A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson.
While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship…readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics.”
Within our televised small screens and the world they inhabit, bad behavior persists in social structures throughout different television media landscapes. While the ethics of onscreen behavior are often situated in states of moral conflict, TV programming promotes, criticizes, and reflects certain behavioral patterns which can be deemed as either utterly abhorrent, humorously acceptable, or both. Across both analog and digital spaces, social depictions of ethically questionable habits, belief systems, and prejudiced attitudes exist in conjunction with television programs and the content that they appear to encourage. While visual media arts have always provided some critical commentary on the societies in which they depict, in television studies (specifically, the sitcom genre), we find consistent issues of bad behavior that emerge in a large portion of sitcom programming.
In David Scott Diffrient’s Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television (Syracuse University Press, 2022), he assesses these themes and narrative patterns from early sitcoms of the mid-twentieth century to contemporary live-action and animated programs. Diffrient’s extended dialogues on these three main subjects evidence an eclectic passion for a variety of television shows over several decades. From Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972-77) to Veronica Mars (UPN, 2004-6; The CW, 2006-7), and The Munsters (CBS, 1964-66) to Bojack Horseman (Netflix, 2014-20), Diffrient’s Bad Behavior surveys a broad medley of TV sitcoms and animated shows throughout the years. Most of these case studies probe how cultural reflections of unethical behavior have maintained underlying assumptions of prejudice levied against characters deemed monstrous in the real world and evaluate why comically grotesque characters exist with such commonality in fictional programming.
Throughout this book, Diffrient considers three main conceptions of a “social imaginary,” which he defines as “an organizing principle through which society comes to grips with itself as a potentially knowable collective made up of ultimately unknowable ‘others’” (6-7). He further states that the seemingly intangible conditions of the social imaginary are grounded in material conditions that make social practice viable. The abstract notion of these social ideas is materialized by corporeal performances from actors and animated characters and is further actualized, materially, by physical objects like television sets and streaming devices that take up literal space in our environments. Furthermore, they also instigate actions and attitudes that operate in the physical world. In Bad Behavior, Diffrient observes three major televisual representations through the “alcoholic imaginary,” the “cult imaginary,” and the “monstrous imaginary” (9). The first section, “TV’s Alcoholic Imaginary: Comic Drunks, Militaristic Drinking, and the Rhetoric of Discovery” offers three chapters that survey different depictions and scrutinies of the alcoholic imaginary in television programs throughout several decades. Part two, “TV’s Cult Imaginary: Comic Cultists, Pathologized Fandoms, and the Rhetoric of ‘Crazy’ Talk” examines representations of cults, or New Religious Movements (NRMs), on the silver screen, along with cult fandom surrounding specific TV shows. Against the grain of generally negative depictions of NRMs throughout much of television media, Diffrient provides alternate examples of religious organizations across two chapters that tread the line of taboo within an ostensible, cultural normalcy.
The final section, “TV’s Monstrous Imaginary: Comic Creeps, Neighborly Terrors, and the Rhetoric of Trump” concludes the text by examining several aspects of the monstrous imaginary. In the following three chapters, Diffrient analyses the televisual origins of Halloween and how annual “Special Episodes” for various shows reinforce cultural conceptions of the spooky holiday. He also offers important considerations of ethical monstrosity in depicting non-literal monsters like Rosanne Barr in her eponymous program Rosanne (ABC, 1988-1997), and how monstrous behavior manifests both in fictional narratives within the show and extra-dietetically in socio-political realities. The final chapter explores humorous and positive representations of monsters in the sixties sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family (ABC, 1964-66), whose harmless and misunderstood social practices have both prosocial implications and harbor important (occasionally paradoxical) critical messages regarding the racial representation of American minorities. These two programs specifically provide comical critiques of unconventional characterizations which both upset and reinforce social structures inherent to the sitcom.
Chapter one charts some of the history and context surrounding the archetypal characterization of the comic drunk and how these function in forming its social imaginary. In tracing early onscreen depictions of performers imbibing (e.g., Arthur Housman, Jack Norton, and Charlie Chaplin) Diffrient notes how the comic drunk has maintained a “hypervisibility” in narrative onscreen media for well over a century, while also being critically understudied despite their ubiquitous presence in contemporary TV (40). He addresses aspects of performative drunkenness (at times, inspired by real-life experience from the performers), as well as how having a “good time” through aspired inebriation can often lead to “bad” and “destructive” behavior. This aspect of alcohol consumption presents interesting contradictions within this social imaginary “that sees mirth and misery as two sides of the same coin” (49). The second chapter further examines the effects of inebriation and addiction in M*A*S*H, the interrelatedness of alcohol and war, and how addictive behaviors onscreen mirror similar ethics involving television viewing habits (i.e., binge-watching). Diffrient concludes that M*A*S*H and other military programs present contradictory messages about the social utility of drinking in the alcoholic imaginary.
Chapter three focuses on AA meetings as a dubious therapeutic space wherein to analyze the ethics of drunkenness. Diffrient acknowledges how the line between joke- and truth-telling is often blurred in television narratives that seem to undermine the efficacy of AA support and instead elevate the humorous effects of impertinence. Diffrient’s survey of the divisive ethics and methods of AA as a quasi-religious organization, which is often narratively exploited for comedic/dramatic potential, segues into the next major section of the book, which further explores “the paradoxical features of the cult imaginary” (133).
Chapters four and five explore the lineage of the cult imaginary as it became more engrained in pop culture consciousness from the 1970s through the 1990s. The increased presence of violent cults during this time, and the media’s attention to this cultural phenomenon, sparked fear in the public that has since aroused suspicion against most fringe religions. In response to the misconception that all cults are deviant, Diffrient uses Veronica Mars (UPN/CW, 2004-07) and Strangers with Candy (Comedy Central, 1999-2000) as two generically diverse case studies that otherwise evidence nuanced and even positive representations of NRMs. Select episodes within these programs keenly oppose the almost cult-like proclivities for common television narratives to conceive of alternative religions and religious practices as a monolithic reflection of the infamous, realistic cult groups which have operated with horrific consequences over the past half-century or so. Moreover, he also notes how the deviance and sexual taboos which the public has often associated with NRMs downplay historical abuse enacted in domestic spaces – a common setting within sitcoms, as well as a literal TV viewing space.
Diffrient’s critical interests in the complex ideologies of bad behavior on the small screen provide productive approaches in further interrogating one of the most longstanding and influential genres of television media: the beloved sitcom.”
Chapter six surveys a broad range of television programs, analyzing cultural trends and social depictions of “Special Episodes” that revolve around seasonal Halloween subjects. Diffrient writes that the built-in intertextuality of the holiday provides sitcom writers with a panoply of opportunities to integrate pop culture references into their programming. He also adds that “Halloween can be seen as kind of a ‘release valve’ for culture at large,” meaning that everyday “moral” citizens can indulge in deviant fantasies and monstrous personas without necessarily breaching cultural taboos (198). Chapter seven focuses specifically on Roseanne, exploring ways in which the show occasionally offers semi-progressive ideologies about queer representation and class struggle. Unfortunately, the show’s titular star has undermined these more liberal-minded ideals through her recent prejudiced rhetoric. Her extratextual behavior aligns itself with former president Donald Trump’s deeply troubling attitudes involving political subversion, belittlingly minority American perspectives, and making inflammatory commentary that actualizes monstrosity. Roseanne’s own caustic actions in real life belie the more positive social messages of her show and, instead, reveal her once amusing persona as something more harmful than humorous. As Diffrient exemplifies in his final chapter, in discussing The Addams Family, The Munsters, The Flintstones (ABC, 1960-66), and other mid-century American sitcoms, the fear of the monstrous Other has underlying racial tensions concerning grossly misguided “threats” to the white, middle-class hegemony, which otherwise defines the sitcom genre. Interestingly, the final two chapters of the book complicate the “self v. Other,” “good v. bad” dichotomies of the monstrous imaginary, by evidencing both malicious human exploits and benign monster activities.
Diffrient’s critical interests in the complex ideologies of bad behavior on the small screen provide productive approaches in further interrogating one of the most longstanding and influential genres of television media: the beloved sitcom. His extended argumentation situates a broad collection of sitcom programming within critical analyses of their cultural depictions of the real world, social imaginaries reinforced onscreen, and the crucial relationship of the two. Through this, television media presents to us the opportunity to both intensify and question our ideological relationship between fictional and literal behavior. The longstanding stereotypes that inherently shape these three social imaginaries also work to uphold certain hegemonic ideals of social behavior, and the sitcom’s most established fixture of social messaging: a return to the status quo.
In summary, David Scott Diffrient’s Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television investigates these three social imaginaries as longstanding stereotypes and concepts of entertainment in television history. Instead of levying blame against television producers for perpetuating these types of bad behavior and endorsing them in the public, and cultural sphere, Diffrient posits an oscillating relationship between these social imaginaries as they appear fictionally on the small screen and realistically in the outside world. Diffrient’s avidity for his subjects of the TV-infused social imaginary comes across in his diversity of case studies and thoughtful textual analyses. However, these discussions do, at times, appear akin to a stream-of-consciousness writing style, which inevitably leads to more extended sentence structures. The author’s diction is very reader-friendly and aligns nicely with the humorous dimensions of his subjects. And while his syntax is often a bit breathless, the smart levity of his style shines through all else.
While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship in his consideration of social imaginaries, readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics in programs like The Good Place (NBC, 2016-2020) and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX, 2005-12; FXX 2013-present). Most importantly, he provokes viewers’ attention to types of bad behavior that are appealing in a fictional context but are otherwise innately questionable when situated beyond the social imaginary. At the crux of entertainment and social utility, when or where does bad behavior cease to function as a productive provocation? This notion also provokes the question of how antisocial forms of behavior might shape the social imaginary in ways that evade positive/negative binaries, and tease at something more socially transformative for TV audiences.
M. Sellers Johnson holds an MA in film studies from Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington). His work has appeared in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film Matters, and the International Journal of Communication.