Meta‐television: Popular postmodernism

Metafiction has been described as a major element of literary postmodernism. Television also can be meta fictional: meta‐television. Three varieties of meta‐television are described: audience awareness and intertextuality or medium‐reflexive structure; metagenericism or genre‐reflexive structure; and autodeconstruction and ilinx or text‐reflexive narrative. Meta‐television relies on the ability of the viewers to recognize artifice. It is the cultural expression of creators and consumers bored with and restricted by television's naturalness.