TV shows become GIFs," says Heather Schwedel. "Witness this one of the Broad City girls using their middle fingers to move up the corners of their mouths after someone on the street yells at them to smile: Great TV moment begets great GIF. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about what may, technically speaking, be the original TV GIF, the dancing baby from Ally McBeal. We’re talking about a TV show, in a display of its devotion to realistic storytelling, showing a GIF on screen, because the show seeks to portray that in real life, the way many of us live and talk to each other and experience the world is, well, with GIFs....So perhaps it’s not such a surprise that GIFs have made the trippy leap from a format mostly used to immortalize moments from media, like TV, to bits of visual texture in those very media."