Meta in Film and Television Series

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. In this impressive study Roche weaves together numerous strands of thought on the ‘meta’ and reflexive in cinema, television and media culture, with admirable clarity and focus. Full of insightful analysis of a diverse corpus of moving-image works – and engaging with important non-English language scholarship – this timely, indeed long overdue, book will no doubt be a standard point of reference on a perennially fascinating topic. -- Daniel Yacavone, University of Edinburgh The depth and breadth of Roche’s analysis of meta, the work around it, and the work that embodies it makes Meta in Film and Television Series a valuable work as both a study and a foundational text for future research. Roche’s command of a massive body of both the literature around metatext and the film and television series that employ it is impressive and an excellent resource for historical, production, and textual scholars in both film and television disciplines. -- Erin Giannini ― Monstrum David Roche is one of the best film theorists. His Meta in Film and Television Series is the most comprehensive study dedicated to metacinema and metafilms. It is a crowning achievement dwelling with a considerable number of examples, always lightened by David Roche's free ruminative thought. -- Marc Cerisuelo, author of Hollywood à l'écran : les métafilms américains Offers a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a concept that has become ubiquitous in both academic and popular discourse. It is an invaluable resource for film scholars who will appreciate the precision of Roche’s epistemological approach in the first part, film students who will marvel at the numerous hermeneutic applications of meta, and cinephiles/“seriephiles” who will commend the extensive knowledge Roche demonstrates and the fluidity of his writing. Erudite and complex while remaining accessible―a quality not all scholarly works possess. -- Julie Assouly ― Miranda David Roche is Professor of Film Studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, a 2022-27 IUF member and President of SERCIA. His recent publications include the monographs Arrival (2024), Meta in Film and Television Series (2022). His articles have appeared in the journals Adaptation , Horror Studies , Journal of Film and Video , Miranda , Positif , Post-script and TV/Series among others. His current research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with particular interest in the work of women directors in the scope of the FEMME ANR project.