METAMOMENTS IN SERIES

Series present many opportune moments for meta that are specific to the format. We have seen that metamoments often occur during beginnings, and in Chapter 7 in particular, how serial adaptations and remakes such as Bates Motel and Hannibal are prompt to address their relationship to their source material. But the specificity of the serial form is that it has a multitude of beginnings: the beginning of the series as a whole, the season opener, the episode prologue. For instance, S3E1 of Sherlock, a series whose meta quality has received sustained attention, struggles to resolve the season 2 cliffhanger (Sherlock jumping off a building with Moriarty) by integrating several fan theories, voiced within the diegesis by a group called the Empty Hearse, whose name is also the title of the episode. In so doing, the episode playfully evokes its own complicated genesis and ensures the series’s survival through that of its eponymous hero, brought back to life by its fans, partly (at least) responsible for rewriting Arthur Conan Doyle’s original story entitled “The Adventure of the Empty House.” Sitcoms habitually celebrate their own return in the first scenes of their season openers. The opening of S8E1 of Married … with Children, for example, has Bud remarking that, if his mother Peg leaves, she will “miss Dad’s latest episode of A Fat Woman Came into the Shoe Store Today” [1:55]. Season 2 of Community opens with Abed exclaiming, “And we’re back!” followed by a lateral tracking shot that quite artificially takes us from one character’s bedroom to another, and a shot of Britta walking around campus while Dean Pelton, on the PA system, recaps her humiliating ordeal in the season 1 finale and announces a “fresh start” [0:00–1:10].

Metamoments are frequent in endings as well, whether the series’s, a season’s or an episode’s. One famous example is the metaleptic finale (S5E13) of Moonlighting. The protagonists, Maddie Hayes and David Addison Jr., are informed by Walter Whitebread of ABC TV that they have been “canceled” and, consequently, that “in six minutes and fourteen seconds [they] will cease to exist as television characters,” a situation a secondary character (Agnes), who hopes she’ll get her own spinoff series, blames on Maddie and David’s inability to “figure out [their] nitwit relationship” [36:51–40:25].