Television has talked about itself almost from the beginning. Artists in this medium have always been fascinated by the innards of the business, particularly the more journalistic part. In 1961, pioneer Carl Reiner recounted the misadventures of a screenwriter in “The Dick van Dyke Show,” initiating a genre of meta-television series that ends (for now) with “The Morning Show” (Apple TV), showing that it the “Silly Box” never existed so stupid or so narcissistic: most of these fictions are far from being exercises in what Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio called omphaloscopy (that is, the art of looking at the omphalos or navel). No matter how cruel those of us who write about television are, it is difficult to find in our writing portraits as merciless as those that television itself has made of itself.
The Morning Show, which just premiered its third season, has so many meta layers you can peel it off with a potato peeler. It sounds a bit like an elegy, as if it were telling of the fall of the cathodic gods, and it explains very well the war and the changes that are taking place in the Spanish private broadcasters, a slaughter for an almost lost hegemony. He also anticipated the cases of DeGeneres and Fallon in the United States. Fiction does not surpass reality, but it often anticipates it.
Compare this tone of Thomas Mann’s novel to the joy of the previous satires. It’s a very far cry from the vivacity and hooliganism of 30 Rock (by far the best comedy about the art of comedy on television) and the moralizing epic of Murphy Brown or the incontinent Sorkin’s silly The Newsroom. I wouldn’t say meta-television is cloaked in mourning: it hasn’t considered its medium dead yet, but it’s starting to turn tragic and even nostalgic. In no time they will tell us about the military battles.
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