ABSTRACT
Radio and television since the early twentieth century have sent sounds and images by airwaves to receptive devices in a wide variety of locations. While fairy-tale programming has never been more than a small percentage of broadcasts, listeners and viewers have regularly found fairy tales by touching that dial. Fairy tale often announces its own fictionality while laying out its inner workings; thus, it not only familiarizes by making metafictional moves but by forecasting its own poetics. Because of accessibility in everyday life and lingering resonance with seasonal schedules, broadcast stories create relationships that transform distances of time and space into the here and now. Fictional characters and their stories become part of the daily routine or calendar round. The metapoetics of the broadcast fairy tale support relationships at a distance by tuning in producers and audiences alike to the inner workings and implications of storied beginnings and endings.
