ABSTRACT
This introduction traces a genealogy of the ways various types of metatextual address have been inherent to the medium since its beginning in the 1940s, moving from more covert forms to what David Roche calls the “hypermeta” (“works whose ‘meta-ness’ is evident and overt”). Television is a bricolage of narrative, acting, and production styles borrowed from radio, film, and theater. Yet, the inherent “weirdness” of television goes unremarked, including how frequently throughout television’s history, many of its most popular programs involved viewers sitting in their residences watching other (ordinary) people move about their own simulated homes; that is, less of a window to the world than a mirror. In that respect, this book will define meta throughout as Roche does: an acceleration of reflexivity that serves as commentary on the nature of the fiction itself. Combined with the voyeuristic positioning of the viewer and television’s cross-medium origins, this chapter asserts, has always made both programs and audiences aware of their constructed-ness, something that programs first implicitly and later openly acknowledged as TV ages, filtered through two short case studies from early and contemporary television, respectively.
