The League... leading us to consume?

I have been watching the tv sitcom The League ever since it first aired in 2009. I personally love the show, the dialogue between the characters on the show creates an impressive humor that is both enticing and apparently influential. The sitcom is about a group of friends that join a fantasy football league, and for those of you who don't know about fantasy football, it's kinda like gambling. You get a league of people together in which everyone contributes the same amount of money creating a "pot" and within that league each person creates their own team of NFL players that will hopefully collect the most points out of anyone in your fantasy league. Now, like I said earlier I have been watching the show since day one, but it took my up until this past year to make the connection between "The League" and Fantasy Football. After watching the new episodes at my boyfriends house with his roommates (I don't have cable(: ) I gained a new perspective on the show. The references on the show about who traded who, or who got hurt, or who the starting line up for the week was, are all very real and legit references to the actual players we see and hear about in the NFL. So with that in mind, I observed my boyfriend and his roommates making comments about, or even critiquing the line up that one of the characters in the show picked. So coming from a Marxist point of view on all of this, couldn't the tv sitcom The League be considered a motivator to consumers to partake in ESPN's very own Fantasy Football in which they would be spending money with hopes that they win the fantasy league and make back more then they spent?