Horrible White People

Gender, Genre, and Television's Precarious Whiteness

Taylor Nygaard, Jorie Lagerwey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781479805358
• eBook ISBN: 9781479805334
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Examines the bleak television comedies that illustrate the obsession of the white left with its own anxiety and suffering

At the same time that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump were elected and reactionary socio-economic policies like Brexit were voted into law, representations of bleakly comic white fragility spread across television screens. American and British programming that featured the abjection of young, middle-class, liberal white people—such as Broad City, Casual, You're the Worst, Catastrophe, Fleabag, and Transparent—proliferated to wide popular acclaim in the 2010s. Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey track how these shows of the white left, obsessed with its own anxiety and suffering, are complicit in the rise and maintenance of the far right—particularly in the mobilization, representation, and sustenance of structural white supremacy on television.

Nygaard and Lagerwey examine a cycle of dark television comedies, the focus of which are "horrible white people," by putting them in conversation with similar upmarket comedies from creators and casts of color like Insecure, Atlanta, Dear White People, and Master of None. Through their analysis, they demonstrate the ways these non-white-centric shows negotiate prestige TV's dominant aesthetics of whiteness and push back against the centering of white suffering in a time of cultural crisis.

Through the lens of media analysis and feminist cultural studies, Nygaard and Lagerwey's book opens up new ways of looking at contemporary television consumption—and the political, cultural, and social repercussions of these "horrible white people" shows, both on- and off-screen.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Authors’ Note, or, a Note on Being Horrible
• Introduction: The Fraying Fantasies of White Supremacy
• 1. Peak TV and the Spreadability of Transatlantic Horrible White People
• 2. Alternative Families and White Fragility: The Politics of the Dystopian Sitcom
• 3. Emergent Feminisms and Racial Discourses of Televisual Girlfriendship
• 4. Diverse Quality Comedies in an Era of White Precarity
• Conclusion: NFL Protests and White Supremacy in the Mass Market
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Horrible White People Shows and Diverse Quality Comedies Synopses
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors