Meta in Film and Television Series

“That’s so meta!” The emergence of the prefix-turned-adjective “meta” to describe media productions is, no doubt, symptomatic of an increasingly media-savvy audience; it has also drawn attention to the lack of scholarship on meta-phenomena in film and television studies. Meta in Film and Television Series aims to make up for this. Meta is defined as an intense form of reflexivity, that is characterized by its aboutness; meta-phenomena are not just an arsenal of devices but suppose an interpretive act and an active audience. Meta creates a framework with which to interrogate a work’s relationship to its production, reception, medium, forms, and the world, and to explore its potentials and limitations. Meta supports the intuition latent in the popular usage that meta-phenomena are deeply entangled, while demonstrating that analysis stills requires such concepts to make sense of them.