Description
Long gone are the days when scholars had to justify writing about television. The pervasiveness and persuasiveness of television programming has continued to evolve and now may be accessed on a variety of media in almost any imaginable locale. The continued relevance of the form makes critical and historical analyses of series, meanings audiences may find there, and the industry that produces these cultural artifacts an enterprise of continuing significance. This volume features twenty-one chapters—some included in the first edition of this anthology, some significantly revised, and eight new essays—on American situation comedies, one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of television programming.
The chapters are arranged into six chronological sections by decade from the 1950s to the 2010s, essays that have been carefully considered as the anthology was conceptualized to address landmark series as well as the following topics: origins and conventions of the genre; the family; gender; sexuality; race and ethnicity; work and social class; production practices; cultural resonances; and ideology. Perspectives represented here include critical media studies, cultural studies, historic surveys, feminist theory, queer theory, and a number of interdisciplinary approaches. The range of theoretical and critical tools employed by the authors of chapters is an intentional choice on the part of the editors to parallel the richness and range of the programming itself.
This project originated as a way to help fill a void in the television literature, and more than ten years after the publication of the first edition, it is time for a revised look at sitcoms, which continue to thrive as a genre. From our examination of the scholarship of sitcoms and broader topics related to television, we found these proposed areas of inquiry have been well established and represented in media studies. What has been missing, however, is a single updated volume that comprehensively and chronologically examines the genre of situation comedy and applies sets of critical lenses to contextualize the programs and help readers think about the shows and, perhaps, even about themselves in new contexts.