Television talks about itself: The Office and fake-reality fiction as a metatelevision trace in XXI century

Abstract

Historically, television has established itself as a place of production of meaning anchored to cultural and ideological determinants. One of the consecrating products of the medium has been the series of fiction, maintained as a constant in the television proposal over time.

However, throughout the different periods of its history, television has become increasingly permeable to mutations and hybrids of its own discursive structures. The series have not escaped this transformation, giving rise in recent days to a new type of format: the fiction of false reality.

From this perspective, it is proposed to approach the main features of what the author Mario Carlón has called metatelevision, considered the most recent period of the medium, and false reality as a byproduct of that stage. Taking as a reference the British series The Office, we will observe the way in which the television discourse is subject to displacements, both in the conventions of the genre, in the relation that the spectator maintains with the television product, and in the problematics between the real and the fictitious thing that the new audiovisual representations provoke in the 21st century.