Queer and Normal?

The closest I think I have felt to identifying with normporn, a novel framing of twenty-first century dramatic television explored in Karen Tongson’s book of the same name, is through the unfolding topographies and shaky camerawork found in Friday Night Lights (NBC/DirecTV, 2006–2011). There, amidst the football fields of Dillon, Texas, I found myself rooting for the Panthers, charmed by the series’ depiction of heterosexual family life; like Julie Taylor (Aimee Teegarden), I went to the same high school that my parents worked at, though in the series Julie was not closeted like I was. That queer longing for a “normal” high school experience overwhelmed what should have been a common-sense understanding, that “normal” experiences found their power because of their assimilation of difference into the feel-good roars of West Texas—clear eyes, full hearts and all. Wanting to be normal yet cringing at both this desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment: these contradictions structure this complex circuit of identification and disidentification that illustrate how the manufactured sentimentality of diegetic worlds like Dillon are exemplary of television’s larger promises of family, community, and normality.

If this reads as an unconventional or especially personal way to begin a book review, that is because Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us belongs to a new genre of television scholarship fueled in part by the autoethnographic, a natural extension of the field’s twenty-first century turn to affect (see also: DuCille 2018; Holdsworth 2021). Tongson writes elegantly about how her grief following the passing of biological and chosen family members, her anxiety and anger felt during Donald Trump’s tumultuous first presidency, and her unease at how crisis has come to define the contemporary guided her to the comforting rhythms and outdoor string lighting setups of TV series like Parenthood (NBC, 2010–2015), Gilmore Girls (the WB and the CW, 2000–2007), and This Is Us (NBC, 2016–2022), all of which sentimentally and ideologically align the contested idea of “family” with twenty-first century liberal notions of diversity. Normporn offers a new orientation through which to consider the appeal of television’s stable-ish relationship to the status quo, and to pressure the collective estrangement from and desire for different norms fabricated by the prestige storytellers of the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden eras. Television has always been a site of emotional “working through” (Joyrich 1992; Ellis 2001) and a template for viewers to make sense of emergent structures of feeling and political affects (Feuer 1995; Zook 1999). What distinguishes Tongson’s reflections on her relationship to normative attachments—a recurring theme in her scholarship and public writing—from others is her commitment to interrogating a too-cool queer studies that would cast disdain on her love of corny family dramas as well as her deft curation of objects, theories, and self-reflections that present an accessible dive into the affective politics of the contemporary.

Put briefly, normporn is defined as the glamorization of “the promise of boredom” and “the relief of having ‘nothing to see here’” in a Trumpian or post-Trumpian world (Tongson, 11). It describes a viewing practice, a conscious seeking out of comfort television in times of crisis. While cultural criticism has often used the suffix “-porn” to emphasize the erotic allure of otherwise non-eroticized objects and events, normporn straddles Jordan Schonig’s (2024) categories of the pornographic-as-moral-critique (that is, how “human suffering is sensationalized for entertainment,” as in trauma porn) and the pornographic-as-aesthetic-indulgence (that is, the consumption of “enticing or attractive images of objects,” as in food porn). Television’s long history of sanitizing potentially disturbing content for much of the twentieth century already helps explains normporn’s natural application to the primetime schedule, since what else could television exploit, fetishize, and embellish—what else could TV pornographize—than images of comfort and normality?

The portmanteau’s construction punctuates this contradiction: porn is supposed to be the opposite of boring, or at least it was before its own normalization and proliferation across user-generated amateur digital channels. In her foundational formulation of “body genres”—namely, pornography, horror, and melodrama—Linda Williams (1991, 6) identified not only a gratuitous excess in the genre’s representational capacity but an excess that prompted mimicry within its audience. Built around “the spectacle of a ‘sexually saturated’ female body” and ensconced within scopic regimes of objectification, the spectatorial relations figured by body genres are self-reproducing and self-sustaining, since they present filmic excess as both a cultural problem to be solved as well as its solution. It is worth noting that Tongson’s use of the pornographic is less clinical than Williams’s, insofar as what makes normporn ‘porn’ is not just the arousal incited by fantasies of a more boring life but more importantly the involuntary feelings of shame and guilt that accompany its consumption:

Those of us who think we should know better than to want something boring, regular, and mundane are thus washed over by a sense of shame after we consume the kind of popular culture that induces spontaneous overflows of basic feelings. While some of us actively seek out that release as any onanist is wont to do, the source of greater embarrassment for us is when such secretions flow involuntarily, as if they speak to some buried truth about ourselves that we find horrifying and titillating all at once” (Tongson, 11, emphasis in original).

Of course, not all consumption of pornography necessarily entails shame or guilt, and in privileging these responses as coerced from an unwilling spectator, normporn risks pathologizing television spectatorship in terms of addiction and compulsion. If conservatives like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley (2021) have advanced moral panics around emerging generations of straight men who waste their time playing video games and beating off to amateur porn, Tongson flirts with enacting a similar panic around leftist queers on the couch bingeing family dramas: both populations stay up all night bleary-eyed, alienated from the responsibilities and productive labor of traditional masculinity and radical queerness respectively. Television, however, has always been designed as a semiprivate and domestic medium, and with the supremacy of the broadcast primetime schedule giving way to cable, streaming, and unlimited personalization, the media that an individual consumes is seen to reflect their lifestyle identities and increasingly their political ones too. This semiprivateness helps Tongson articulate normporn’s larger contradictions in terms of desire and exposure, since for her as a queer person normporn’s enchantment “lulls us into a sense of safety and order that we never thought we wanted” (11). This produces a sort of reverse mobilization of something like cruel optimism, though with the same affective ends. In Lauren Berlant’s now canonical formulation (2011), one cannot help desiring the object that is actually an obstacle to your happiness, but in the case of normporn, the easy assimilation into bourgeois life experienced by Tongson’s we produces shame and guilt despite our preexisting knowledge of bourgeois life’s sterilization.

The argument is easy to accept, especially if you are like Tongson, a reliably lefty coastal elite or someone who identifies as one. (This is a book especially about being made to feel seen as an audience demographic.) Because the material is admittedly mawkish, Tongson must reconcile her feelings of queer shame through a kind of performative self-flagellation, one that emerges through her evocatively detailed cartoonish identifications.1 While television and cultural studies benefit from Tongson’s self-reflective honesty, even when deploying the language and analytic of fan studies, Normporn can feel written to a very specific audience, with the “we” sketched out by Tongson mostly concretizing around “queer/of color cultural studies scholars” and “basic liberal normies.” Queer audiences, of course, have often turned to camp or exaggerated performance to locate themselves within Hollywood’s normative logics. Tongson, however, elicits richly reparative readings of the seemingly basic or cringe without resorting to camp’s straightforward subversiveness, taking seriously the sentimentality of both normporn’s alluring objects and its entranced queer audience. Thus Tongson can exclude more obviously queer TV such as The L-Word or the oeuvre of Ryan Murphy; as she explains in a footnote on Gilmore Girls (a series without any explicitly queer characters), one example of normporn is the shame that liberal queer viewers feel when investing in conventionally heteronormative programs like Gilmore Girls (Tongson, 181–2n13).

That understanding of a liberal queer audience content with bourgeois norms of democratic consumption and engagement, however, might feel harder to reconcile in 2025. Normporn was released in late 2023, a year before the 2024 United States presidential election. The book opens by framing Biden’s 2020 election as energetically cathartic, an attempt to “return to normalcy” after the tumult of Trump’s first term—normal, at least, for a kind of liberal voter bloc who matured and flexed their power during the technocratic Obama administration. Over the period in which this book has been out so far, Trump took back the office, defeating Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, after a madcap election season in which Biden stepped down as the Democratic nominee following a disastrous debate performance. This resulted in the first woman of color to head a major-party ticket in American politics, a fulfillment of the Obama-era catchphrase that ‘representation matters,’ or as Tongson snarkily expounds in Normporn’s introduction, “what passes for progress in our representative democracy is, if you believe all the inaugural TV coverage in January 2021, built on this bridge called Joe Biden’s back” (5).

Trump’s 2024 victory over Harris produced a mainstream consensus that the Democratic Party had, under Obama and Biden, abandoned the working-class in favor of elites embracing identity politics. (Iterations of this argument—often minimizing intersectionality—can be found across critical theory too, pitting Marx against Foucault.) Structuring normporn around an audience of elites who are practiced in the art of tolerance and nominally inclusive respectability politics risks the implicit endorsement of those reductive electoral hot takes; in this respect, Normporn’s main limitation is that it primarily looks back at Trumpism in the past tense. Pandemic-era escapist bingeing probably feels less cathartic as normporn’s viewer moves between the TV screen and the handheld screen, reading about the many executive orders issued by Trump 2.0 that attempt both to curtail the basic human rights of immigrants, transgender individuals, and those protesting genocide as well as to withhold federal funds from universities in an effort to bring the professoriate to heel.

But this reframing also shifts how one views the normal through formerly perceived markers of bourgeois sentimentality (such as a tolerant family structure accommodating of different identities, including partisan ones). Many minoritarian individuals and communities may conform to new norms post-2024 out of necessity, strategically engaging in self-censorship and codeswitching and moving networks of care underground. And yet even that seems like a privilege in the authoritarian present, with the success to which one can invest in norms solely for their entitlements as norms hinging on where one lives, one’s place of employment, one’s social circles—the space and time in which one can exist as normal. Consider two examples of Obama-era normporn from the showrunner Jason Katrims: Parenthood and Friday Night Lights. The diegetic worlds of these series and the norms they summon could not be culturally further apart, with the former set in Berkeley, California (in which Harris won 88.2% of the 2024 vote) and the latter set in a fictional West Texas town (the counties of which Trump won 82.9%). Normporn’s fictive “we” might have more easily straddled these disparate locales back in the “before” times: before COVID, before algorithmic personalization, before social media. Broadcast networks and their targeted imagined communities of family and nation gave us normporn, Tongson notes, and thus they can help us best understand the brutal psychic shifts that seemed to demarcate the Obama era from Trump’s first term—and, presumably, the shift between from Biden’s four years in office to Trump’s much more ambitious and targeted attacks on elite institutions during his second term.

Normporn might begin with slight nostalgia for Obama-era multicultural competence, but it evolves quickly into a study of a genre with specific formal criteria: these are programs that are serialized, more dramatic than they are comedic, and that air in one-hour time slots inclusive of commercials on traditional broadcast networks. They also feature an expanded and mostly progressive (while predominantly White and straight) family unit, portraying them in an aesthetic realist sentimentality that magnifies the little struggles and moments of everyday life. Each chapter in the book takes a series from the past to construct a broader genealogy of twenty-first century normporn that accompanies television’s larger cultural legitimation and turn towards quality. thirtysomething (ABC, 1987–1991, the critically acclaimed late 1980s dramatization of baby boomer life, functions as an important origin text here. While the series taught Hollywood “how captivating it can be to sweat the small stuff, even when—or perhaps especially when—life and death themselves at stake” (Tongson, 47), it did so primarily by summoning an audience formation of liberal elites that could invest in its aspirational depiction of adulthood.

Television studies scholars will recognize this argument from Jane Feuer’s masterful work on the yuppie audience in Seeing Through the Eighties (1995), but Tongson extends and mines thirtysomething’s mobilization of grief within the series’ larger narrative architecture to sketch out a way for those not typically included in the yuppie audience to tap into the “psychic tribulations of creative-class gentrification” (Tongson, 40). Watching Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton) die in season four both in adolescence and, later on, in middle age reveals to Tongson the sentimental power of the rote acts that help us understand death, like the phone calls to and from friends that announce a loved one’s departure. Tongson remains somewhat evasive about the larger politics of normporn’s emergence here, such as the Reagan administration’s weaponization of sentimentality in its marshaling of “family values” and in its alliance with far-right evangelicals. This is why normporn is first and foremost a viewing practice, however; following Berlant, sentimentality is always marshaled to promote the stability of family and nation despite changing norms and regardless of who inhabits the Oval Office.

For example, the book’s second chapter, “An Intermezzo on Alternatives,” examines the marketplace’s incorporation of so-called “alternative” lifestyles beginning in the 1990s and culminating in “normcore,” an Obama-era aesthetic movement that presented itself “as the next edge, or more precisely, the no edge” (Tongson, 61). As a counterpoint to the increased individuated and niche patterns of consumption encouraged by the new digital economy and that bestowed on its bourgeois subjects the façade of cool uniqueness, normcore asserted adaptability and ease over the pronounced difficulty and inconvenience of subcultural coolness. The feeling to crave emancipation from the system while still feeling special within it?—well, that’s a feeling queers know well, especially those versed in queer theory’s long attraction to anti-normativity. Norms shift over time because our desires and attachments are framed individually, and this allows for the possibility of resistant formations and viewing practices. “In sum,” Tongson writes, “norms are adaptable and absorptive, so framing them as stable fails to capture the nuances of the interplay between the purportedly anarchic with what is expected and even produced by certain perfectly acceptable, bourgeois aesthetic norms” (66).

The remaining three chapters examine normporn’s twenty-first century configurations as they play out against the Obama and Trump years, though not without some slippery categorizations. The third chapter, “Mainstreaming in True Blood,” acknowledges the generic and tonal difference in Alan Ball’s salacious vampire melodrama (HBO, 2008–2014) from the balance of the book. Yet “the series allows us to parse through the campy, queer, contradictory impulses of ‘mainstreaming’ and political agendas cloaked by representations of ‘nonthreatening,’ normal behavior—particularly among communities who are perpetually under suspicion,” Tongson writes, and thus interrogates the desire of norms through an engaged parody of identity politics and rights-based political inclusion (75). Tongson’s insightful textual readings of True Blood and especially of its finale, an uncharacteristically sincere send-off that uses a wedding to reaffirm an innate desire for family, demonstrate how during the Obama years prestige series appropriated the debates within queer studies and activist circles over ‘equality.’

The next chapter traces the development of normporn through prominent postmillennial changes to television, such as the normalization of fan practices and the archiving of series on streaming platforms, both of which enable for the recycling of intellectual property via spinoffs, reboots, and revivals. In “The Stars are Hollow: Gilmore Girls at the end of Roe,” Tongson describes how Amy Sherman-Palladino’s aughts-coded screwball feminist dramedy feels more normporn-y through its reception on Netflix in the 2010s, in which viewers could binge the series’ small-town familiarity and its “illusions of seamless assimilation and big-tent conviviality” in preparation for the streaming platform’s 2016 revival, the miniseries Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (98). While the series was heralded for its feminist characters and its witty, intelligent dialogue, Tongson focuses on the series’ more ambivalent reproductive politics, especially with respect to the supporting character of Lane Kim (Keiko Agena), whose tragic pregnancy is recounted in a deeply cringeworthy seventh season episode (Kim became pregnant with twins after her first time having sex with her husband, a storyline many fans found unnecessary). This is, Tongson notes, more than the longstanding story of how Hollywood writers let down their characters of color, in part through a persuasive reading of the series’ branded “quirkiness” that was assimilated quickly into postfeminist consumer culture. This “swerve in the GG universe” (Tongson, 111) provides the context for reviewing the episode and the series in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The last chapter, “This Is Us, This Is The End,” takes up normporn’s end through a series simultaneously suffuse in normporn’s aesthetic and narrative trappings and erudite in its depiction of intergenerational and racial traumas. Parsing the origin story of protagonist Randall Pearson’s (Sterling K. Brown) transracial adoption and his own reflections on it in therapy and during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests (the series adopts a wildly looping and non-linear narrative), Tongson reads these reflections as network television’s first real attempt to think through racialized schemas of historical and psychic repair with a truly diverse TV family. That the primetime family has long been a symbol of narrative and ideological stability, protecting its characters from the long afterlives of trauma is not on Tongson, who thoughtfully compares Randall’s story with the “white savior” narratives of transracial adoption found on 1980s sitcoms.

While the chapters above highlight Tongson’s close readings of key normporn texts, they also reveal normporn’s intertextuality: not just familiar character actors but also familiar aesthetic and narrative forms that flexibly accommodate the diegetic grief expressed by their characters with the non-diegetic grief potentially within a viewer’s psyche. The book sings best when it weaves reflections on grief and shame with formal analysis, especially when it comes to normporn’s soundtrack, frequently laden with the mesmerizing arpeggios of an acoustic guitar. Tongson makes clear in the book’s epilogue that her normporn might not be the same as yours or mine, and thus normporn’s logics could be provocatively exported to other genres, especially those more transparent in their spectacularization and excess. If quality texts are emblematic of Obama-era aspirational family politics and cultural attitudes (many of these series claim a certain kind of “wokeness,” even though the term itself is slippery in the book), genres like reality television (Joyrich 2016) and video podcasting within the manosphere might represent the carnivalesque and certainly less bourgeois logics behind Trumpian politics in their own quotidian and viral cycles of resentment, accusation, and outrage. Of course, the image of a conservative audience consuming such clamorous media to work through their own grief is an image that basic liberal normies can conjure up all too easily.

In times of unrelenting crisis, how much should we—as professional queers, as scholars of modern culture, as resistant and critical viewing publics—desire the normal? This question has fueled critiques of popular culture not just in the softly lit backyards of Tongson’s Silver Lake neighborhood but in Birmingham, Frankfurt, and beyond. Normporn demands that we justify “how we exceptionalize the Trump years as a foil for some of our escapist TV amusements” (Tongson, 10) but what will those justifications and that escapism look during Trump’s second term, one more committed to disrupting of the norms of government than before? Perhaps my normporn-tinted look back at Friday Night Lights reflects a momentary longing for an impossible adolescence, an expression of grief for a kind of normal that could not accommodate my own queerness. Yet the stunningly beautiful landscapes of West Texas and their reassuring family dynamics ultimately feel too alienating to me. Despite normporn’s allure, I cannot not see the current political situation refracted back onto the screen: as of this writing and under the emboldened second Trump administration, much of the state of Texas will remain unsafe for trans youth, for women seeking reproductive health, and for the undocumented. What I find most fruitful about Normporn here is not just its disentangling of grief, shame, and longing within our TV viewing practices but also how Tongson trenchantly elevates those minoritarian perspectives and modes of spectatorship in the name of repair. That work of repair? It seems perfectly normal to me.