Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us

Tongson (Why Karen Carpenter Matters), a gender and sexuality studies professor at the University of Southern California, takes a discerning look at the ambivalence queer viewers feel watching such mainstream family-centric TV shows as Parenthood and This Is Us. These sitcoms and dramas, she suggests, constitute “normporn,” or “a subgenre of television that... features liberal, mostly white, but ever-expanding families wrestling with the peccadilloes of their own privilege.” She argues that queer viewers, herself included, have complicated relationships with such programs, feeling shame about their emotional investment in the characters’ “bourgeois dramas” and, on some level, “coveting the comfort” of the privileged and often heteronormative lifestyles depicted. Offering an overview of normporn through the decades, Tongson expounds on thirtysomething’s focus on the “mundanities of ‘our lives,’ ” Gilmore Girls’ lukewarm politics, and how This Is Us explores queer and Black characters’ lives in a way its normporn predecessors shied away from. The analysis presents bracing assessments of network TV touchstones, and Tongson’s wit is a treat (referencing the intimidating food critic from the film Ratatouille, she describes herself as a “skeptical and shriveled Anton Ego in the streets, a perimenopausal weeper to pet food ads in the sheets”). Thought-provoking and full of fresh insights, this entertains and enlightens. (Nov.)