Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television

Select Titles in Television and Popular Culture

Becoming: Genre, Queerness, and Transformation in NBC’s Hannibal

Kavita Mudan Finn and EJ Nielsen, eds.

Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences

Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir, eds.

Chick TV: Antiheroines and Time Unbound

Yael Levy

Gladiators in Suits: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Scandal

Simone Adams, Kimberly R. Moffitt, and Ronald L. Jackson, eds.

Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television

Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts, eds.

Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls

David Scott Diffrient and David Lavery, eds.

Television Finales: From Howdy Doody to Girls

Douglas L. Howard and David Bianculli, eds.

Watching TV with a Linguist

Kristy Beers Fägersten, ed.

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3775-2 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3785-1 (paperback)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diffrient, David Scott, 1972– author.

Title: Comic drunks, crazy cults, and lovable monsters : bad behavior on American television / David Scott Diffrient.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2022. | Series: Television and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022023072 (print) | LCCN 2022023073 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815637752 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780815637851 (paperback) | ISBN 9780815655695 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Television comedies—United States—History and criticism. | Deviant behavior on television. | Conduct of life on television. | LCGFT: Television criticism and reviews.

Classification: LCC PN1992.8.C66 D54 2022 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.C66 (ebook) | DDC 792.45/6559—dc23/eng/20220811

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023072

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Contemporary TV Comedy: A Good Place for Bad People

PART ONE. TV’s Alcoholic Imaginary: Comic Drunks, Militaristic Drinking, and the Rhetoric of Recovery

1. Very Drunken Episodes: Comedy TV’s Discourses of Insobriety

2. Drinking the War Away: Alcoholic Merriment in M*A*S*H and Other Military-Themed Sitcoms

3. The Big Book on the Small Screen: Alcoholics Anonymous, Standup Comedy, and Television’s Road to Recovery

PART TWO. TV’s Cult Imaginary: Comic Cultists, Pathologized Fandoms, and the Rhetoric of Crazy Talk

4. Very Crazy Episodes: Cultivating Misconceptions about Cults on American Television

5. Drinking the Kool-Aid of Cult TV: Fans, Followers, and Fringe Religions in Strangers with Candy and Veronica Mars

PART THREE. TV’s Monstrous Imaginary: Comic Creeps, Neighborly Terrors, and the Rhetoric of Trump

6. Very Spooky Episodes: Intertextual Monsters, Moral Panics, and the Playful Perversions of Halloween TV

7. Three-Headed Monster: Queer Representation, Social Class, and the Trumpist Rhetoric of Roseanne

8. Ugly Americans: Animating Monsters, Demonizing Others, and Racializing Fear on American Television

Beyond Bad and Evil: Finding TV’s Good Place

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

I.1: Frame enlargement from Brickleberry (Comedy Central, 2012–15)

I.2: Frame enlargement from Barry (HBO, 2018–present)

I.3: Frame enlargement from Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972–77)

I.4: Frame enlargement from The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present)

1.1: Frame enlargement from Archer (FX, 2009–16; FXX, 2017–present)

1.2: Frame enlargement from I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–57)

1.3: Frame enlargement from The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961–66)

1.4: Frame enlargement from Good Times (CBS, 1974–79)

1.5: Frame enlargement from Car 54, Where Are You? (NBC, 1961–63)

1.6: Frame enlargement from The Dean Martin Show (NBC, 1965–74)

2.1: Frame enlargement from McHale’s Navy (ABC, 1962–66)

2.2: Frame enlargement from Hogan’s Heroes (CBS, 1965–71)

2.3: Frame enlargement from Hogan’s Heroes (CBS, 1965–71)

2.4: Frame enlargement from M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83)

2.5: Frame enlargement from M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83)

2.6: Frame enlargement from Laverne & Shirley (ABC, 1976–83)

3.1: Frame enlargement from Clueless (ABC, 1996–97; UPN, 1997–99)

3.2: Frame enlargement from Mom (CBS, 2013–present)

3.3: Frame enlargement from Mom (CBS, 2013–present)

3.4: Frame enlargement from Family Guy (Fox, 1999–present)

3.5: Frame enlargement from Family Guy (Fox, 1999–present)

3.6: Frame enlargement from BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–20)

3.7: Frame enlargement from BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–20)

4.1: Frame enlargement from The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present)

4.2: Frame enlargement from Documentary Now! (2015–present)

4.3: Frame enlargement from Welcome Back, Kotter (ABC, 1975–79)

4.4: Frame enlargement from Brickleberry (Comedy Central, 2012–15)

4.5: Frame enlargement from Everybody Loves Raymond (CBS, 1996–2005)

4.6: Frame enlargement from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix, 2015–20)

5.1: Frame enlargement from Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (ABC, 1996–2000; WB, 2000–2003)

5.2: Frame enlargement from Strangers with Candy (Comedy Central, 1999–2000).

5.3: Frame enlargement from Veronica Mars (UPN, 2004–6; The CW, 2006–7; Hulu, 2019)

5.4: Frame enlargement from Veronica Mars (UPN, 2004–6; The CW, 2006–7; Hulu, 2019)

5.5: Frame enlargement from Mork & Mindy (ABC, 1978–82)

6.1: Frame enlargement from Dennis the Menace (CBS, 1959–63)

6.2: Frame enlargement from Happy Days (ABC, 1974–84)

6.3: Frame enlargement from Alice (CBS, 1976–85)

6.4: Frame enlargement from Diff’rent Strokes (NBC, 1978–85; ABC, 1985–86)

6.5: Frame enlargement from Diff’rent Strokes (NBC, 1978–85; ABC, 1985–86)

6.6: Frame enlargement from The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012–15; Hulu, 2015–17)

7.1: Frame enlargement from Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97)

7.2: Frame enlargement from Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97)

7.3: Frame enlargement from Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97)

7.4: Frame enlargement from Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97)

7.5: Frame enlargement from Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97)

8.1: Frame enlargement from Gilligan’s Island (CBS, 1964–67)

8.2: Frame enlargement from Gilligan’s Island (CBS, 1964–67)

8.3: Frame enlargement from The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66)

8.4: Frame enlargement from Jonny Quest (ABC, 1964–65)

8.5: Frame enlargement from Leave It to Beaver (CBS, 1957–58; ABC, 1958–63)

8.6: Frame enlargement from The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66)

8.7: Frame enlargement from The Addams Family (ABC, 1964–66)

8.8: Frame enlargement from The Flintstones (ABC, 1960–66)

8.9: Frame enlargement from Ugly Americans (Comedy Central, 2010–12)

C.1: Frame enlargement from The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66)

C.2: Frame enlargement from The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66)

C.3: Frame enlargement from The Good Place (NBC, 2016–20)

C.4: Frame enlargement from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX, 2005–12; FXX, 2013–present)

Acknowledgments

Although I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, in his league comedically speaking, the late Robin Williams once used a metaphor to describe his work as a stand-up comic and joke writer that reminds me of my own writing process. Telling an interviewer that, for him, "comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, which he is then forced to sculpt into a more refined if still-manic form of humor before delivering it on stage, Williams nails what it is like for most thinkers with a few too many thoughts in their heads to convey the deeper, darker side of life in a cogent, hopefully entertaining way. Thankfully, several people have helped me to shape the spew" leading up to this book’s publication—friends and fellow media scholars whose words of encouragement and advice over the years made it possible for me to channel the whirlwind of ideas spinning around in my brain.

First, my colleagues in the Communication Studies department at Colorado State University, including department chair Greg Dickinson, Usama Alshaibi, Karrin Vasby Anderson, Eric Aoki, Martín Carcasson, Thomas R. Dunn, Meara Faw, Katie Gibson, Morgan K. Johnson, Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, Katherine Knobloch, Ziyu Long, Liz Parks, and Elizabeth Williams, have supported my teaching and research over the years and continue to inspire me with their dedication to higher education and community outreach. My brilliant cohort in the department’s Film and Media Studies area, including comedy enthusiasts Evan Elkins, Kit Hughes, and Nick Marx, never fail to impress me with their sharp wits and sharper insights into many of the television shows that I discuss in the pages that follow. I am especially grateful to Carl Burgchardt, my oldest friend in the department (I mean that in the good way) who at this point in our respective careers is more like a brother than a coworker, someone who never fails to lend a sympathetic ear to some of my weirdest, wildest theories but is not afraid to tell me the truth whenever my ideas are half-baked. My favorite part of teaching at CSU (besides the free candy) is being one door down from his office. Throughout the writing of this book, I have benefitted from the research assistance provided by Ryan Greene, Andy Gilmore, Lisabeth Bylina, Henry Miller, and Andrea Jaques. Ryan in particular, as someone who has helped me on five different projects, gets a big COVID-era elbow bump.

Besides the people with whom I work, there are many scholars who, wittingly or not, played a part in improving this book, lending their insights during conference and symposia presentations (as fellow panelists), including Christine Becker, Peter Corrigan, Amanda Hickok, Sam Johnson, Emily Kulbacki, Anna Martonfi, Brett Mills, Philip Scepanski, Nicole Seymour, and Mark Stewart. Several critics and theorists of TV comedy have helped me to understand the historical, political, and social significance of this often-maligned cultural form in their own writings: Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore, Vincent Brook, Jeremy G. Butler, Robin R. Means Coleman, Jonathan Gray, Bambi Haggins, Andrew Horton, Douglas L. Howard, Deborah Jermyn, Jeffrey P. Jones, Amanda Konkle, Alice Leppert, David Marc, Joanne Morreale, Brian Ott, Tison Pugh, Jeffrey Sconce, Janet Staiger, Ethan Thompson, Christina von Hodenberg, and Rosie White. I hope that my meager contribution to the growing list of publications about satires and sitcoms gives them the same pleasure that their books have given me.

A shorter version of Chapter 2, "‘Drinking the War Away’: Alcoholic Merriment in M*A*S*H and Other Military-Themed Sitcoms," appeared in Anna Froula and Stacy Takacs’s edited volume Militarism on the Small Screen (Routledge, 2018). Anna and Stacy provided exceptionally valuable instructions on how to hone my arguments in that original piece as well as the considerably expanded version that appears in this book. Permission to reprint portions of that chapter has been kindly provided by Taylor and Francis Group LLC. Chapter 4, Very Crazy Episodes: Cultivating Misconceptions about Cults on American Television builds upon my previous conceptualization of the cult imaginary, or how TV comically frames fringe religions—a topic that I wrote about in a 2010 article published by Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. David Culbert, the journal’s editor before his passing in 2017, championed my work then, and I am so thankful to have worked with him on that earlier version of my chapter. Sue Turnbull and Rhonda Wilcox sagely steered me toward productive readings of Strangers with Candy and Veronica Mars several years ago, and in 2013, Katherine Larsen, Principal Editor of the Journal of Fandom Studies, worked with me to improve an earlier, shorter version of Chapter 5, which concerns those two television programs. Jonathan Cohn and Jennifer Porst, editors of the recently published collection Very Special Episodes: Televising Industrial and Social Change (Rutgers, 2021), were likewise generous in providing feedback on my work about the blue-collar sitcom Roseanne, helping me to refine my arguments about Halloween TV. A person could not ask for a better, kinder acquisitions editor than Syracuse University Press’s Deborah Manion, who had thrown her encouragement behind my Gilmore Girls volume (also published by SUP) years earlier and continues to light the way for researchers in the field.

As always, Hye Seung Chung has been in my corner as both a departmental colleague and a life partner, and her continued support of my work has made it possible for me to reach my goals both as a cultural critic and as a father (to our darling five-year-old Pepper, whose love of television rivals my own). My parents, Donna and Harry Diffrient, have shown me what it means to be a good parent (they even, despite my own tendency toward bad behavior as a TV-addicted boy, let me stay up late to watch Saturday Night Live when I was perhaps too young to appreciate its adult content).

Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of David Lavery, who, early in my career (and in the middle stage of his own illustrious one), recognized my potential to write about television with the same passion that he brought to his projects. I will never forget the grace, humility, and wisdom that he shared with me on multiple occasions before his passing five years ago (in 2016).

Contemporary TV Comedy

A Good Place for Bad People

Do you think I’m a bad person?

—hitman Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) inquiring about his own moral character to acting coach and mentor Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) in a Season Two episode of HBO’s Barry (2018–present)

There’s a lot of good people who do bad things.

—skateboarder Camille Palomino (Rachelle Vinberg) to fellow teenager Janay (Dede Lovelace) in a Season One episode of HBO’s Betty (2020–present)

Bad behavior is everywhere on contemporary American television, an increasingly ubiquitous yet curiously overlooked facet of the larger cultural, social, and political landscape that finds its purest, most profane and provocative expression in comedic form. From Barry (HBO, 2018–present) to Brickleberry (Comedy Central, 2012–15), today’s live-action and animated comedies are populated with unconventional protagonists and supporting characters whose words, thoughts, and actions are likely to raise the eyebrows of anyone who has been fed a strict diet of The Waltons (CBS, 1971–82), Touched By an Angel (CBS, 1994–2003), 7th Heaven (The WB, 1996–2006; The CW, 2006–7), or any of the other saccharine TV shows that have been singled out by the Parents Television Council as examples of innocuous, family-friendly entertainment.

For instance, in a Season Two episode of Roger Black and Waco O’Guin’s animated series Brickleberry (My Way or the Highway [2.07]), a couple of rangers at a fictional national park in Illinois find themselves on the ballot for the state’s upcoming governor election, but resort to a savage, self-targeting form of character assassination upon discovering that the top vote-getter will likely be literally assassinated once in office. Specifically, the fifty-five-year-old head ranger Woody Johnson (voiced by Tom Kenny), who has recently admitted to being a war criminal, and Ethel Anderson (voiced by Natasha Leggero), a female ranger half his age, each take out TV ads in which they tell the viewing audience why they should not be elected: She admits to being a raging unrepentant alcoholic as well as a Holocaust denier who promises to make her home state a safe haven for terrorists; Woody goes even further, saying that he enjoys molesting kids before kneeing a US soldier in the groin and yelling, Fuck our troops! Then, grabbing a nursing baby away from her mommy, who is seated on a park bench, he punts the child into the sky like a football before punching another bystander in the face at a women’s shelter and proclaiming, "Domestic violence isn’t a problem . . . It’s a solution. Refusing to be bested as the worst of the worst, Ethel ends her TV spot by shoving a Statue of Liberty figurine into her vagina (located just below the frame) and finally performing a blackface minstrelsy routine (Camptown Races) in front of a large US flag. All of these playfully perverse acts are edited into an outrageous montage of human depravity—a forty-five-second burst of performed badness"—that is both a put-on (not to be taken too seriously) and a very real, if slightly exaggerated, precursor to the moral vacancy witnessed by millions of Americans during the lead-up to another, more consequential yet equally farcical political election (that of 2016).

I.1. In one of the many moments of bad behavior that occur in Brickleberry, Ethel, a park ranger on the ballot of a governor’s race (who is actually trying to lose), tells and shows the public why she is unfit for office. © Comedy Central and DAMN! Show Productions

By the same token, early in the second season of Barry, the title character—a former marine-turned-hitman-turned-actor played by co-creator and Saturday Night Live [SNL] alum Bill Hader—ponders whether he is evil after gunning down a police detective in cold blood (What?! [2.04]). The officer, Det. Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), had been doggedly sniffing out clues about the recent murder of another L.A.-based thespian-in-training. That inevitably doomed investigation put Janice on Barry Berkman’s corpse-littered trail and culminated with her own death at the end of Season One, paving the way for his apparent moral quandary. In Season Two’s The Power of No (2.02), he flatly tells the flamboyant criminal kingpin Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan), who has assumed leadership of the Chechen mafia, I take no pleasure in killing people. That line, which triggers a disbelieving giggle from the baldheaded mob boss, is spoken robotically by the straight-faced comedian (who for eight seasons honed his abilities as a gifted impressionist and Emmy-nominated featured player on SNL [NBC, 1975–present]) with the spiritual emptiness or detachment of someone who has grown accustomed to his grisly line of work. Barry’s words also serve as ironic counterpoint to the series’ flashbacks to his days as a US soldier in Afghanistan. Nervously smiling from ear-to-ear, the sniper bonds with his fellow grunts on the ground upon making his first kill: a faceless civilian whom the laughing Americans call a sheep-fucker.

I.2. In a flashback to his days as a U.S. marine in Afghanistan, the title character of Barry takes aim at a villager before making his kill, a morally compromised act that informs his subsequent stints as a hitman for hire and a fledgling stage actor. © Alec Berg Productions and Hanarply

The death of the villager in the Taliban stronghold of Sangin is abstracted as a distant, offscreen occurrence in the first episode of Season Two (The Show Must Go On, Probably? [2.01]), in much the same way that Muslim wedding guests are referred to as unfortunate casualties of a drone strike issued by President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in an episode of another pitch-black comedy, HBO’s Veep (2012–19). Never shown, those invisible victims of the United States’ War on Terror and its deeply cynical leader-of-the-free-world’s career ambitions are little more than jokey evidence of her dereliction of duty, only slightly more troubling than Selina’s willingness to hand Tibet over to China if such a move will help her power-grabbing reelection bid. If the grotesquely caricatured rangers of Brickleberry National Park can trust that the electorate will do the right thing and select someone less evil than themselves for high office, no such comfort is to be found in Veep, which brazenly suggests that voters might not be all that bothered by the deaths of foreigners and other confirmations of presidential war crimes. As Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn), the White House Chief of Staff remarks in Season Seven’s Oslo (7.06), Americans don’t give a flying fatwa if you drone a bunch of Muslims. That comment, like hundreds more in the f-bomb-littered Veep (both during and after creator Armando Iannucci’s four-year tenure as the series’ showrunner), is withering in its frankness, satirically framing US foreign policy as something to laugh at and cry about. Even though it is difficult to stomach, Ben’s statement can be quickly digested as a throwaway line, leaving us little time—before the next bit of bracing dialogue in this fast-paced, puckishly profane comedy series—to ponder the public’s continued support for militaristic uses of unmanned aerial vehicles as a counterterrorism measure resulting in civilian casualties.¹

Judging from the online commentary surrounding them, pleasure—the thing that is absent in Barry’s life—is precisely what these critical darlings provide to audiences who can tolerate not just bad but truly abhorrent behavior. In Barry, this can be chalked up partially to Bill Hader’s deadpan delivery as the soft-spoken assassin who, blessed with being able to witness the atrocities of war (to borrow the words of Barry’s acting coach Gene Cousineau [Henry Winkler]), appears to be working through his undiagnosed PTSD in pursuit of a better, more peaceful, and honorable (but no-less-deceptive) life and career on the stage. Perhaps some of the enjoyment that comes from soaking up this award-winning HBO series can also be attributed to our own questionable thrill in vicariously witnessing—episode-­after-serialized-episode—a number of socially corrosive and physically destructive acts play out at a safe distance, as if seen from the vantage of a trained marksman. Although contained within the parameters of scripted fiction, those moments are unconstrained in their ability to affectively move us through whiplash tonal shifts, unexpected dramatic twists, and absurd incongruities or comical juxtapositions (e.g., Barry’s friend Monroe Fuches [Stephen Root] using superglue to bind the knife gash in his back; the protagonist ducking bullets in his bedroom while his girlfriend, Sally [Sarah Goldberg], casually Skypes with her mom in the adjoining room). And there is something to be said about the showrunner’s apparent lack of interest in giving the audience what they want, a feature that Dom Nero (a TV critic for Esquire) notes in his appreciative take on Barry. As the critic states, the titular hero is emotionally cut off from the world in much the same way that Zach Galifianakis’s character is in Baskets (FX, 2016–present), another unconventional comedy that skips the sentimental stuff in favor of some very dark shit.²

Although set in very different social milieus, both of these series focus on lonely saps who struggle to suppress their feelings of being emotionally wounded from past traumas, something that ironically resonates with audiences despite the absence of any textual signifiers of heroic achievement or personal success that have traditionally been found in commercially lucrative TV shows (especially prior to the emergence of gritty crime dramas such as The Sopranos [HBO, 1999–2007] and Breaking Bad [AMC, 2008–13]). Finally, my own—and presumably other critics’—semi-delight in watching Barry, tempered though it is by the fatigue of consuming yet another redemption narrative about a difficult man (i.e., one featuring a loathsome yet compelling antihero in the mold of Tony Soprano [James Gandolfini] or Walter White [Bryan Cranston]),³ comes from knowing something about the creators of the show. Alec Berg, a former writer on NBC’s now-quaintly nihilistic 1990s hit Seinfeld (1989–98) as well as an executive producer on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–present), shares showrunner duties on Barry with Hader and has imported some of the quirkier beats of those earlier cringe-inducing programs into his latest co-creation.

To varying degrees, the above programs, along with countless others, have attracted mainstream audiences as well as smaller circles of devoted fans while pushing buttons in ways that would have been inconceivable thirty years ago. Prior to the days when Seinfeld and its spiritual meta-sequel Curb Your Enthusiasm mined humor from once-verboten topics (including graverobbing, group sex, incest, masturbation, and post-swimming penis shrinkage), network and cable TV writers, producers, and performers generally steered away from material that might offend viewers and advertisers, believing that any such incitements would have had a negative effect on a media organization’s or parent company’s financial intake. The bottom line was thus the topmost concern among broadcasters, whose decisions throughout the first decades of the medium’s commercial history (1940s–1960s) were dictated by the industry’s self-regulatory ethical standards (formalized through the 1952 Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters). They were furthermore guided by a principle that executives referred to as least offensive programming (or LOP).

As Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc observe in their historical overview of the US television industry, the term LOP spells out how artistic or provocative shows might not be the best choice for primetime, that peak viewing period or programming block each night when audiences of various ages (from older adults to presumably impressionable youngsters) can be counted on as reliably pliable consumers.⁴ Even those TV producers of the 1950s and 1960s who are remembered as being brave for tackling then-taboo subjects within the talk-show format—for example, drug abuse, gay rights, racial bigotry, and the nuclear arms race—were far more worried about offending their patrons than are today’s showrunners when it came to overseeing fictional comedies and dramas. Posthumously inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in recognition of his handsomely mounted adaptations of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1958), The Moon and Sixpence (1960), The Glass Menagerie (1973), and other literary classics, David Susskind is one such person, a pioneer of intelligent programming who—sensitive to his sponsors’ interest in pre-sold product (like small-screen remakes of big-screen movies) as a way of garnering mass appeal—freely admitted that he could not in good conscience roll dice on a quarter of a million dollars of somebody else’s money by producing something that might antagonize the public.⁵ During that postwar period, when superficially comforting sitcoms such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952–66), Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954–55, 1958–60; NBC, 1958–60), The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960–68), and The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962–71) were ratings hits, TV programs were allowed to be amusing or intriguing, as Curtin and Shattuc point out, but "above all they should be tolerable."⁶

What was intolerable, at least in the eyes of many sponsors and network chiefs, was any subject that might provoke passionate responses, including moral indignation or outrage, leading to a disgruntled turning of the dial.⁷ Raunchy jokes were unthinkable, although gifted comedians such as Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, and Red Skelton managed to smuggle off-color humor into their televised standup acts and slapstick skits through innuendo or winking asides to the audience; moments of subterfuge through which they were able to sneak semi-salacious material past the censors.⁸ Anatomical nudity of any kind, even of cartoon animals (e.g., the law-enforcing horse Quick Draw McGraw, the unflappable penguin Tennessee Tuxedo, the bowtie-wearing drawling dog Huckleberry Hound, etc.), was a no-no. And the kind of body humor that many of us are accustomed to at the present time, such as the sound of a person belching or farting and the sight of someone vomiting or defecating, would have been beyond the pale a mere four decades ago. Such potentially objectionable content is a central feature of recent cultural productions, especially television comedies of the past three decades that trade on spectators’ tolerance for repellent or unsavory behavior and forge new definitions of badness in the process. That shifting definitional matrix, formed not only by televisual representations but by (mis)perceptions, stereotypes, and the ideological baggage that viewers bring to small-screen fictions, constitutes what I refer to as a social imaginary, an organizing principle through which society comes to grips with itself as a potentially knowable collective made up of ultimately unknowable others.

Social Imaginaries and Badness as a Cultural Construct

The idea of an imagined community, which becomes a real one when we all think about it in the same way and act ‘as if’ it were really there, rests upon this creative capacity for imagining and instituting the social that defines us as humans.

—Graeme Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 2.

This book draws upon existing theories of social imaginaries (e.g., the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Benedict Anderson, Henri Lefebvre, and others) as well as important studies written by media scholars who focus on gender and genre (including Julie D’Acci, Amanda D. Lotz, Lori Landay, David Marc, and Jason Mittell) to put forth novel approaches to TV comedy. In doing so, I spotlight several recently produced cable and network programs that, despite their popularity or critical acclaim, have yet to generate much scholarly commentary, such as Strangers With Candy (Comedy Central, 1999–2000), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX, 2005–12; FXX, 2013–present), Ugly Americans (Comedy Central, 2010–12), The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012–15; Hulu, 2015–17), Mom (CBS, 2013–present), BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–20), Documentary Now! (IFC, 2015–present), and Flaked (Netflix, 2016–17). I also analyze historical precedents of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that similarly contributed to an evolving understanding of badness as a cultural construct, such as The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–56), The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66), Get Smart (NBC, 1965–69; CBS, 1969–70), All in the Family (CBS, 1971–79), M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83), and Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97). Far from being an inherent or ingrained characteristic of particular offenders (of laws, of social etiquette, or of good taste), bad behavior circulates within the culture at large as a way of seeing, one that—like Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective consciousness—is neither reducible to nor derived from individual consciousness.⁹ That is, thanks to conventionalized codes of representation and the ritual enactment of particular types in popular culture, we form a picture of society in a way that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve outside of symbolic language. But that picture smudges—becomes blurry over a surprisingly short period of time—before new images are traced over it; a constellation of signifiers that is likewise temporary or subject to change, as Manfred B. Steger has noted.¹⁰

Lest we believe that such epistemological frameworks exist only in the imagination and are thus not real, Steger reminds us that they materialize through common practices and deep-seated communal attachments.¹¹ In his book The Rise of the Global Imaginary, Steger states that social imaginaries should not be dismissed as phantasms or mental fabrications floating above us in the ether. Seemingly intangible, they are in fact grounded in the material conditions that make actual social practices possible. As I hope to illustrate, television’s decades-long contributions to the creation and circulation of these frameworks are tied to its unique features as a communication medium that takes up real (physical) space in our lives while endowing abstract (metaphysical) ideas with the solidity of corporeal performances: those of the comedians and actors who collectively embody what a society—and specifically its most maligned or vilified members (from alcoholics and drug addicts to criminals and prisoners to cult members and other so-called monsters)—might look like.

As of this writing, surprisingly few scholars—either in media studies or in sociology—have turned to the above conceptualization of the social imaginary as a foundation for the critical-historical analysis of US television programming. In his 2012 book Television and the Moral Imaginary: Society Through the Small Screen, Tim Dant gives his readers a rare look into just such an approach, productively building upon the theories of Castoriadis, Taylor, Anderson, and Lefebvre while crafting hermeneutic tools that will serve future studies well.¹² One of Dant’s most important observations is that, as a symbolic network of ideas through which a society makes sense of itself, the social imaginary (or what he refers to as the moral imaginary) is not an ethical system from which rules of behavior could be derived.¹³ We do not necessarily learn how to be bad or good from watching TV shows, in other words; but we do witness the concretizing of mainstream and alternative worldviews or values through repetitive representations and adherence to genre formulas. One thing that contemporary TV teaches us, whether in ostensibly brainless reality shows such as Jersey Shore (MTV, 2009–12) and Keeping Up with the Kardashians (E!, 2007–present) or in high-minded, overtly prestigious forms of pedagogical television such as The Good Place (NBC, 2016–20), is that network and cable channels’ latest offerings—the new situations and new characters that Dant alludes to in his book—are invariably revisions of previous forms.¹⁴ That combination of creativity and tradition, innovation and repetition, makes television especially noteworthy as a purveyor of widespread attitudes, one whose historical continuities and ruptures are neatly replicated in the ceaseless flow yet commercial interruptibility of a medium that, at its industrial roots, is fundamentally contradictory.

TV’s paradoxical status as a consensus medium prone to eliciting antisocial behavior on the part of impressionable audiences (a contentious claim largely discredited by researchers) as well as kneejerk reactions from its fiercest naysayers is perhaps most nakedly apparent today, in this age of Family Guy (Fox, 1999–present), South Park (Comedy Central, 1997–present), and other animated sitcoms that might strike some viewers as being simultaneously liberal and conservative, progressive and regressive (as unproductive as those binaries are).¹⁵ Yet American television has long been snagged not only between dueling ideological perspectives but also between the artistic ambitions of talented storytellers (from Norman Lear to Jenji Kohan) and the advertising dollars that make the delivery of those potentially upsetting or offensive stories possible. This is a line of argument that I will pursue through selected case studies over the course of eight interlocking chapters.

Rather than take up the challenge of unpacking one overarching social imaginary from which the current state of US television programming can be generalized, I focus on three subcategories of culturally constructed alterity, looking specifically at what I term the alcoholic imaginary, the cult imaginary, and the monstrous imaginary (devoting two or three chapters to each). In doing so, I am following in the footsteps of other critics and historians who have explored everything from the urban imaginary on view in the British version of Queer as Folk (Channel 4, 1999–2000) to the female mafia imaginary in contemporary Italian literature.¹⁶ These and other subcategories might alternatively be grouped together under the umbrella term the mediatized imaginary, which Elizabeth Klaver has coined as a catchall designation of the way that film, television, and other forms of media construct individual subjectivity in relation to a broad community of others.¹⁷ Inspired by the work of media theorist John Caughie, Klaver’s book Performing Television makes the case that individuals find themselves within a communal identity, situated alongside virtually present but physically distant others, once they have stepped into the reservoir of delimiting images upon which so much popular culture—past and present—is predicated. Her conceptualization is not unlike German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s notion of an intersubjectively shared lifeword that comprises the massive background of the public sphere, where communicatively acting subjects develop a mutual understanding of one another through official and unofficial channels.¹⁸

This Habermasian lifeworld that, owing to its ubiquity, has receded into the background and all but disappeared from view, is furthermore akin to Steger’s description of the global imaginary as a familiar ocean of circulating symbols (such as those of a small-town parade, replete with patriotically dressed onlookers, a marching band, waving flags, street vendors, soldiers in uniforms, and military planes roaring overhead—all of which are lent an aura of normality through the repetition of holiday celebrations).¹⁹ By focusing on humorous depictions of bad behavior on American television, I hope to show how audiences’ familiarity with the tropes associated with different types of stereotypically dangerous activities (from drinking oneself into a stupor to engaging in criminal activity to joining a cult) compensates for the disconcerting uncertainty that otherwise attends such potentially life-altering occurrences. However, in making the world safe for cultural consumption, sitcoms conceal as much as they reveal, masking the rationale for socially deviant or deleterious behavior behind figures of ridicule whose motives are rarely disclosed fully over the course of a thirty-minute episode.

Extending Steger’s oceanic metaphor, cultural representations, like the proverbial water inside the fish tank (an analogy favored by Marshall McLuhan and subsequent generations of media ecologists), have become invisible to the extent that they are hypervisible, an ever-present but hardly noticeable part of the artificially natural habitat that we call home. Here, home denotes the actual physical dwelling in which television is as much a member of the family (figuratively) as it is a piece of furniture (literally). But the word also connotes the larger imagined community—namely, the nation—that, ironically, can only be grasped in the abstract, and which is no less a construct than the essentializing images too often mistaken as an accurate reflection of reality. Like a funhouse of mirrors (to borrow Klaver’s fittingly carnivalesque metaphor), the mediatized imaginary presents a distorted view of the world, pulling it like taffy into grotesque yet recognizable shapes.²⁰ Because we are encouraged by advertisers, network executives, and writers/showrunners to recognize ourselves in those misshapen images, it is not too much of a stretch to equate the physically embodied act of watching TV to that of standing before a funhouse mirror, peering at the person for whom that world was ostensibly created. But this is the illusion that the mediatized imaginary (or social imaginary) foists upon audiences, who mistakenly imagine themselves as subjects rather than objects of ideology, and who take false comfort in the belief that their lives—unlike those of fictional TV characters—are self-determined and shaped by free will (rather than, say, market forces and government policies). Nevertheless, reflection (in both senses of the word) is possible when audiences cast their collective gaze at individuals whose excessively coded badness is designed not to be taken too seriously (i.e., it is meant to be laughed at), thereby giving rise to the possibility of negotiated, resistant, or counter-hegemonic readings of ironic, parodic, or satirical televisual texts.

In Klaver’s words, it is primarily the viewer’s act of looking, and to a lesser extent listening, that generates entry into an imaginary order. However, because of the interruptive quality of television programming with its constant insertion of advertisements, the fissures and gaps that are unique to the medium make it possible for audiences to momentarily break the spell and to glimpse TV’s fantasy landscape for what it really is.²¹ Hence broadcast and cable networks’ need for reliably repetitive representations—for instance, the same kinds of sitcom characters (e.g., the lovable loser, the neurotic, the logical smart one, etc.)²²—that she and other media scholars conceive of as suturing devices; or as means through which television storytellers are able to maintain their hold on audiences who project themselves onscreen (not unlike the way that shot/reverse-shots in cinematic texts encourage spectatorial identification with one or more narrative agents across a volley of looks). As I will explain in the forthcoming chapters, the repeated appearance of socially wayward figures on the small screen—from raging alcoholics to brainwashed cult members to actual monsters who are merely exaggerated extrapolations of our own inner demons (like the title characters in The Munsters or the undead, flesh-eating real-estate agent played by Drew Barrymore in Santa Clarita Diet [Netflix, 2017–19])—has the dual effect of reducing complex individuals to recognizable types while neutralizing the presumed threats that they pose. Such representations not only provide strangely comforting reminders that badness is a cultural construct, but also prompt us to reflect on our own unspoken proclivities for antisocial behavior, if only in passing.

Without subscribing to monolithic conceptualizations of audiences, which tend to focus on the short-term or long-term effects of television-viewing and posit direct or indirect correlations between media messages and spectatorial behavior, I wish to explore how social imaginaries solidify through the reciprocal interplay between text and context as well as between cultural producers and agentive publics. Though static in many ways, the sitcom, like other forms of comedic programming, is a moving target. As soon as a television scholar has an example of the genre in her sights, it flits away and is replaced by an equally instructive but fleeting case study. Of course, context is no less fluid or prone to shift than a televisual text, and what was once disallowed or frowned upon decades ago (such as scenes of sexual foreplay and intercourse) is now the new normal thanks to changing social mores and a desire for greater authenticity or realism in small-screen fictions.

Conversely, certain activities that were commonly portrayed in 1950s and 1960s sitcoms, such as cigarette-smoking (on view in I Love Lucy [CBS, 1951–57], The Danny Thomas Show [ABC, 1953–57; CBS, 1957–64], The Dick Van Dyke Show [CBS, 1961–66], and other sitcoms made prior to the 1964 Surgeon General’s report on tobacco use), are not likely to appear in contemporary programs, save for Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15), Pan Am (ABC, 2011–12), and other period dramas that are set during previous decades. To be sure, worse things than cigarette-smoking take place in Mad Men, which depicts the womanizing ad executive Don Draper (Jon Hamm)’s addictive tendencies (e.g., alcoholism, serial adultery, etc.) and shows his agency’s office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) being sexually harassed by her male bosses and company clients, slut-shamed by a few of her female colleagues, and raped by her fiancé Greg (Samuel Page) in episodes that suggest that a more accurate title for the series might be Bad Men (to borrow a recurring bit from Late Night with Seth Meyers [NBC, 2014–present]).²³ The comparative harmfulness of particular acts—a matter perhaps best left to medical doctors, psychologists, and social scientists—nevertheless continues to attract the interest of communication and media theorists who treat television-viewing as an addiction in its own right; one that, if undertaken with the regularity with which ten-drinks-a-day Draper consumes rye whiskey, could have deleterious effects.²⁴

From Bad Uses to Bad Users: Junk TV and TV Addicts

No TV and no beer make Homer something something.

—Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) explaining to his wife Marge (voiced by Julie Kavner) why he is in such a murderously bad mood, in a Season Six episode of The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present)

Public consternation about the dire consequences of excessive television consumption can be traced back to the earliest published works about the medium’s addictiveness, such as the article I Was Cured of TV, which appeared in the pages of a 1955 issue of Coronet (and which was echoed by several subsequent calls to protect innocent children from its seductiveness in other magazines).²⁵ Penned by sportswriter Edward A. Batchelor and subtitled The Story of a Confirmed Addict and His Long, Hard Fight Back to Life, this facetiously worded yet fearmongering article came out the same year that the US News and World Report published a series of interviews with people saying they could no longer control their television use, including a New Jersey housewife who compared the medium to a monstrous creature that had crept into her family’s lives and mesmerized them.²⁶ Such discourse amplified an already-growing concern that was sneaking into TV shows around the same time, including domestic sitcoms such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Honeymooners where the middle-class and working-class breadwinners of their respective families are shown falling under the spell of late-night programming and regressing to a childlike state. The Pajama Game (3.22), an episode of the former series that aired on April 1, 1955, reveals that it is the father, Ozzie Nelson, and not his two young sons, who is unable to use the medium in a responsible, adult way, to quote Lynn Spigel,²⁷ in much the same manner that Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is portrayed as an easily triggered viewer of the boob tube in an episode of the latter program.

Titled TV or Not TV and originally broadcast on October 1, 1955, the pilot episode of The Honeymooners introduces audiences to Ralph and his wife Alice (Audrey Meadows), who—in the first of several marital spats that will flare up over the show’s thirty-nine-episode run—bicker about the prospect of buying their first television set. Refusing to back down from her cheapskate husband’s blustery protests, Alice desperately wants a TV, as she has grown tired of being cooped up inside their tiny, sparsely furnished Bensonhurst apartment where she spends all day at the stove and icebox (while he, a $62.50-a-week bus driver, works outside). I wanna look at Liberace! she exclaims, highlighting how housewives might find temporary comfort or respite from domestic duties through cultural performances that are far removed from their prison-like kitchens. In the words of John T. Caldwell, although Ralph seems content with the dingy working-class tenement that the couple have inhabited unchanged for more than a decade, Alice seems to know that culture exists ‘out there,’ and this early peek into their private lives indicates how she is more worldly (relatively speaking) than he is.²⁸ As will happen repeatedly throughout the series, the female character wins this standoff as a result of her intellectual superiority to the male character (establishing a template for generations of sitcoms revolving around married life). But it is Ralph and his upstairs neighbor Ed (Art Carney)—with whom he splits the cost of this modern electrical appliance—who spend the second half of TV or Not TV glued to the set, well into the wee hours (so late, in fact, that Alice, blanket in hand, has to tuck them in for the night with motherly condescension).²⁹ Watching the DuMont network’s kid-friendly sci-fi serial Captain Video and His Video Rangers before switching over to a televised prize-fight, the two men are infantilized in the presence of a medium that eventually turns them against one another. Putting up their dukes like boxers, they each claim ownership of the set until Alice finally defuses the situation. Ultimately, once she has seen the effect that such mindless entertainment can have on a weak-willed individual like her husband, Alice admits that, for once in his life, Ralph is right: "We never should’ve gotten a television