Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

In this intriguing if uneven critical analysis, UC Berkeley English professor Lavery (Please Miss) challenges the notion that American sitcoms center “normative nuclear families.” According to Lavery, sitcoms dwell “in the present continuous, where family is always on the verge of disintegrating and always in the process of being repaired or reconstituted.” As a result, the genre lends itself to complex, blended families and social milieus that enable “narrative closure” at the end of each episode. Marshaling close readings of The Addams Family, Bojack Horseman, The Brady Bunch, Family Matters, Home Improvement, and The Office, Lavery frames Family Matters’ Steve Urkel as a constant impediment to the Winslow family’s stability—“His uncertain provenance marks him out as a kind of changeling boy... who occupies the family setting as part-defective son and part-defective romantic prospect.” Even The Brady Bunch, whose credit sequence is otherwise a “heterosexual grid of absolute obligation,” features Ann B. Davis as Alice, the ostensibly queer housekeeper. Though Lavery’s analysis is often insightful, her methodology can feel haphazard: she provides insufficient explanation for her choice of shows, engages relatively little with other television scholarship, and sometimes obscures her points with overwrought language (“Figures of butch competence are intrinsic to the logic by which compulsory heterosexuality persuades itself to soldier mordantly onward”). Still, this is worth a look for theory-minded fans of the genre. (Feb.)