NBC has become the punching bag of two of television’s best comedies. And both air on NBC. GE’s recent sale of NBC to cable giant Comcast has become recurring fodder for both “The Office” (8 p.m., NBC) and “30 Rock” (8:30 p.m., NBC).

The sale of a broadcaster to a cable company raises all sorts of interesting issues that have recently made their way to the business pages. Who is the tail and who is the dog? Broadcasters and cable providers have been waging very public battles, fighting over fees and threatening to withhold programming until deals are made. Viewers in some markets have turned on their favorite shows to find a blank screen.

“The Office” takes a relatively benign look at a merger’s culture clash. The Dunder Mifflin Co., a paper firm in one of the industrial northeast’s least glamorous cities, has been acquired by Sabre, a Tallahassee-based purveyor of cheap Korean printers.

Kathy Bates plays the brash head of Sabre, a woman who neither cares about nor understands the strange office behavior of Michael’s branch and insists that selling is selling, whether it involves paper or printers.

All of that is rather gentle compared to the treatment the merger receives on “30 Rock.” Jack (Alec Baldwin), raised in GE’s aggressive corporate culture of manufacturing and acquisition, is suddenly adrift, a figurehead leader for a company named KableTown, which makes absolutely nothing and freely admits that 95 percent of its profits come from on-demand pornography channels.

Back in the 1980s, when David Letterman was still at NBC, he apparently irked then-new owners by joking about GE in his monologues and trying to deliver a fruit basket to their corporate headquarters. But he never called them pornographers.

The bitter, biting satire of “30 Rock” hearkens back to a legendary “Saturday Night Live” skit that never aired. Back in 1981, NBC was in the ratings basement, and its failure was linked to network chief Fred Silverman. John Belushi was reported to have returned for a guest stint on SNL to appear in a sketch comparing Silverman’s waning days at NBC to the last days of Hitler in his Berlin bunker. He was played as a raging madman presiding over the ragged remnants of “The Nazional Broadcasting System.”

Tonight’s other highlights

• NCAA Basketball Tournament (7 p.m., CBS).

• A gamer’s competitive streak may have been his undoing on “Bones” (7 p.m., Fox).

• Aaron makes a connection on “FlashForward” (7 p.m., ABC).

• Jerry Seinfeld gathers celebrities to offer couples counseling on “The Marriage Ref” (9 p.m., NBC).

• Technology is on the menu on “Project Runway” (9 p.m., Lifetime).