It’s corny to open an article or even a school essay with a definition. If I were an English teacher, that would be a dealbreaker. “Webster’s defines …” – record-scratch: F-minus. Next paper.
However, this article is clearly about the evolution of “Meta TV,” and in this piece, we need to define “meta.”
So, we’ve started an article with a cliché of a start, acknowledging how clichéd a start like this is. It don’t get more “meta” than that.
Meta TV can mean different things to different people. For me, it starts with self-awareness. Winking at the camera is a simple and sometimes reliable joke, but a show isn’t really meta until it demonstrates that we all are aware of the realities of shows, and we’re about to play around with something we all understand.
There are additional rules about TV itself being toyed with. The show isn’t a story about something in life anymore. It’s a story about stories or a show about shows.
This shared inside joke between creators and audience is a relationship. That’s what “Meta TV” is. It only works when viewers understand the tropes and the “rules” of TV storytelling.
Because audiences get savvier over time, Meta TV naturally becomes more meta as decades pass and viewers have watched more TV.
Category 1: TV Discovers It’s A TV Show (Proto-Meta)
Of course, early TV looks pretty primitive looking back on it now – low energy puppets like Kookla, Fran & Ollie and the hilarity of Uncle Milty putting on a dress passed for entertainment.
It took the smarter creators and producers about 15 minutes to get bored with the standard version of the form. The black and white era had real innovators like Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs doing shows within a show and both literally and figuratively turning TV upside down.
This stuff holds up better than any Your Show of Shows or I Love Lucy clip. Just watch a Burns And Allen Show and you’ll see self-referential jokes, weird narration, fourth-wall stuff, and all sorts of things satirizing the form that wasn’t even 10 years old.
If you really want to get into something that seems corny at first but turns out to be so revolutionary that you’ll wish you were high for it, try Green Acres on for size.
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, on several occasions has cited Green Acres‘ wonderful weirdness and he credits it being a big part of his upbringing and a partial inspiration for The Simpsons. You can see some of the playfulness in this clip.
But, the episode where the Green Acres residents of Hooterville put on a theatrical performance of The Beverly Hillbillies (which shared production teams and the same timeslot hour on CBS) is a tour-de-force of early meta, way before anybody coined the term.
Category 2: TV Makes Fun of the Business of TV (Industry Meta)
This group isn’t just about any show about show business. The Dick Van Dyke Show, as brilliant as it was, never traded in meta-craft. Ricky Ricardo was a bandleader with a Manhattan apartment and club on I Love Lucy; the premise didn’t generate meta moments.
But several great shows used show business to get very meta. The Larry Sanders Show was immediately the king of this in the 1990s. Anything real in Hollywood or star/creator Garry Shandling’s life got sucked into the show. He hated Dana Carvey’s SNL impression of him so had Dana Carvey do it to Larry on the show. Sean Penn on the fictional Larry Sanders Show told a story about the nightmare of acting with Garry Shandling. Fictionalized versions of guest stars were incredible; I will never be able to get David Duchovny’s “Basic Instinct moment” coming on to Larry out of my mind.
There are so many “Meta Hall Of Fame moments” to highlight here.
Arrested Development had a ton, but the “Save Our Bluths” episode not only had the representative clip below but a great self-aware gag about having to blur out one of Andy Richter’s quintuplet brother, who didn’t sign a release
There are plenty of hall-of-fame meta scenes on 30 Rock. The live episodes’ self-referential stuff alone puts them on Meta Mount Rushmore. But I’m partial to this clip of Tracy Morgan preventing himself from being used in a film by singing his thoughts to Billy Joel songs that can’t be cleared for air:
The Simpsons threw everything at the wall over the years. You gotta love the “Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” episode. And special format episodes like seeing characters’ off-screen lives in “22 Short Films About Springfield” and the Behind The Music parody are about as meta the Simpsons ever gets. Yet, none of the shows did it quite as well as “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase.”
Of course, Jerry Seinfeld making a “Jerry” sitcom as a season-long plot device on the Seinfeld sitcom is approaching the meta TV singularity. Yet for my money, I just can’t get enough of Kramer finding the old Merv Griffin Show set in a dumpster and turning his apartment and whole life into a talk show:
Then, later on Curb Your Enthusiasm, there was a Michael Richards moment in their Seinfeld reunion arc that not only turned a real-life incident in on itself but perhaps allowed Michael Richards to be funny again.
And when I think of self-referential sitcom moments, I have to shout out the awards show episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia:
Category 3: TV Blurs Performance and the Very Nature of Existence (Reality Meta)
Meta TV just isn’t breaking the fourth-wall or making in-jokes about show business.
Some shows took all of this to the next level and got into so many Inception-like deep layers, it was simply amazing to watch.
If any Mr. Show fans are with me here, you’ll certainly remember “Car Wash Change Thief Action Squad,” where a different change theft happens in the reenactment of a change theft. But if you really want a Mobius strip of a comedy sketch, go with the insane logic of the “Pre-Taped Call-In Show” here:
Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC political fund existed in real life because fictional Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report created a Super PAC that spilled over from the TV into real life. The Colbert Report was a consistent meta-TV great with Stephen Colbert as the Stephen Colbert character eating his own tail.
But Nathan Fielder is truly the GOAT when it comes to meta moments every bit as insane and deep as the ones in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdote, New York.
On Nathan For You, the “Finding Frances” and “Dumb Starbucks” episodes have so many levels of real-life stunts; the insertion of the original real humans inside fake re-creations creates so much layered insanity.
Fielder leaned into it on HBO’s The Rehearsal. Season 1 had the insane trivia night recreations and then the awkwardly real fake family arc. Season 2 got even stranger and further up its own ass with the co-pilot trust issue and crazy deep airline stuff. Chef’s kiss.
And how about Perd Hapley from Parks And Recreation? His self-proving introductions and preambles make a meta meal out of speech itself. He is tautology incarnated.
Tautologisms are language that explains itself by restating itself to near meaninglessness. Think of the Abraham Lincoln quote, “For people who enjoy this sort of thing, this is just the sort of thing that they would enjoy.”
Perd Hapley is next level. “Let’s begin the show by starting it,” “The statement this reporter has is a question,” and “Also joining us is another person.” Enjoy the Perd Hapley experience in this highlight reel:
This list wouldn’t be complete without the theme song for It’s Garry Shandling’s Show – “This is the theme to Garry’s show.” Listen to it, please. It’s meta perfection.
All of these shows in some way are attempting to destabilize what’s real.
Category 4: Not Just For Comedy (Meta Drama)
It seems like meta scenarios and statements are easier in comedy than drama. Once you establish a crazy self-referential scenario, that’s enough to generate comedy. In a dramatic situation, it’s harder to pull off and find meaning that’s more than a joke.
Author and schizophrenic Philip K. Dick wrote the brilliant, trippy The Man In The High Castle, which became a good early Amazon Prime TV show. The premise supposes that the Germans and Axis powers won World War II and ruled over an occupied United States. In the book/show though, there was an author of a book called The Man In The High Castle, which supposed an alternate reality where the U.S. and Allied forces won World War II. Wow. Seriously, mind-blowing stuff.
David Lynch and Twin Peaks: The Return were often inscrutable and consistently brilliant. Yes, tracking the deep levels of the Agent Cooper dopplegangers and tulpas can be hard work. But so much of that last series was about time and the impossibility of storytelling.
The series concludes with Cooper trying to fix the past, and he looks like he’s going to do it by bringing the Laura Palmer lookalike back to Laura’s house. Nope. Instead, we just get “What year is this?”
The most legendary meta drama moment and perhaps best series ending for decades was the conclusion of St. Elsewhere where it turns out the whole series was just in the mind of Dr. Westphal’s autistic son Tommy:
The last scene of The Sopranos makes a case that narrative endings are impossible since they don’t exist in life, or the cut to black is how sudden death feels.
Sure, at the time viewers thought their cable went out. But it’s caused fantastic arguments ever since. It’s not “meta” within the show, but it’s meta about how viewers watch television.
Conclusion
Where is this all heading? More and more, audiences see and hear things about people who make TV. As their knowledge of the industry keeps expanding, that opens the door to shows about shows and trust that the public understands it.
Yeah, things are not inherently good by being meta. There’s a lot of lazy “post-ironic” irony from the moustache-humor crowd; it insists it’s a joke by being cheeky or calling attention to itself. We’ll have to deal with that.
But on the bright side, there’s going to be plenty more of the good stuff coming. And I can’t wait.
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