Meta in Film and Television Series grew out of my previous work on Quentin Tarantino. I realized that research on meta-phenomena had mainly been carried out in the fields of literature, drama and transmedia, and that film and television studies had pretty much taken for granted terms such as metacinema and metafilm, and had mainly focused on reflexivity, specific devices such as the mise en abyme, or on a genre like the movie about making movies. Meta in Film and Television thus seeks to remedy this lack by confronting the writings on the movie about making movies and reflexivity in film and television (most of which date back to the 1980s and early 1990s) to the seminal works carried out on metafiction in the 1980s and metareference in the 2000s. And though I recognize the value of transmedial approaches, I believe it is equally important to focus on the specificities of phenomena in a given medium. Meta in Film and Television Series also seeks to respond to the increasing presence of the term “meta” to designate films and series in the writings of fans and journalists. It assumes its timeliness by analyzing phenomena that have been circulating for years but that seem to have intensified and crossed over into the mainstream in the digital age, perhaps as a response to the audience’s increasing awareness of self-conscious works. The book’s main thread lies in this convergence between academic and popular discourses. The popular usage of “meta” points to a profoundly entangled set of practices and discourses, and suggests that audiences have somehow sensed this entanglement. It is the scholar’s job to untangle and make sense of it.

Meta in Film and Television Series is highly indebted to prior work on metafiction, metareference and reflexivity—the writings of Gérard Genette, Linda Hutcheon and Patricia Waugh, Christian Metz and Robert Stam, Werner Wolf and many others—and the preliminary theory of meta presented in Part I devolves from discussions of these important texts. The purpose of this book is not to invent new terms, and the only terms coined herein, metamoment (i.e., a moment that can be interpreted as meta) and hypermeta (i.e., works whose “meta-ness” is evident and overt), are fairly transparent.