Continuing our weeklong look at how metafiction, a conceit previously used only by avant-garde Italian playwrights on hard drugs, has infiltrated pop culture.

Best Meta-TV Series. It’s…Arrested Development. I know, if you’re not a fan, you’re tired of people waxing poetic about the hard-to-follow Fox comedy. But I’m still working through my pain regarding the series’ 2006 cancellation, and my analyst (or therapist? maybe he’s both…) says this blog post is the logical next step.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, Arrested Development’s fourth-wall-breaking descending into Moonlighting territory. (A boom mike would slip into frame to punch up a joke, an impossible character would walk through a scene to show the writers weren’t paying attention, etc.) But most of the time, it was genius. During the first season, the flat, Midwestern Ron Howard voice narrating every episode gradually revealed himself to actually be Ron Howard, savagely turning on characters who used the word “Opie” as an insult, defending actor Andy Griffith to laborious lengths, commenting archly on Scott Baio’s replacement of his former Happy Days costar Henry Winkler (as the show’s lawyer character) to appeal to “a younger demographic,” etc.

But everything came to a head during the show’s final season, when the struggles of the series’ dysfunctional Bluth family became a metaphor for the series’ own struggles to survive the network axe. Cupboards on the set were slyly revealed to be empty, as a result of budget cuts and network apathy. One of the final episodes, “The S.O.B.s” (“Save Our Bluths,” but even the title is a jab at network notes that the show’s characters needed to be “more relatable”) is a show-length parody of a desperate series on the brink of cancellation. There’s an uber-dramatic reality-style opening, a parade of non sequitur D-list guest stars, a scene in phony “3-D,” a promised character death, and even a faux-”live” videotaped finale.

At one point, Jason Bateman’s and Jeffrey Tambor’s characters are discussing a benefit dinner to save the family business.

“Well, I don’t think the Home Builders Organization is going to be supporting us.”

“Yeah, the HBO’s not going to want us. What do we do now?”

“It’s Showtime. I think we have to have a show during dinner.”

It got to where I couldn’t believe Fox was airing a half hour of thinly veiled anti-Fox contempt every week. Ironically, Showtime did bite and offer to continue the series on premium cable, but producer Mitchell Hurwitz decided to wrap up Arrested Development instead, using the final episode’s epilogue to hint at an upcoming movie. (To which Michael Cera has now signed on! What a fun, sexy time it must be for him.)

Tomorrow: the best metapop song ever written.