9 Worst Times TV Shows Went Meta

Sherlock season 2 was a bona fide hit, creating an enormously dedicated fan base online, and ending on a killer cliffhanger. When Season 3 arrived after almost two years of intense anticipation, however, it became increasingly clear that the writers had no intention of properly answering the questions they’d raised, and were instead content to drift into increasingly meta territory.

Baiting the fans with the fake-out of Anderson’s explanation was a very amusing beginning to the season, and surely irresistible to the writers given the amount of intense online speculation they had inspired. But unfortunately this scene was more than a playful opening: it set the tone for a batch of overly-self-conscious episodes. This was a season that gave us a Derren Brown cameo, homoerotic slash fiction, on-screen #SherlockLives hashtags, and a deerstalker-donning superfan - it was Tumblr brought to life.