Section | Semester | Instructor | Time | Location | Course Areas |
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2 | Spring 2022 | Lavery, Grace
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MW 10:30-12 | Wheeler 315 |
The television situation comedy has been one of the most durable, wide-ranging, and successful genres of popular culture of all time. Its narrative forms (such as the “will they/won’t they” romance that depends on the televisual mode of serialization) have become premises of everyday life; its stage-set cinematography is instantly recognizable; even the sound editing (historically organized around the bizarre and coercive rhythms of a “laugh track”) has profoundly changed the way we experience the sound of words. In this class, we will critically assess the characteristic formal and aesthetic features of a genre too rarely subjected to scholarly analysis, and even more rarely to the kind of close reading we will practice here. Working across the full chronological range of sitcoms in English, from the screwball comedies of the postwar period, through to the high-concept star vehicles of the present, we will watch several episodes of different sitcoms each week, and each week focus on a recurring theme. How do sitcoms balance the competing demands of family, friendship, and erotic emplotment? How does the serial form enable, or else impede, the sitcom’s ability to represent reality? How realistic are sitcoms, anyway – and how have their various relations to realism shifted from the stage-set/laugh-track shows of the 1950s, to the deadpan mockumentaries of the 2000s? What does the American sitcom have to say, finally, about the post-1945 period’s emerging ideas about love, drugs, race, sex, youth, community, secularism, capitalism, gender, wealth, Christmas, family, and time?
Each week we will watch a total of six episodes of television, and class will entail two lectures and one discussion session. The episodes will be drawn from:
30 Rock | Fresh Off the Boat | The Monkees |
The Addams Family | The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air | New Girl |
Amos ‘n’ Andy | Friends | Parks and Recreation |
Arrested Development | Full House | Punky Brewster |
The Beverly Hillbillies | Home Improvement | The Office |
The Big Bang Theory | I Love Lucy | Roseanne |
Bob’s Burgers | It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia | Sanford and Son |
BoJack Horseman | It’s Garry Shandling’s Show | The Simpsons |
The Brady Bunch | The Good Place | South Park |
Brooklyn Nine-Nine | The Jeffersons | Taxi |
Community | The Larry Sanders Show | Third Rock from the Sun |
The Cosby Show | Leave It To Beaver | Tom Goes to the Mayor |
The Dick Van Dyke Show | Louie | Veep |
Dinosaurs | Married… With Children | Welcome Back, Kotter |
Don’t Trust the B– In Apartment 23 | Mary Kay and Johnny | Who’s the Boss |
Drawn Together | The Mary Tyler Moore Show | Will and Grace |
Ellen | M*A*S*H* | |
Episodes | Master of None | |
Family Guy | Meet the Wife | |
Family Matters | Mister Ed |
summer, 2022 |
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176/1 |
spring, 2021 |
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176/1 |