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 E. 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.
Industry Reviews
"Combining a gonzo theoretical orientation with an appreciation for detail and specificity, Grace Lavery rummages through the archive of BoJack Horseman with the best of them while throwing in a bit of Shakespeare, feminist theory, and wild speculative gestures. She illustrates how the sitcom reveals the weaknesses of not only the structure of the nuclear family but the ways the family works against the interests of the individual. Closures is a funny, engaging, smart, and eclectic book." -- Jack Halberstam, author of * Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire *
"A stylish writer and wickedly perceptive critic, Grace Lavery makes a compelling argument that the sitcom is an exercise in the endless undoing and repairing of the heterosexual family. Remarkable for the engaging openness of its critical intelligence, Closures is by far the best account of the sitcom-a genre that continues to have a symptomatic afterlife in our horrifying culture." -- Joseph Litvak, author of * The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture *
"Intriguing. . . . This is worth a look for theory-minded fans of the genre." * Publishers Weekly *
"Closures demonstrates what a masterful literary critic can do with the flimsy and the abject, as the book brings high theory to bear-delightfully, speculatively-on the likes of Mork & Mindy and New Girl. . . . Lavery points the way, proving beyond a doubt that the pleasures of criticism and bad TV need not be at odds." -- Isabel Bartholomew * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"Closures reads like a zany amusement park ride through a fantastical, queer, broadcast-network-nonspecific Disneyland. . . . Closures is intelligent, surprising in the specificity of its examples, and above all, immersive. The great delight of the book lies in Lavery's intellectual and aesthetic survey of the sitcom, from The Addams Family and Amos & Andy . . . all the way to its structural unraveling in shows like Bojack Horseman and Rick & Morty." -- McKenzie Watson-Fore * Full Stop *
