Meta Story Telling in Television

[Honeybee]

I posted this in the TATV thread, but Io9 has posted an amazing compendium of meta-story telling in television, with references to everything from Mister Rogers Neighborhood to Trek and The Simpsons.

The commentary section is chock full of wonderful examples. Some of my favorites:

The DS9 Episode with Sisko as the SciFi writer dealing with racism
The end of the 80s Show Newhart and also St. Elsewhere
Glee's habit of writing dialogue to respond to fan criticism and commentary
Supernatural's storylines about fan culture
Buffy's episode where Buffy is a girl in an insane asylum
Xena's episode about the making of Xena, with the cast playing asshole versions of the showrunners


There are so many examples. Anyone have favorites?

[Mistress Euclid]

We were recently talking about the show Merlin, and a good example is the last shot of that show that shows Merlin living in our modern world, so somehow the fairy tale/fantasy world of the show has evolved into our modern world.

The Neverending Story was very meta.

There was that Voyager episode where they play the Holonovel about a Maquis mutiny, which turns out to be a security simulation.

I like that the article shouts out to the Muppets as well as Mr. Rogers neighborhood.

[EntAllat]

I'll forever associate meta storytelling with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Raphael frequently joked in such a way that broke the fourth wall, and it was my first really obvious and regular exposure to that sort of thing.

[Mr Smith]

I loved it when Boston Legal did things that broke the fourth wall, like referencing the theme tune.
And Stargate SG-1 had episodes about a television show exactly like SG-1 called Wormhole X-Treme.

I'm sure I could think of other examples, eventually.

[Honeybee]

I'm not a big fan of reality shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians or The Real Housewives or The Hills, but I don't think there's any doubt that those shows are meta in the sense that people create characters based on themselves and have those characters interacting in a contrived world that is fashioned from the reality that they live in. It's fiction in the same way it's fiction when the TNG cast shows up playing asshole versions of themselves on Big Bang Theory.

Then, there's the whole recent Discovery Channel controversy with their bogus documentaries on mermaids and megladons that people took as real since that channel is supposed to be educational.