Diverse Quality Comedies in an Era of White Precarity

This chapter returns to the cultural context described in the Introduction and first chapter to explore what it means that the same historical conjuncture produced both Horrible White People shows and Diverse Quality Comedies, a broad range of content about and by people of color. Insecure, Master of None, Atlanta, Dear White People, and Friends from College are primary case studies because they most closely mirror the white-cast shows with regard to aesthetics, affect, and tone. Their central characters navigate the same emotional and financial obstacles as the millennial white women and men in the rest of the book, while representing culturally specific experiences of people of color in the 2010s United States that push back against the recentering of white people’s trauma in Trump’s America. Through these comparisons, the chapter argues that Insecure, Master of None, Atlanta, and others offer a counterpoint to the recentering of affluent but under-siege whiteness on so many “quality” programs but that they also have to carefully negotiate their diverse representations in relation to authenticity, affective resonance, and legibility to the main audience demographics and studio or network heads that continue to be predominantly white.

Conclusion

Because so much of the book focuses on niche-marketed programming or shows with a very specific politicized, classed, and racialized address, in summing up the arguments and impacts of this precarious whiteness, the conclusion offers a mass-market counterpoint to some of the relatively obscure programs discussed in the rest of the book. This chapter analyzes racial protests in US sports leagues, primarily the national anthem protests in the National Football League spearheaded by the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The NFL is the most-watched programming in the United States, and similar TV industrial shifts to those described earlier in the book have spurred the league and platforms with television rights to the games to push American football into the UK market as well. This chapter returns for a final time to the historical conjuncture of recession, changing TV technologies and business practices, and the heightened visibility of racial and gender inequality to think through what happens beyond the tiny target audiences of Horrible White People shows as the cycle draws to an end and to insist that the cultural discourses of white supremacy that feed Horrible White People shows are visible everywhere.

Introduction

Horrible White People shows focus on liberals confronting the structures keeping their hegemonic power intact while seeing the normalized neoliberal dreams to which they have aspired for decades collapse around them. In wallowing in their despair, these characters consolidate their identity around a gendered whiteness, often obscuring or overshadowing the plight of characters of color around them. The large scale of this programming cycle, as well as its address to middle- and upper-class audiences, highlights how educated, urban-dwelling white liberals, presumed to mobilize for civil rights and vote for left-leaning politicians, react with an ineffectual fear that neither returns them to their former status and security nor leaves room to organize for those whom they claim to support. The introduction sets out the contexts in which Horrible White People shows proliferated: recession, a postracial ethos, changing TV technologies and industry patterns, emerging feminisms, and shifting generic norms. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Horrible White People representations and business practices mirror and help reproduce the ineffectual responses of liberals and progressives to growing class- and race-based inequalities and that they are indeed part of a broadly neoliberal economy and ideology that continues to worsen those divides.

Alternative Families and White Fragility

This chapter zeroes in on Horrible White People shows’ generic structures, aesthetic innovations, and relationship to sitcom history, focusing particularly on how the sitcom has historically perpetuated an idealized form of aspirational white domesticity and contained, incorporated, or appropriated racial and ethnic diversity. This chapter traces the significant ways Horrible White People shows break from sitcom conventions and highlight how rather than celebrate or romanticize kinship and solidarity as the genre’s traditional focus on idealized nuclear families does, this cycle of bleakly comic, white-cast rom-com sitcoms wallows in the anxieties and neuroses of contemporary alternative family structures and relationships. These failed white subjects disrupt the utopic family sitcom and romantic comedy’s generic structures with serialized plots and replace the fantasy of familial unity and heterosexual coupling with self-destructive narcissism. The darker lighting, isolating single-camera cinematography, and grimmer aesthetics of these shows centralize families that are unable to protect members from the outside world. So, by delving into the high-production-value aesthetics and the usually bleak affects of the cycle, the focus is on the ways in which these dystopian white couples and families function to either justify or come to grips with the failures of contemporary white political and social liberalism. Horrible White People shows challenge the conventions and histories of the sitcom genre to appear progressive, self-critical, antiracist, inclusive, and feminist, but they ultimately recentralize white suffering under the seemingly protective guise of liberal social critique. The disillusion with family and lack of narrative closure in these shows leaves the white protagonists suspended in a space of precarity, unable to fulfill their neoliberal capacity without the safety of family, jobs, or often even ambition.

Peak TV and the Spreadability of Transatlantic Horrible White People

Expanding the sketch of the conjuncture of significant cultural shifts leading to the ideological centralization of white precarity outlined in the introduction, this chapter uses TV industry studies to map the correlated changes in TV production and distribution models. It illustrates how content providers prioritize race and class identities and shared affects over national identities, finding commonalities in revenue-driven definitions of “quality audiences” before commonalities of geography. The chapter focuses on the disruption to the TV industry created by internet-distributed portals like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Now, especially their increased production of a certain type of “quality” fictional programming meant to attract an “imagined community” of upscale transnational consumers. This chapter thus examines how changes in the technology and business models of transnational television distribution have played a huge role in the rapid spread of the Horrible White People programming cycle, thereby contributing to the continued invisibility or normalization of white supremacy in the United States and Britain and confirming that television is still a dominant cultural and ideological force in society, despite the surplus of content, fragmentation of audiences, and other industrial changes that may have appeared to diffuse its impact in the era of “Peak TV.”

Emergent Feminisms and Racial Discourses of Televisual Girlfriendship

This chapter focuses on the cycle’s integration of emerging feminist discourses and its disruption of the postfeminist sensibility by interrogating its focus on female friendship. It highlights how the centrality of female friendship demonstrates the cycle’s liberal politics and therefore its appeal to upscale liberal or progressive audiences. The close, complex, honest relationships between main female friends on these shows, like Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, Gretchen and Lindsay on You’re the Worst, Quinn and Rachel on UnReal, or Rebecca and Paula on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, allow them a critical self-awareness to interrogate gender norms, whiteness, and millennial culture. But the cycle’s incredibly insular and encouraging friendships also obscure racial politics and diversity by recentering whiteness and celebrating a particularly narrow type of liberal feminist girl culture that also frequently centralizes white fragility. Thinking through the critical humor and other modes of political discourse of these friendships within the context of television’s racist and postfeminist roots, this chapter situates these representations of female friendships in the context of contemporary empowerment rhetoric to interrogate the potential and limitations of television’s representational politics in this era of the reemerging or mainstreaming of feminism.