A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Of the convolved levels of fantasy and reality and identity here—e.g.
     the patient simultaneously does, does not, and does have Betty White “confused” with Sue-Ann Nivens—we needn’t speak in detail;
     doubtless a Yale Contemporary Culture dissertation is under way on Deleuze & Guattari and just this episode. But the most
     interesting levels of meaning here lie, and point, behind the lens. For NBC’s
St Elsewhere
, like
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
The Bob Newhart Show
before it, was created, produced, and guided into syndication by MTM Studios, owned by Mary Tyler Moore and overseen by her
     erstwhile husband, eventual NBC CEO Grant Tinker; and
St. Elsewhere
’s scripts and subplots are story-edited by Mark Tinker, Mary’s stepson, Grant’s heir. The deluded mental patient, an exiled,
     drifting veteran of one MTM program, reaches piteously out to the exiled, drifting (literally—
NASA
, for God’s sake!) veteran of another MTM production, and her deadpan rebuff is scripted by MTM personnel, who accomplish
     the parodic undercut of MTM’s Dr. Auschlander with the copyrighted MTM hat-gesture of one MTM veteran who’s “deluded” he’s
     another. Dr. A.’s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a “distraction” is less naïve than insane: there is nothing
but
television on this episode. Every character and conflict and joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, self-reference,
     metatelevision. It is in-joke within in-joke.
    So then why do I get the in-joke? Because I, the viewer, outside the glass with the rest of the Audience, am
in
on the in-joke. I’ve seen Mary Tyler Moore’s “real” toss of that fuzzy beret so often it’s moved past cliché into warm nostalgia.
     I know the mental patient from
Bob Newhart
, Betty White from everywhere,
and
I know all sorts of intriguing irrelevant stuff about MTM Studios and syndication from
Entertainment Tonight
I, the pseudo-voyeur, am indeed “behind the scenes,” primed to get the in-joke. But it is not I the spy who have crept inside
     television’s boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, has become my—our—own
     interior. And we seem a jaded, weary, but willing and above all
knowledgeable
Audience. And this knowledgeability utterly transforms the possibilities and hazards of “creativity” in television.
St. Elsewhere
’s episode was nominated for a 1988 Emmy. For best original teleplay.
    The best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could ever
     have dreamed of. The colors of MTV videos, blue-black and lambently flickered, are the colors of television.
Moonlighting
’s David and
Bueller
’s Ferris throw asides to the viewer every bit as bald as an old melodrama villain’s mono-logued gloat. Segments of the new
     late-night glitz-news
After Hours
end with a tease that features harried earphoned guys in the production booth ordering the tease. MTV’s television-trivia
     game show, the dry-titled
Remote Control
, got so popular it burst out of its MTV-membrane and is now syndicated band-wide. The hippest commercials, with stark computerized
     settings and blank-faced models in mirrored shades and plastic slacks genuflecting before various forms of velocity, excitement,
     and prestige, seem like little more than TV’s vision of how TV offers rescue to those lonely Joe Briefcases passively trapped
     into watching too much TV.
    What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks
     any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue but that they’ve
     become deeply irrelevant. It’s that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of
     us born in, say, the ’60s were trained by television to look where it pointed, usually at versions of “real