Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

by Grace E. Lavery

From The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Arrested Development to BoJack Horseman , the American sitcom revolves around crises that must be resolved by episode’s end, with a new crisis to come next week. In Closures , Grace Lavery reconsiders the genre’s seven-decade history as an endless cycle of crisis and closure that formally and representationally frames heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of both collapse and reconstitution. She shows that even the normiest family-based sitcoms rely on queer characters like Alice ( The Brady Bunch ) and Steve Urkel ( Family Matters ) that highlight how the family is perpetually incomplete and unstable. Analyzing the genre’s techniques and devices such as the laugh track and the cringe pan, Lavery also charts the shift to friend-group and workplace sitcoms like Friends and The Office , which she contends reflect a weakening of social ties in ways that place characters in an unending state of becoming. With this capacious yet svelte queer and trans theorization of the sitcom, Lavery demonstrates that the family ties that bind the genre’s normative heterosexuality are far more tenuous than we have been led to believe.

Genres: Criticism

128 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2024

Reviews

[Monty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an intensely academic, Freudian exploration of the sitcom format. Although it offers insightful explorations of sitcom history and the future of sitcom-related genres, Lavery includes tangential segments that, while informative, often do not connect in a clear way to the topic. All-in-all a fun and useful book for research in the area, but could have benefited from some clarification of structure and purpose!

[Downward · Rating 3 out of 5]

much of this feels like the unstructured but smart rantings of someone who loves both sitcoms and academia, and like sitcoms and like academia here it often feels like grace lavery is joking. the stretches are very stretchy, but they're fun and even if you can't quite make the connection it's still fun to see someone use fuccboi in an academicy context.