Winter is the season for cozying up under a blanket and binge-watching comfort TV. Maybe Parenthood or This is Us? This genre is “normporn” — family dramas that are soothing, sedate, and best enjoyed with a hot beverage — according to Karen Tongson, USC professor and author of the new book called Normporn: Queer Viewers And The TV That Soothes Us.
Normporn comes from the shame and embarrassment a viewer might feel when watching these types of shows, Tongson tells KCRW. She says that it especially applies to some queer or high-brow purveyors of media who feel these shows are beneath them.
“We think of ourselves as part of the avant-garde or pressing, even, against the revolutionary. And I think that there's some way that we feel a little guilt. It's not so much a guilty pleasure,” Tongson explains. “I know that I watched, for example, Parenthood in secret sometimes, and cried by myself so that my wife didn't see me doing it.”
She attributes the power of the genre to the shows’ universality and ability to grapple with race and sexuality as a nonissue. It all comes down to, Tongson says, the universal desire for peace. “Many of these shows, they present problems, but they eventually get resolved and the family becomes the space that absorbs it all.”
Tongson traces the normporn phenomena to the 1980s, with the ensemble drama Thirtysomething. Unlike other shows at the time, like Dallas or Dynasty, she says the program tackled tiny problems that are part of everyday life.
“The episode description of episode two of Thirtysomething is ‘Hope is upset because the bathroom renovation isn't going to be done in time for her in-laws’ visit.’ That's the kind of tiny problem that you're like, ‘Yeah, I want to be able to just luxuriate in the tiny problem and not think about all of the horrible big stuff.’ For that reason, because it wasn’t about cops or doctors or lawyers … people really thought it was an innovation in television.”
Initially, Tongson couldn’t relate to the show — she was in high school at the time. But when she revisited it in college, Thirtysomething felt like a revelatory experience.
“I started to think more about what my future would look like. I became much more invested in what the show was about, and what it would mean to grow into or with a family. I very much wanted that for myself at the time. That became like an aspiration, someday I hope to have the same problems.”
A 21st-century spiritual successor, Tongson posits, is NBC’s Parenthood. The show scratches at nostalgia and what it means to be a family.
She points to the character of Zeek Braverman, who works hard to get it right as the family patriarch: “It's the sense of that boomer dad who might be confronted with all of this craziness and … all of this sprawling intensity, but somehow he managed to bring it together and build something nice, something you can rely on.”
These shows also provide a sense of nostalgia. Tongson says they’re a representation and evolution of the bygone era of what the American family looks and acts like.
“It's coming to terms with some of these differences between the fantasy of the American family and where it's going — the new normal. These shows present that fantasy of reconciliation between that bygone era and the new normal, which is more expansive and inclusive. But in the end, that just all still remains a certain kind of fantasy.”
Another NBC family drama show falls in the normporn category: This is Us. Tongson points out, however, that it may be the last show she considers part of the genre, due to its themes of discomfort: “It accepts the incompleteness of resolution or repair that happens in families, and I think in that sense, it moves us to someplace else.”
Ultimately, Tongson argues that enjoying TV isn’t always about consuming conscious programming. Sometimes, it’s about surrendering to what speaks to you.
“We have to think about what our relationship to these things is and to think deeply about how our feelings are enmeshed sometimes in problematic objects.”