Introduction to the Special Issue: At Home With TV: Television Houses, Theory, Life Writing

This special issue proceeds from the premise that, for a certain kind of dedicated television viewer, the scene of encounter with the medium’s domestic sitcoms, dramas, and dramedies is one in which four “houses” interact complexly and multivalently: the actual house in which the viewer lives and watches television; the idea, fantasy, or self-mythologizing of one’s actual house; the magnetically attractive house featured prominently onscreen in a given series, to which one fastens with curiosity and even devotion; and the sense—whether based on knowledge of location shooting or conjecturally hypothesized—of how that television house exists beyond the screen, emplaced in the “real world.” Examining a range of case studies, the contributors to the issue work with, against, and beyond this conceptual premise as they develop a collective sense of how television houses mean and why they matter.