ABSTRACT
There is another level of self-awareness of television series beyond that discussed in Chapter 1, series broadly characterized in one of two ways: shows within shows, and shows that serve as a metaphor for the production of television series. That is, series about television production (e.g., backstage series, à la 30 Rock, The Dick Van Dyke Show) vs those that employ metatextual processes to comment on the production of the selfsame series (e.g., Dollhouse, Community). Although the latter, more overtly metaphorical series are primarily confined to the past 25 years of US television, one can see the ancestry in earlier semi-anthology series featuring stories that either traded on the previous works or celebrity personas of guest stars (The Love Boat) or borrowed from then-current popular trends in film and television for its stories (Fantasy Island). These two elements didn’t always operate separately; The Simpsons frequently comments on its own constructedness (including its historical antecedents) and embeds “The Itchy and Scratchy Show” to analyze itself within that context, a conceit later borrowed by South Park (1999–). Both of these types foreground the ways in which both the “backstage” series and those that serve as metaphors for production produce metanarrative analysis of their particular sociopolitical moments.
