The Sitcom Reader, Second Edition: America Re-viewed, Still Skewed

Updated version of an engaging overview of the television situation comedy.

This updated and expanded anthology offers an engaging overview of one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of television programming: the sitcom. Through an analysis of formulaic conventions, the contributors address critical identities such as race, gender, and sexuality, and overarching structures such as class and family. Organized by decade, chapters explore postwar domestic ideology and working-class masculinity in the 1950s, the competing messages of power and subordination in 1960s magicoms, liberated women and gender in 1970s workplace comedies and 1980s domestic comedies, liberal feminism in the 1990s, heteronormative narrative strategies in the 2000s, and unmasking myths of gender in the 2010s. From I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners to Roseanne, Cybill, and Will & Grace to Transparent and many others in between, The Sitcom Reader provides a comprehensive examination of this popular genre that will help readers think about the shows and themselves in new contexts.

Mary M. Dalton is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Wake Forest University and author of The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies, Second Revised Edition.

Laura R. Linder, a retired Associate Professor of Media Studies, is the author of Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox. Together they coauthored Teacher TV: Sixty Years of Teachers on Television.

For access to an online resource created by Mary Dalton, which includes interviews with contributors and course lectures, visit: The Sitcom Reader: A Companion Website @ https://build.zsr.wfu.edu/sitcomreader