MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | ENERGY AND EXHAUSTION | SPRING 2025

Making it Home:  Single Women and Visions of the Good Life in Television Comedies and Dramedies

Elizabeth Traube • Wesleyan University 

February 10th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

The serial melodramas that became the face of “quality” TV in the early 21st century were made by, about, and largely for men. Their protagonists and, at some level, the series themselves seemed nostalgic for the waning social form of the male breadwinner family. Over the past decade, women creators from independent cinema and theater have produced a cycle of comedies and dramedies about single women in states of arrested transition who fail or refuse to grow into normative adulthood. Thematically, the shows explore alternative happiness scripts that elevate the demands and pleasures of intimate friendships over romance, marriage, and parenthood as well as career success, while aesthetically, they substitute character, anecdote, and performative excess for more plot-driven, high-production-value storytelling. This talk first situates the cycle in its generic contexts. It then analyzes how HBO’s recently canceled Somebody Somewhere creates an "alternative hedonism" based on investment in social relationships.

Energy and Exhaustion
View Spring 2025 Lecture List

Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities