The Gang's All Here: Re-Reading Contemporary American Situation

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THE GANG’S ALL HERE: RE-READING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SITUATION COMEDIES AS DELAYED, AMBIVALENT BILDUNGSROMAN

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English

Caitlin Jordan, B.A.

Washington, D.C. March 20th, 2020

THE GANG’S ALL HERE: RE-READING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SITUATION COMEDIES AS DELAYED, AMBIVALENT BILDUNGSROMAN

Caitlin Jordan, B.A.

Thesis Advisor: Sherry Linkon, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores how contemporary situation comedies, Friends and Will & Grace in particular, can be read as bildungsroman texts. I posit that Friends and Will & Grace function as current bildungsroman works because they foreground narratives of character change, and like the canonical bildungsroman, they possess pedagogical potential for their viewers. Friends and

Will & Grace, in part because of their character-centered narratives and open-ended finales, remain associated with cultural images that continually attract younger audiences. Both series traverse generational lines, and they remain culturally relevant with millennial viewers. This thesis poses a reparative reading of contemporary situation comedies; it argues that mass entertainment is capable of conducting productive and powerful cultural work.

Chapter I explores the various ways in which the relative histories of the German bildungsroman and the American situation comedy genres work in dialogue with one another.

Both forms have demonstrated incredible propensity for development and adaptability in spite of criticisms that they are formulaic and stagnant. Chapter I also discusses that though both the sitcom and the bildungsroman are bourgeois mediums, they have subversive potential that dates back to their relative archetypal texts, I Love Lucy and Wilhelm Meister. Chapter II then transitions to explore the meaningful ways in which contemporary situation comedies align with the bildungsroman form. As an evolution from their sitcom predecessors, both Friends and Will

& Grace have nuanced narrative structures that foreground character development throughout

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the duration of both series. However, both series also maintain a balance of traditional sitcom formal elements that open them to pedagogical potential because they remain inherently familiar and relatable to audiences.

In a turn, Chapter III highlights the means in which Friends and Will & Grace make adaptations to the bildungsroman form; these adaptations are significant because they help regenerate the bildungsroman form. Important departures that contemporary sitcoms make is that the protagonists are decidedly older than those represented in the canonical bildungsroman, and these characters, because of ensemble casting, pose more opportunities for the future than what was previously depicted in literary bildungsroman. Friends and Will & Grace create new potentialities in terms of gendered and queer representations, and unlike the canonical form, both have endings that are decidedly more open and resistant to closure. Clearly, the formula for both of these series was a successful and impactful one for audiences. I close with a discussion about how reading the sitcom as a bildungsroman is regenerative for both the sitcom and the bildungsroman, and I comment upon how the bildungsroman can continue to develop into the twenty-first century.

The research and writing of this thesis is dedicated to many. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Sherry Linkon: thank you for your incredible patience, your guidance, and your support. I’d also like to extend my gratitude to Caetlin Benson-Allott. If I hadn’t taken your class in the Fall of 2018, I wouldn’t have been inspired in the slightest to write about media texts.

Thank you for always being such an excellent listener and humoring my long-winded conversations. I’d also like to thank my family, especially my sister. Thank you for allowing books to cover the floors, tables, and countertops for many months. I couldn’t have completed this without your persistent patience and support.

Thank you,

Caitlin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter I ...... 18

Shared Criticisms ...... 19

Bourgeois Mediums with Subversive Potential ...... 22

Shared Propensities for Bildung ...... 35

Chapter II...... 42

Characterological Emphasis ...... 43

“Pseudoclosures” and Character Bildung ...... 47

Balancing Nuanced Narrative with a Familiar Form ...... 57

Chapter III ...... 68

Ensemble Casting ...... 68

Inversions of Traditional Exemplarity ...... 75

Delayed Bildungsheld(s) ...... 89

Queer Visibility ...... 99

Ambivalent and Resistant Finales ...... 106

Conclusion ...... 115

Bibliography ...... 118

INTRODUCTION

From a cursory glance, the literary bildungsroman and the television situation comedy do not appear to have much in common. However, both forms, in their relative contexts of the eighteenth and mid-twentieth century respectively, were quietly revolutionary. Thomas Jeffers notes that the bildungsroman, or the “novel of formation,” came to fruition within the Enlightenment, and more particularly as a result of the “event-wracked revolutionary years” of the mid to late eighteenth century.12 Literature was in dialogue with this tumultuous cultural moment, and the bildungsroman, as both a literary phenomenon and theoretical framework, broke from established norms.3 Set against the Enlightenment cultural landscape that celebrated human rationality and choice, and set it free from oppressive hegemonic bonds, European readers were ready for literary characters to reflect such radical changes in thought and conceptions of personal development. As opposed to other, established literary formats that were driven by plot (such as the ordeal, family, or biographical novel), bildungsroman was unassumingly revolutionary in its depiction of a central character who was open to change, a hero who was not “ready-made.”4

Television made its debut a couple of centuries after the bildungsroman, and the public reception that television generated was vastly different than the eighteenth-century literary genre.

When television made its American commercial debut in 1948, audiences responded with ambivalence because of its inherent “strangeness” in post-World War II America.5 Consumers, in

1 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 19. 2 Thomas Jeffers, Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2. 3 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 2. 4 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 2. 5 I posit 1948 as a tentative “start date” for television, but the medium certainly did not have a singular debut. Television’s history dates back to the 1920s when radio behemoth RCA began investing in the development of television as a new way to deliver its programs to audiences.

the wake of the horrific Second World War, were wary of the new technology and were unsure of its potential impact on culture. American consumers were attempting to culturally re-center around the nuclear family, and they were uncertain whether television would bring families together or alienate disparate generations due to the television’s newness.6 Importantly, situation comedies naturalized television in its burgeoning years by making audiences feel at home while watching from their homes.7 Though mid-twentieth century America was not marked by the same outward revolutionary character of the European Enlightenment, the post-war period was rife with an underlying cultural tension marked by a desire to return to some presupposed American cultural ideal that indeed, did not even exist before the economic prosperity of the war. American culture turned inward, towards the intimacy of the home and the nuclear family as its sources of cultural salvation, and television was a significant tool in ushering in the mid-century age of domesticity.

Archetypal American sitcoms, through their quotidian narratives and utilization of a domestic setting, became a staple of early television and functioned as a paradigm for more complex program

Starting in 1931, RCA selected the Empire State Building as its first television transmitter, and from that site researchers ran field tests through the early 30s. Television was later a stand-out innovation at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York City, and RCA began selling the first sets that year, but the market for television was niche, and it was not until 1948 that television systems had significant commercial success. Lynn Spigel states that between 1948-1955, “more than half of American homes installed a television set.”(See Danielle Shapiro, “The TRK-12: RCA’s First Mass-Marketed Television Receiver,” in John Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016], 165-6; see also Lynn Spigel, “Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space, 1948-1955,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], 3). 6 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 136. 7 Lynn Spigel notes that since the high Victorian era, the home was ideologically tied to ideas of restoration and personal peace. The domestic functions as a respite for the hardships that occur in the outside world because the home is a site of leisure. This ethos of the home as sanctuary endured into the mid-twentieth century when television first appeared on American markets. (See Spigel, Make Room for TV, 12-17).

forms.8 Indeed, partially because of the sitcom’s inherent relatability, television became the

“cultural symbol par excellence of family life” by the mid 1950s.9 Within their respective historical moments, both the sitcom and bildungsroman forms performed significant work as both products and producers of cultural change.

Because of the sitcom’s potential to naturalize, it can be argued that sitcoms function as pedagogical texts. Indeed, this argument is not new, as Alice Leppert highlights that the onslaught of 1980s family sitcoms functioned as “templates” for families struggling in the post-Reagan economic uncertainty in which two incomes became an imperative for many American families to maintain their middle and/or working class status.10 Historically, however, explicit pedagogy through a particular form has been largely associated with the literary bildungsroman.11 Afterall, the etymology of the very term bildungsroman led to its common-sense Western definition as a “novel of education.”12 The bildungsroman typically portrays the development of a bildungsheld, the central character, as he/she moves through adolescence into young adulthood . The bildungsheld is an ephebe, or a “yet-to-be developed” character at the novel’s onset, but throughout its duration, he/she becomes an exemplar, or a self-actualized adult model character. Bildung, or characterological “formation” is the informing principle of the literary bildungsroman, and through character change, the reader can likewise experience his/her own sense of bildung.13 Because the bildungsroman developed in the Enlightenment period and was heavily influenced by those ideals,

8 Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City/New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 27. 9 Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 39. 10 Alice Leppert, TV Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 4. 11 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 19. 12 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 19. 13 Petru Golban, A History of the Bildungsroman from Ancient Beginnings to Romanticism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 4.

the bildungsroman demonstrates a dual emphasis on both personal maturity and successful social integration.14 Dating back to its origins, the bildungsroman has the capacity to induce individual reflection because bildungsroman texts teach the reader, through the protagonist’s journey, how to assimilate and productively join their relative society. Thus, the inherent bildung (as characterological development that then becomes the reader’s education) of the bildungsroman is both individual and collective. Bildungsroman poses the potential to alter cultural norms by revising how individuals conceive of themselves and the societies of which they are a part.15 Contemporary sitcoms function in a similar fashion; they enact cultural bildung by telling stories about characters that change throughout the duration of the series, and these character evolutions then impact the viewer’s behavior.16

Bildung is a complicated notion, and its lack of a complete English translation implies its multifaceted nature. Hans-Georg Gadamer provides background for the complex term when he articulates that bildung’s linguistic origins date back to medieval mysticism, centuries and centuries before the development of the term bildungsroman.17 Bildung has a spiritual connotation; a person demonstrates bildung when they are trying to improve him/herself.18 Linguistically, the term bildung evolved as a way to make the stem bild more comprehensible and uniform because bild

14 Todd Kontje, “A History of the Bildungsroman,” in A History of the Bildungsroman, ed. Sarah Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 10. 15 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 44. 16 It is important to make a distinction between contemporary examples of sitcoms, which I note as 1990 onwards, and more archetypal series. Scholars like Horace Newcomb have noted that character development was not a primary narrative concern for older series like I Love Lucy. Newcomb cites that paradigmatic situation comedies like I Love Lucy and Bewitched did not devote much narrative attention to character development and instead relied on the motif of “confusion” so that the audience was let in on a joke that would eventually backfire upon the characters. I, however, contend that later examples of the sitcom prioritize characterological change as a primary narrative tenet. (See Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 31). 17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982),11. 18 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11.

could be transmuted to mean both nachbild (image, copy) and vorbild (model).19 Within bildung, then, there is a precedent then of modeling and copying. Innate to bildung is the concept of pedagogy because both potential definitions, nachbild, and vorbild deal with copying and modeling oneself based upon a construction of the supposed “ideal.” The term continued to be present in the

German lexicon alongside the development of Christianity, and thus, bildung evolved alongside religious connotations. Within the Christian faith, God was the ideal that individuals sought to mimic. Becoming God is an unattainable goal, however, and thus the individual must reconcile with reflecting only God’s image.20 Bildung then encompasses both “education,” since there is a proposed model which one must follow and “formation,” the actual process by which the individual alters the self to better mimic or embody the model.21

Bildung functions both individually and communally because a citizen is educated through an example or model (in this case, the sitcom), but that individual pedagogy then translates to the communal/cultural ethos when personal actions transpire to transform cultural norms. Indeed,

Gadamer notes that by the twentieth century, bildung could no longer be conceived of as an individual enterprise. He writes that with the evolution of contemporary society, bildung becomes

“intimately associated with the idea of culture” and “designates primarily the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities.”22 Thus, as society develops and becomes less religious, bidung as a term once again proves to be malleable as its connotations become more secularized. Cultural and social assimilation have replaced God as the model, and yet unlike God, culture and individual citizens are in a much more reciprocal relationship. The drive to cultivate

“talents and capacities” is an externalized way that the individual can fruitfully join his/her culture,

19 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12. 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12. 21 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12. 22 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11.

but it is not the only expression of bildung. Indeed, Gadamer is careful not to narrow the definition of bildung by making it solely about work and output. He cites Wilhelm von Humboldt to state that there is an inward, reflective component of bildung that has functioned as the underlying principle for the term since its medieval origins. Gadamer states that bildung is “an attitude of the mind” which allows the term to oscillate back and forth between religious and secularized meanings depending presiding cultural values.23 Bildung is an “intellectual and moral endeavor” that “flows” outward and informs one’s sense of character.24 Thus, bildung originated as an inward-looking, reflective concept of personal development based upon a specific model (God), that with cultural shifts has developed into a theory of duality that demands productive assimilation as well as a drive for personal improvement. Thus, culture becomes the new God. Gadamer notes that contemporary connotations of bildung are complex because there are psychological and moral components alongside external demonstrations of development (such as employment and productive social participation). Thus, bildung is a theoretical framework of pedagogy, formation, and development that is then transmogrified into social practice through readers’ consumption of bildungsroman texts.

The bildungsroman sought to encapsulate the duality of bildung by posing to the reader characters that are embarking upon the dual process of forming themselves while also assimilating into societal norms. Formation, then, becomes possible on a variety of levels. Intertextually, the work’s concern is with the development of the bildungsheld; and through reading and engaging with the bildungsroman, there is pedagogical potential for the reader as well.25 Jeffers comments

23 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Behr, 1936), 30, https://archive.org/details/gesammelteschrif01humbuoft/page/n6, quoted in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11. 24 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11. 25 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 6.

upon this phenomenon: “To go through such a novel is an occasion not only for a reader’s individual cultivation (his vicarious growing up, or re-growing up) but for a generation of reader’s collective cultivation.”26 Through the reading of a bildungsroman text, the reader can experience a sense of “growing up” in tandem with the bildungsheld. Significantly, Jeffers also utilizes the term

“re-growing up” to indicate that the bildungsroman text has pedagogical potential regardless of the reader’s age. The bildungsroman is not limited by targeting a specific age group; it is near ubiquitous in its cultural reach because a reader that has already reached physical or sociological adulthood is still susceptible to change. The bildungsroman derives its linguistic and conceptual origin from bildung, and so the cultivation being described by Jeffers is both highly individualized and intimately tied to culture. The duality of bildung is also present in the bildungsroman. As

Jeffers highlights when he discusses a “generation” of readers, bildungsroman possesses a scope that is both individual and communal. Through the proposed singular journey of the hero/ine, the reader learns to be a citizen, indeed a participant, in culture. On a mass scale, an entire population can achieve progress and work towards “cultivation.”

Though different in terms of form, medium, and socio-historical context, television, like the bildungsroman, functions as a pedagogical cultural mediator and creator. Michael Tueth comments on television's influence throughout the twentieth century to note that it has become “the culture’s primary storyteller and definer of cultural patterns by providing information and entertainment for an enormous and heterogeneous mass public.”27 Importantly, like literature, television functions pedagogically, and yet it does so covertly through entertainment. Though other mediums, such as radio broadcasting, infiltrated American homes in a similar way that television did dating back to

26 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 4. 27 Michael V. Tueth, “Breaking and Entering: Transgressive Comedy on Television,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 27-8.

the early 1920s, television uniquely captured America’s attention largely because of its visual and domestic nature. Television, as a form, taught and continues to teach audiences self-knowledge and

“unknowable modes of citizenship” through reflecting critiquing cultural values on the small screen in a way that is attainable for a vast audience.28 Ron Lembo discusses that viewers are active participants in television viewing because viewers are capable of “concretely constructing their own meaningful relations with television.”29 In much the same fashion as literature of centuries prior, television provides mass medium programs that feel intimate and personal because of TV’s domestic setting.

Television’s ability to reflect and refract current cultural values makes the medium a strong site for potential bildung because television is a mediator of social values. Television, in many ways, provides consumers with a model that sparks personal development. When viewers see characterological change on their small screen, those changes serve as a model that can be mimicked in real life. Importantly, for serialized television programs, their narratability is much greater than the extent of a single novel. Jeffrey Sconce notes that: “A commercial series that succeeds in the U.S. system ends up generating hundreds of hours of programming, allowing for an often quite sophisticated and complex elaboration of character and story world.”30 When conceived of through this lens, a serialized television form like the situation comedy can develop an elaborate story world, and there is the space to foreground character development in such a detailed way that can mirror character development in novels. Like its literary predecessor, then, the contemporary

28 John Hartley, “Television as Transmodern Teaching,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 597. 29 Ron Lembo, “Components of a Viewing Culture,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 456. 30 Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 95.

situation comedy prioritizes characterological development in long narratives that can be recirculated culturally, in much the same way that the bildungsroman can be re-read. The contemporary sitcom can thus perform in a similar way to the canonical bildungsroman: both forms enable individual pedagogy that then functions on communal levels to enact cultural bildung, or formation.

Both Friends and Will & Grace are representative examples of contemporary situation comedies, and they perform in a similar fashion as the paradigmatic literary bildungsroman text,

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.31 Apprenticeship is the most-widely cited, and indeed, almost inarguably paradigmatic bildungsroman novel, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1795.32

Goethe’s work was “revolutionary” for both its foregrounding of the protagonist’s interiority and its claim that the common man has a right to “self-cultivation.” Jeffers argues that the right of a common man to possess the much-coveted status of bildungsheld, or “hero of self cultivation,” was

“revolutionary,” and it functioned as a literary prelude to a century of liberal reform.33 This ground- breaking literary phenomenon has roots in Romanticism through its underlying motif that human life has worth and agency beyond demonstrated piety, beyond status as God’s creation. The novel demonstrates, through Wilhelm’s various choices and struggles with his self-conception, that humans are capable of making meaning of their own lives.34 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in

31 I use the term “contemporary” to describe situation comedies that have been produced within the past three decades. Other scholars have contended that sitcoms of the twenty-first century can be conceived of as “postmodern,” products of the media convergence, and these texts include Modern Family or Scrubs, but neither of these series utilizes the traditional formal elements (such as a live studio audience or a proscenium, stage-like set) in the same way that Friends and Will & Grace do. Another example of a contemporary text that utilizes traditional elements is How I Met Your Mother. 32 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 5. 33 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 5. 34 Though it seems like a commonplace belief in contemporary society, the idea that an individual can enact agency in his or her own life was revolutionary in the early Enlightenment. Some scholars contend that the Enlightenment began as early as the late 16th century with René Descartes’s

other words, foregrounds characterological choice. Goethe’s work was both in dialogue with

Enlightenment ideals and further reinforced them. Dating back to the inception of the bildungsroman, Goethe’s work performs bildung as both an idea of individual development that then circulated and became a coinciding social ethos regarding the innate value of human lives and their agency to enact change,35 Goethe’s work performed bildung of foregrounding ideals about human agency and worth that was decidedly separate from the church and other hegemonic sources of power such as the Germanic state’s highly-structured class system. Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeship gave rise to a burgeoning bourgeois secularized consciousness that it also participated in. Through Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the cultural movement of the

Enlightenment that ascribed individuals with worth and the ability to choose their own futures, gained irrevocable traction.36 Goethe’s foundational novel did not replicate Enlightenment ideals; it further radicalized and strengthened them through the pedagogical potential of the bildungsroman as a literary form of bourgeois consumption.

Like Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Friends and Will & Grace perform cultural work within and beyond their 1990s moment. In spite of both series’ air dates being more than twenty

foundational philosophical approach to scientific discovery that relied upon doubt and skepticism as tools that enabled scientists to better understand the natural world that surrounds them. This scientific movement driven by desires for knowledge of the natural world beyond a religious understanding of its creation then expanded to political thinkers and philosophers who contended that humans possessed agency over their own choices. Humans were no longer considered to be merely vessels of God though Christianity continued to flourish throughout Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rational and humanist impulses of the Enlightenment influenced authors such as Goethe through a newfound preoccupation with characters’ interiority and psychological journeys. (See William Bristow, "Enlightenment," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2017, accessed February 4, 2020, ; see also Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 7). 35 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 35 and 38. 36 It should be noted the term “individuals” refers primarily to white, heteronormative, bourgeois men. Other identity categories were largely excluded from such a privilege of self-determination during this historical moment.

years ago, Friends and Will & Grace can both be considered “contemporary” because they remain as relevant in the current cultural milieu as they did in their original 1990s context. Both have had long-running syndication deals and tremendous success on streaming platforms that enables them to reach ever-younger audiences. And clearly, both continue to resonate and remain popular with these younger viewers. Friends was the second-most viewed show on Netflix in 2018,37 and Will &

Grace had a three-season revival that will end in the spring of 2020. Friends and Will & Grace are not ground-breaking in the traditional sense - both utilize many traditional elements of earlier sitcoms - but reading these series as bildungsroman texts reveals that perhaps, it is their bildungsroman elements that have enabled their incredible cultural durability. Friends and Will &

Grace both work to foreground characterological bildung, and their ensuing cultural associations have riveted viewers into the present moment. The way in which Friends and Will & Grace narratively prioritize character choices, flaws, and agency has enabled both series to remain current and continue to participate in cultural bildung.

Friends and Will & Grace were likewise significant cultural tools in their original context because they were relevant for Gen X.38 Gen X largely rejected the relatively conservative run of family sitcoms that were prominent in the 1980s, such as Happy Days, Full House, The Cosby

37 According to Nielsen SVOD ratings, quoted in Sarah Whitten, “Netflix Says It Can Spend More on Its Own Shows Now that It’s Not Paying for ‘The Office’ and ‘Friends,” CNBC, July 17, 2019, accessed March 3, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/no-friends-the-office-means-netflix- can-spend-more-on-own-shows.html. 38 “Gen X” is often referred to as a “lost generation” marked by “uncertainty” in the OED, and they were largely distrustful of conservative institutions like the nuclear family. Their tastes in television reflected their liberal consciousness. (See “Generation X,” Oxford English Dictionary online, accessed 22 November 2019, https://www-oed- com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/view/Entry/253884?redirectedFrom=Generation+X#eid. See also Judy Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost? Sitcom Family Dynamics from the Cleavers to Modern Family,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016], 26).

Show, Diff’rent Strokes, Growing Pains, and Who’s the Boss?,39 and by the 1990s, NBC “largely abandon[ed]” the family sitcom as it attempted to win a ratings battle against ABC.40 Both Friends and Will & Grace became staples of NBC’s Thursday night “Must See TV” lineup in attempts to garner the much-coveted young adult, ages 18-49, audience.41 Purposefully, Friends and Will &

Grace were examples of a narrow-casting strategy in which NBC featured programs with characters that targeted a younger and more affluent audience. In spite of being plagued by a ratings decline from 1991-1994, NBC regenerated its own status as a ratings stalwart through shows such as

Seinfeld and Friends, which originally aired in the fall of 1994.42 Will & Grace later came in the fall of 1998, but was nonetheless informed by NBC’s audience targeting and an attempt to rebrand the network as younger and more upscale.43 Based upon ensemble casting, Alice Leppert states that both Friends and Will & Grace depict a “friendship-family,” in which a group of young adult professionals regularly gather in a communal, public location.44 This format of the friend-family was originally pioneered by NBC’s Cheers, but both Friends and Will & Grace demonstrate marked shifts from Cheers because of the dual-emphasis on the characters’ home and work lives.45 NBC’s

39 It is worth noting that the sheer number of family sitcoms in the 1980s was largely a product of perceived demand for this type of content from the boomer audience, and yet starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a shift within the networks to target younger, educated, and affluent audiences. (See Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 25. See also Amanda D. Lotz, “Must- See TV: NBC’s Dominant Decades,” in NBC: America’s Network, ed. Michelle Hilmes [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 262). 40 Leppert, Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcom, 146-7. 41 Leppert, Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcom, 147. 42 Leppert, Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcom, 269. 43 Lotz, “Must See TV,” 270. 44 Leppert, Family Values: Gender, Domestic Labor, and 1980s Sitcom, 147. 45 Cheers takes place almost exclusively in Sam’s bar, eponymously named Cheers, a place of leisure for his customers but his place of work. Friends, in contrast, uses a variety of sets. The series forays into all of the central character’s work and home environments, including but not limited to Central Perk, where Rachel works as a waitress for the first two seasons, her office at Ralph Lauren, Ross’s classroom and office at the unnamed university at which he teaches, Joey’s escapades on sets of his various acting gigs, Chandler’s nondescript corporate office and his later travels to Oklahoma in season 8, Phoebe’s massage room at her spa and her clients’ homes, and Monica’s

niche-marketing strategy worked; both series were foundational in keeping NBC as the foremost broadcast network during the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. Like other sitcom predecessors that came before them, Friends and Will & Grace were ubiquitous in their particular cultural moment because they provided sites of audience identification, entertainment, and emotional release.46 Friends and Will & Grace, because of their popular and critical acclaim, normalized the experiences, struggles, and triumphs of single young-adult characters as they navigated the hurdles of becoming both externally more successful in their personal and professional lives while likewise becoming more intrinsically self-actualized in ways that had largely not been portrayed in sitcoms prior to this moment.

Friends spoke to Gen X, a group fraught with fiscal, political, and existential angst by displaying characters who were not successful at the series’ onset, but instead, progressed throughout its decade-long run. Friends premiered amidst an uncertain American culture and economy. Audiences were “frenetic and less predictable” by the early 1990s, a response to the

Reagan era economic and social policies that “widened the gap between rich and poor,”47 and made people suspicious of centralized authority after the “Reagan boom” was revealed to have shaky foundations that ultimately led to “Black Monday” in which The Dow plunged an “astonishing

various kitchens where she is employed as a chef. Likewise, Will & Grace positions both Will’s legal offices and Grace’s design studio as sets of paramount importance, and in the later seasons, the series also features the interiors of Karen and Jack’s respective homes. 46 Other situation comedies that became nearly synonymous with the relative cultural context in which they first aired include but are not limited to: I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, Burns and Allen Show, The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Cheers, and Seinfeld. 47 Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 84.

22.6%,” in 1987,48 alongside the collapse of several eminent savings and loans associations.49 The

1990s began in an economic downturn caused by higher interest rates on debt imposed by the U.S.

Federal Reserve alongside higher rates of unemployment.50 In effect, Gen X was largely graduating from college with more debt and less opportunity than previous generations. In opposition to the supposed unity of American cultural reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War,

American audiences in the 1990s were increasingly fragmented, and they were seeking communities, typically of friends, that were increasingly narrow and like themselves.51 The ensemble of characters in Friends functioned as various sites of identification for viewers rife with anxiety regarding the failed promise of a brighter socio-economic future. Rachel Green, Ross and

Monica Gellar, Chandler Bing, Phoebe Buffay, and Joey Tribbiani came from different socio- economic, class, and familial backgrounds to achieve some, but not all, of traditional status markers well into their thirties. Thus, Friends performs cultural bildung by reflecting Gen X uncertainty on screen, while also normalizing a variety of paths toward successful assimilation. Friends was the crest of a wave of series that reinforced and anticipated cultural perceptions surrounding marrying later in life, or not at all, and the decision not to have children. The series was powerful within its cultural moment because it helped an entire generation make sense of their own lived experiences in an era where adults were seeking a source of stability amidst vast socio-economic uncertainty.

48 “Black Monday” is cited as the biggest one-day percentage loss in history, even surpassing the stock market crash of 1929 that ultimately led to the Great Depression. (See Christine Romans, “Remembering the Worst Day in Wall Street History,” CNN online, October 19, 2017, accessed December 18, 2019, https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/19/investing/romans-numeral-black- monday/index.html). 49 “1990-2 Early 1990s Recession,” Slaying the Dragon of Debt: Fiscal Politics and Policy from the 1970s to the Present, The Regents of the University of California, last modified March 7, 2011, accessed January 18, 2020, https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/debt/1990srecession.html. 50 “1990-2 Early 1990s Recession.” 51 Becker, Gay TV and Straight America, 84.

Friends functioned as a prevalent cultural salve that young adult audiences could cling to that was both pedagogical and entertaining.

Though Friends enacted bildung in regard to delayed and varied definitions of adulthood, it did so through an almost entirely heterosexual lens.52 Will & Grace, in contrast, crafted bildung differently because of its decidedly queer perspective. Will & Grace broke ground as the first gay sitcom notwithstanding ABC’s Ellen, which began in a few years earlier in 1994, and was not originally written as a gay sitcom.53 However, Will & Grace provided a cultural site of contention because it aired a mere two months after ABC cancelled Ellen when DeGeneres, and her eponymous main character, came out as gay.54 NBC took a risk by airing Will & Grace, especially given that 1996, a mere two years earlier, ushered in the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, indicative of a legal shift to target and oppress homosexual individuals.55 Will & Grace, in contrast, unapologetically foregrounds the homosexual milieu from the first episode through the inclusion of two gay protagonists, Will Truman and Jack McFarland. Though I am not arguing that NBC’s first queer sitcom is unproblematic, it is significant to note that gay visibility of this magnitude was a first. Will & Grace normalized queer visibility in mainstream media in ways that had never happened before in spite of legal efforts to ostracize and dehumanize the homosexual and queer community. Amidst a culture that largely treated gay media representations with ambivalence, Will

52 Though Friends does make a foray into lesbian visibility with Ross’s first wife, Carol Willick (initially played by Anita Barone, but later replaced by Jane Sibbett), and her lover, Susan Bunch (played by Jessica Hecht), the show is overwhelmingly situated from a heterosexual perspective. 53 Niall Richardson, Clarissa Smith, and Angela Werndly, Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 62. 54 Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will & Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre,” Critical Studies to Media Communication, 19, no.1 (2002), 88. 55 “A Timeline of the Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage in the US,” A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States, Georgetown University Law Library, updated February 7, 2020, accessed February 13, 2020, https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4182201.

& Grace was a mainstream and critical success that unapologetically foregrounded gay central characters.

Though Friends and Will & Grace enacted bildung differently, both were paramount in informing the current cultural milieu in which domesticity is met with ambivalence and queer representations are mainstays in both popular and high culture. Friends and Will & Grace can be read as bildungsroman texts because both series perform cultural bildung in a similar fashion to the canonical literary genre.56 Both series are pedagogical, and both series have reflected and produced cultural development. However, unlike the traditional bildungsroman in which a youth successfully assimilates and looks to the future with hope, Friends and Will & Grace depict delayed bildungsheld characters that are already adults from legal and socio-economic perspectives, and both series are marked with an affect of ambivalence, or even grief, regarding the “growing up” process. Thus, it is through tension between the various ways in which both series reflect, and depart from, the traditional literary genre that make both series compelling contemporary bildungsroman works. The stakes of this argument are multi-faceted. An alternative, reparative reading of both Friends and Will & Grace will reveal the subversive potential of sitcoms and undermine criticism that sitcoms lack cultural value because of their assumed status as mere vehicles for cultural hegemony. Though Friends and Will & Grace are forms of mass entertainment, they both portray nuanced narratives that can be unearthed through a critical reading. By reading sitcoms as delayed and ambivalent bildungsroman, an avenue of potential opens for the canonical bildungsroman form. Through the sitcom, the framework can be regenerated within the 1990s and twenty-first century milieu. Both series break from the traditional bildungsroman through age and affect because neither sitcom foregrounds the adolescent hope of burgeoning adulthood. Instead, in

56 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12.

keeping with Generation X’s identity as a “lost” generation, both series depict relatively young adults grappling with uncertainty about how to make progress towards traditional status markers of adulthood, and both series centralize affect tinged with nostalgia and sadness at the inevitability of moving forward into subsequent decades of one’s life. What makes these series such powerful cultural tools are their refraction of cultural anxieties regarding the future. In contemporary society, there is no longer undiluted hope that the future will bring success and prosperity. Both Friends and

Will & Grace depict norms of the bildungsroman genre alongside meaningful and relevant departures from it, and it is this tension that enables both series to conduct cultural work while still remaining popular and relevant to audiences more than twenty years after their initial air dates.

To begin my argument, I examine the relative histories and similarities between the canonical bildungsroman and the situation comedy. The first chapter includes a brief history that will bring to light the ways in which these two mediums work in tandem with one another while providing evidence of both's susceptibility to change and adapt through time. The second chapter will discuss the various ways in which Friends and Will & Grace depict the paramount identificatory tenets of the bildungsroman genre. Through formal, aesthetic, and narrative elements,

Friends and Will & Grace emphasize character development, yet they do so through a balance of retaining paradigmatic situation comedy elements with contemporary narrative techniques. The third chapter then reveals how both series make meaningful departures from the canonical bildungsroman genre, and through these adaptations, both series reinforce contemporary anxieties surrounding an uncertain adult future. Finally, I end with a discussion of the continued popularity of both Friends and Will & Grace and their incredible endurance into the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER I

Some scholars contend, in an attempt to solidify the bildungsroman critical definition, there must be reliance upon its etymology. Thus, a bildungsroman text must be a “roman,” or a vernacular prose novel.57 I, however, intend to conceptualize bildungsroman as a more theoretical, and less concrete or literary construct. A theoretical ideation of bildungsroman is useful when applying the term to forms other than literature. Marc Redfield argues that the bildungsroman exists only as a “phantom entity” and thus “the choice of texts to be read is in some ways an open one but in other ways comes burdened with specific responsibilities.”58 Redfield opens the bildungsroman to evolve and manifest in other formations because he conceptualizes the bildungsroman through its ideology as opposed to its form. Redfield, through his statement regarding the “burden” of “specific responsibilities,” notes that bildungsroman is not so ephemeral as to lack definition. A text must perform certain functions in order to be considered bildungsroman, and one of these necessary responsibilities is exemplifying characterological change in such a way that foregrounds it as a primary narrative device.59 Indeed, Bakhtin echoes Redfield’s sentiment when he explains that the text must prioritize the image of “man’s essential becoming,” so that the hero is importantly not constant.60 Bildungsroman refers to the larger theoretical concept in which the hero is in the process of becoming more full-fledged, self-actualized and self-realized, and yet there is a simultaneous narrative impetus to become fully assimilated into society as well. Moretti succinctly defines this balance as the bildungsheld’s drive towards both “individuality” and “normality,” and more often

57 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 11. 58 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the "Bildungsroman” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), xi. 59 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 2. 60 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 20.

than not, these impulses are in competition with one another.61 In canonical German bildungsroman, this manifested through a male bildungsheld obtaining a successful career and presumed domesticity (through the acquisition of a wife, and sometimes children). In more contemporary examples of bildungsroman, the outward demonstrations of the inward progress are less limited; characters may demonstrate positive socio-economic shifts, improved employment, romantic relationships, or in some cases, parenthood.

Shared Criticisms

Though seemingly disparate in terms of form and historical context, the bildungsroman and the situation comedy work in dialogue with one another. A brief history of both genres, along with a cursory glance at criticisms levied against the bildungsroman and the situation comedy will be helpful in elucidating this point. The sitcom and the bildungsroman genres have historically been criticized for their relative reliance upon conventions that have failed to adapt. The bildungsroman specifically has been criticized by many scholars for its formulaicism. Hegel mockingly claims of the German bildungsroman that the bildungsheld, “usually gets his girl and some sort of job, marries, and becomes a Philistine like everybody else.”62 The “coming of age,” as noted by Hegel, ends when the protagonist is considered an acceptable member of society. As discussed by Moretti, the goal of the classic bildungsroman is the end of the “desire for metamorphosis.”63 The bildungsheld, having reached the end of his adolescence, is now presupposed to desire stasis.

Impending productive adulthood is resolute. Thus, assimilation and maintaining the status quo were

61 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York/London: Verso, 1987), 16. 62 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), 216-7, quoted in Todd Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 24. 63 Moretti, The Way of the World, 23.

often the indicators of a successful bildungsroman.64 From a gendered standpoint, the classic bildungsroman was also justly criticized for its assumption that the “male self is the universal self.”65 The German literary tradition failed to include female characters by presupposing “a range of social options only available to men,” in terms of characters' career choices.66 Importantly, the canonical bildungsroman’s exclusionary practices likewise extend to sexuality because bildungsroman, in its paradigmatic conception, was geared towards a heteronormative coupling. No space was allotted for the bildungsheld to remain single, nor was there the possibility of homosocial or homosexual pairings in the canonical form. The range of potentialities for denouement of canonical bildungsroman was, indeed, incredibly limited because the canonical bildungsroman is a normative genre.

The sitcom has likewise been criticized for its reliance upon formulaic endings. Lawrence

Mintz, writing in the 1980s about popular situation comedies produced and aired in decades prior, argues that the repetitive narrative structure in situation comedies that is neatly “resolved” at the end of each episode is a primary force behind the sitcom’s ideology of stasis. Any sense of evolution from one episode to the next is largely undone.67 There is no room for characterological development because there is an audience expectation, then delivered by the series, that the episode’s narrative will reach a complete and neat denouement.68 Mintz contends that situation

64 Maroula Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” in A History of the Bildungsroman, ed. Sarah Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 215. 65 Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 202. 66 “Introduction,” in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1983), 7. 67 Lawrence E. Mintz, “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” Studies in Popular Culture, 8, no. 2 (1985): 42-4. 68 For his analysis, Mintz relies upon Horace Newcomb’s foundational definition of the situation comedy as “weekly half hour plays involving a recurring cast of familiar characters who face new adventures initiated and resolved in each episode”. (See Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 25- 58).

comedies are mere “comprisal[s] of safe and familiar popular culture conventions,”69 and it is because of this popular packaging that they are nothing more than “trivial” or silly.70 Part of what makes the situation comedy trivial, according to Mintz, is the reliance upon “characterizations,” or long-standing character tropes instead of fully-developed and nuanced characters.71 Horace

Newcomb, whom Mintz cites, also argues that situation comedies, in their first few decades of production, promote antics of “confusion” that become fully resolved, and are therefore not able to infiltrate into next week’s episode.72 Much like its literary predecessor which hinged upon a domestic, optimistic ending, so too were many early situation comedies prone to endings that brought the characters back to narrative equilibrium.

Both bildungsroman and situation comedies have inherited a legacy of supposed stasis, however, for both forms to remain culturally relevant throughout their overlapping histories, it must be realized that both forms adapt to reflect cultural changes. Throughout their histories, both forms have developed and shown propensity for bildung, or continued formation. Seemingly contradictory, both genres have remained ubiquitous in popular culture because of their abilities to simultaneously retain particular paradigmatic elements of their forms while nuancing other elements in keeping with specific cultural changes in temporality and accepted customs. Bildungsroman and sitcoms retain what makes them both familiar, while also making significant, culturally reflective developments. Todd Kontje, when referring to criticism levied against the bildungsroman, writes that there is “much to be said for the appeal of generic convention” because we can anticipate the

69 Mintz, “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” 44. 70 Mintz does contend that one of the few situation comedy creators who can be taken seriously is Norman Lear and his slew of 1970 sitcoms that examined current social issues including racism and class privilege. According to Mintz, however, Lear’s series, such as The Jeffersons and Good Times, only embark on such a social critique “grudgingly” and in a precursory manner. (See Mintz, “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” 42-5). 71 Mintz, “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” 42. 72 Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 31.

end points, and therefore, we are “drawn to them because of, not despite, the fact that they fulfill expectations.”73 Kontje here describes the innate pleasure of a form that fulfills reader expectations, a concept that likewise applies to the sitcom. Though both the sitcom and bildungsroman have retained elements of their respective paradigms; in many significant ways, both forms have manifested considerably to work within and speak to the cultures of which they are a part. Thus, intrinsically within each genre, bildung has occurred that then allows each form to influence their relative cultures and promote further bildung beyond the genre.

Bourgeois Mediums with Subversive Potential

One significant aspect of both the bildungsroman and the situation comedy’s histories is that they each developed as a hybrid. Primarily, bildungsroman is preceded by the baroque ordeal novel, or, as Bakhtin articulates, the heroic novel of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries that dates back to ancient times. Though the bildungsroman draws inspiration from the long-standing heroic novel archetype in which the hero perseveres through a variety of tests and challenges,

Kontje is careful to distinguish that the bildungsroman is not simply akin to Joseph Campbell’s conception of the Hero’s Journey; Bakhtin delineates that Homeric heroes, best epitomized by

Odysseus, do not evolve throughout their narratives. Odysseus retains the same characterological traits throughout his two decade sojourn back to Ithaca.74 Several centuries later, the heroic novel lost its “purity” amidst the various cultural shifts in the wake of the French Revolution and the ensuing European Enlightenment, primarily through a desire to celebrate more common-place and less “larger than life” literary heroes, and yet the leitmotif of testing remained a prominent literary

73 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 14. 74 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 12.

trope.75 Through a shared plot-reliance upon characterological tests, the heroic novel and the educational novel blended into a new subcategory that celebrated the interiority of a common protagonist, while still posing external tests to that character. Other common literary categories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included hagiographies and adventure novels, and Kontje notes that these two genres also influenced the bildungsroman. The religious novel became secularized, and the adventure novel, primarily through advances in writing techniques made possible by Rousseau and others, “rendered inwards” to focus more on the protagonist’s psychological and emotional interiority.76 The bildungsroman form, then, came to be as an incredible amalgamation of heroic and adventure narratives with a secularized protagonist that is focalized through a narratological emphasis on his internal evolution set amidst a series of challenges.77

The sitcom’s history begins roughly a century and a half later with the inception of television in 1948.78 The fledgling medium relied upon media predecessors (film, radio, and theater) for narrative sustenance, and the situation comedy came to be as a hybrid production not unlike the bildungsroman. Brett Mills elucidates: “The sitcom did not arrive on television as a fully-fledged form, and instead mutated out of other types of broadcasting, bringing together the realist settings

75 Bakhtin notes that the heroic novel is a subcategory of the ordeal novel, a form which dates back to the dawn of literature. Subcategories of the ordeal novel date back to antiquity and include ancient Greek romances, Christian hagiographies dating back to the second century AD, and the medieval chivalric novel. The baroque ordeal novel developed in the seventeenth century in large part due to authors including Honore d’Urfe, Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, and others who first pen the “possibilities of the idea of testing.” (See Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 11-13.) 76 Interestingly enough, it is cited by scholars that young Goethe forayed into writing about psychology and characterological interiority well before his ground-breaking bildungsroman debut. Goethe is categorized with the likes of Rousseau as being not only influenced by philosophical, cultural, and literary trends, but aiding in their creation. (See Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 12-3). 77 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 12-3. 78 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 2.

and narrative structures of drama and the performance styles and audience interactions of theater.”79

The sitcom is an amalgamation from its inception. They revolved around quotidian settings and narratives while incorporating dramatic, and highly engaging, performative styles that mimicked live theater and the “visual spectacle” of vaudeville entertainment. Early sitcoms, in a legacy that can still be seen today, use the every-day and make a performative spectacle out of it. The situation comedy comes to fruition, much like the bildungsroman, by appropriating forms that came before.

In the case of both forms, there is innate relatability and entertainment because the experiences of common characters are foregrounded.

Both situation comedies and the canonical German bildungsroman have bourgeois roots that are dependent upon each genre’s respective cultures at the time of their inceptions. Both are referred to as “middle class mediums,” because it is the middle class to which both forms appealed.80

Bildungsroman came to be “in tandem with the bourgeois public sphere” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.81 In terms of context, the rising bourgeois was both widely literate and demanding of literature that better reflected their lived reality in the tumultuous Revolution and

Enlightenment period.82 Characterologically, class was a fundamental element in the development of the canonical bildungsheld because the very notion of character formation stems from a middle class sensibility. Aristocratic literary characters are defined “by who they are, rather than by what they can do,” because the character’s title matters more than their profession. The aristocratic

79 Brett Mills, The Sitcom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 35. 80 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 6. 81 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 11-12. 82 It is worth noting that the Germanic states did not have an equivalent or parallel revolution to France’s, but it was nonetheless tumultuous all across Europe at this time. Over the centuries-long rule over the Germanic states by the Roman Empire there were many small uprisings, but they were ubiquitously put down. The French Revolution, however, was able to enact a wave of powerful ideals regarding inherent human dignity and worth beyond economic status that washed over the Germanic states at this time. Ideals regarding innate human worth and agency affected all echelons of society. (See Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 21-2).

character (akin to real-lived experiences) is always on-stage because there is no blending between public and private spheres within the upper echelon of court society.83 Likewise, there is very little potential for upward economic or social mobility for the aristocracy because they already occupy the apex. For different reasons, the proletariat was likewise unable to fulfill the role of bildungsheld because of fiscal limitations that inhibited movement and personal choice beyond economic sustenance. For the “evolving sense of self” that is so necessary to the bildungsroman, there must be economic fluidity and movement to match the often-external tests put upon the bildungsheld. The protagonist of the archetypal bildungsroman was in a position to fully explore his subjectivity because of his bourgeois standing; both aristocratic and proletariat classes were too rigid.84 The middle class bildungsheld, paradigmatically embodied by Wilhelm Meister, was welcomed by the burgeoning Germanic bourgeois of the eighteenth century, and he gave rise to their already- developing consciousness.

Early American situation comedies of the twentieth century were likewise largely targeted for a middle-class reception. Lynn Spigel notes that attracting a middle-class audience was essential to the situation comedy’s and early television’s success from both practical and ideological standpoints.85 Suburban nuclear families literally owned the homes in which a television could be incorporated, and they had disposable income. Middle class families were economically indispensable to the television industry because they could afford television sets and the various commodities being sold on paid advertisements. The nuclear family embodied American cultural ideals in the Post Second World War, and they were the target market for post-war consumerism.86

83 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 11. 84 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 11. 85 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 12. 86 Lynn Spigel explains that the home had been a “consumerist mecca” in American culture beginning with the late Victorian period, and by the middle of the twentieth century, the home had

Thus, archetypal situation comedies of the 1950’s purposefully portrayed family narratives to appeal in accordance with broadcast networks, and advertiser’s, aligned ethos to reach the broadest possible audience. Because American families were the target audiences for early sitcoms, these sitcoms typically reflected middle class experiences on screen in a way that parallels the bildungsroman and its reflection of the bourgeois experience. Though there were working class exceptions, such as The Honeymooners, many early situation comedies depicted middle class families that had a degree of disposable income without the financial cushion of belonging to the wealthy upper echelon.87 Similar to the bildungsroman, the sitcom, amidst a variety of forces, also solidified the cultural image of the middle class by making it so widely available and visible on the small screen.

The target middle class audience for the sitcom informed the way that early series employed humor. As stated earlier, situation comedies were reliant upon aspects of vaudeville entertainment, but prevalent, and indeed, culturally risqué vaudeville antics such as sexual innuendos or cross- dressing needed to be contained on broadcast television. Early situation comedies merged

“traditions of live entertainment with stories about wholesome American families,” in an attempt to

“tame” the bawdy humor of vaudeville.88 For example, in an episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy and

achieved status as a ubiquitous cultural ideal, a site representative of American prosperity in the wake of the Second World War. (See Spigel, Make Room for TV, 17). 87 Importantly, the 1950s also saw a wave of what George Lipsitz terms, “urban, ethnic, working- class situation comedies” that demonstrated potential for social mobility and opportunity. These situation comedies, of which The Goldbergs, Mama, Life with Luigi, and Life of Riley, are primary examples, demonstrate a contradictory lived experience to the consumerist mecca that network television often depicted. Though these series largely disappear in the 1960s and situation comedies become more homogenized in terms of protagonist’s racial and socio-economic status, Lipsitz significantly highlights that the working class immigrant experience would have been a “concrete memory” for American television audiences in the post-war period because either their parents or grandparents would have endured the immigration experience. (See George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990] 39-43). 88 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 142.

Ethel both dress as relatively scantily-clad martians in an attempt to promote a movie and pay back debt to a former classmate, but the costuming is packaged as more genteel and comedic than overtly sexual because both characters are married.89 In other episodes, Lucy cross-dresses or dons other features typically reserved for men, such as a mustache.90 Though considered to be a “respectable middle class repackaging” because of the various ways in which sitcoms adapted vaudeville’s subversive, adult humor, the situation comedy’s roots nonetheless derive from visual spectacle that pose critiques against uptight norms regarding gender and sexuality.91 This tension between the sitcom’s respectable “packaging” and its underlying ideological concerns would permeate the sitcom’s reception and inform the remainder of its American history.92

The sitcom and bildungsroman genres both likewise rely upon contextually subversive foundational texts. Though I have already explained, in part, the cultural impact that Goethe’s

Apprenticeship had upon its first audience, a more in-depth examination of the work will be helpful in understanding how it established the narrative pattern for the bildungsroman genre. Meister is a sensitive young man seeking the freedom of self-expression as an actor in spite of his more respectable social status as bourgeois; he would rather be creative than bear the burden of his family’s business. Wilhelm’s theatrical dreams are not realized, and he abandons the theater for a more economic and practical means of income once he acknowledges his economic decline. The variety of economic and personal setbacks endured by Wilhelm reinforce the bildungsroman with what Kontje defines as its affective “complexity,” that he contends is largely ignored because much

89 I Love Lucy, season 3, episode 22, “Lucy is Envious,” perf. Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, aired March 29, 1954, on CBS, https://www.hulu.com/watch/e01b91d2-73e5-41a8-b2a2-50f0bf265ca1. 90 I Love Lucy, season 1, episode 23, “The Mustache,” perf. Lucille Ball, aired March 17, 1952, on CBS. 91 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 151. 92 The term “packaging” here refers to the way in which the situation comedy was presented to viewers. Typically, older situation comedies revolved around middle- or working-class nuclear families. Examples include I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Mama, and others.

attention is paid only to the end of the work, as opposed to its narratable middle.93 Wilhelm’s choice to pursue his artistic dream is celebrated within the work when Wilhelm is contrasted with his brother-in-law, Werner, whose main characterological drive is to further the success of Wilhelm’s family business. Though Wilhelm is less economically viable, he is described as much more attractive and happier than his brother-in-law.94 The resolution of the novel sees Wilhelm married and embarking on a domestic life with his wife and son, and thus the paradigmatic bildungsroman foregrounds Wilhelm’s evolution from discontented youth to self-sufficient independent man both through external challenges and the interior evolution of his subjectivity.

Interestingly, the resolution of the bildungsroman is often domestic, or at least hinting at impending domesticity, and it is within this milieu that the situation comedy picks up its narrative.

One of the pioneering series of the situation comedy, I Love Lucy, begs important questions about what occurs for those characters who have seemingly transcended into their domestic “happy ending.” I Love Lucy “codified the conventions and structures of the situation comedy”95 with its premiere in 1951 on CBS.96 Similar to Goethe’s Meister, the premiere of I Love Lucy preceded the development of terms for its categorization.97 The term “situation comedy,” did not appear in print

93 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 12. 94 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeships and Travels, trans. Thomas Carlyle (New York: A.L. Burt, 1839), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36483/36483-h/36483-h.htm. 95 Lori Landay, “I Love Lucy: Television and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 87. 96 These conventions include, but are not limited to the elaborate, physical style of slapstick comedy that became synonymous with the sitcom, the use of three cameras when filming, the live studio audience, high key lighting, and the stage-like nature of each set. 97 Karl Morgenstern coined the term Bildungsroman in a series of essays published between 1817 and 1824, more than twenty years after Wilhelm Meister’s first publication date of 1795. (See Karl Morgenstern, “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman,” trans. Tobias Boes, PMLA 124, no.2, [2009]: 647-659).

until a TV Guide article in 1953, two years after the premiere of the series.98 Lucy famously depicted the comedic adventures of Lucy Ricardo (played by Lucille Ball), a charismatic and unsatisfied housewife who sought a life for herself outside of the home, much to the chagrin of her husband,

Ricky (played by Ball’s real-life husband, Desi Arnaz). Ball became a household name both because of her propensity for physical comedy and her reflection of many women’s post World War

II lived experiences. The show was so successful that it set entirely new records for the burgeoning television medium when it became the first television show to be seen in over ten million homes.99

A surface reading of both Wilhelm Meister and I Love Lucy supports a conservative argument that bildungsroman and the situation comedy, though separated across 150 years of history, both work as vehicles for conformative cultural hegemony. Indeed, given that canonically, the bildungsroman form is founded upon the principle of normative assimilation, it is perhaps unsurprising that individual freedom must ultimately be curtailed upon its resolution.100 Meister forays into the theater and an unprecedented journey away from his bourgeois family, but the adventure must come to an end before the narrative’s denouement, and his adventure must be contained by the acquisition of his own nuclear family. The loss of supposed freedom and independence is even more pressing for female characters who must “remain virgins until they find their Mr. Darcy in a plotline that leads to a happy ending of the novel and also the end of any career ambitions.”101 Likewise, because of I Love Lucy’s domestic setting and its narrative structure that

98 David Marc, “Origins of the Genre: In Search of the Radio Sitcom,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 15-16. 99 Lori Landay, “I Love Lucy: Television and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Re-Viewed, Still Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 31. 100 Moretti, The Way of the World, 6. 101 Kontje does not directly state that Pride and Prejudice be read as a bildungsroman, but he utilizes the well-known novel to articulate a literary trend in which female characters have limited

revolved around the Ricardo marriage, Lucy entrenched the sitcom form, from its archetypal text, in a traditional, gendered conception of matrimony and family that echoes Apprenticeship.

Indeed, domesticity is so paramount to Lucy, and other sitcoms that followed, that the domestic comedy developed as the first sitcom subgenre.102 Mittell defines the domestic comedy:

“Domestic comedies generate conflicts from tensions between husbands and wives...but they typically reaffirm the nuclear family and marriage as the stable foundations of American society.”103 Lucy’s adventures beyond her home were typically resolved by the closing of each episode, and thus the sitcom inherited a legacy of neat narrative closure that scholars have utilized to imbue the sitcom with conservative ideological significance. The neat narrative ending, and the return to domesticity through Lucy’s typical failure in her external foray, inscribed the sitcom in this ideology. Lawrence Mintz describes this phenomenon: “Sitcom ideology reconciles the viewer, as well as the characters, to a social situation... in which domestic tranquility is the highest ideal.”104

Through its narrative structure and the domesticity of the television as its viewing platform, the situation comedy became nearly universally-associated with domestic ideology in which the family is foregrounded and stasis, a sense of equilibrium that is temporarily disrupted and then restored within each episode, reigns supreme. In parallel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship foregrounds the economic stasis of Meister’s middle-class position at both the start and end of the novel in spite of hurdles and setbacks that take place within the middle of the narrative.

agency, and their primary narrative concerns revolve around marriage. (See Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 14). 102 These other sitcoms include but are not limited to: The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Goldbergs, Honeymooners, Mama, and Make Room for Daddy, later titled The Danny Thomas Show. 103 Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 249. 104 Mintz, “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” 44.

However, there is potential for alternative readings of both Meister and I Love Lucy that foreground both texts’ implied contention with, rather than reaffirmation of, dominant cultural ideals and reveals that perhaps both the bildungsroman and the situation comedy are more subversive than they initially appear. Published in the midst of the French Revolution,105 Meister reasserts the importance of individual agency through the contextually-revolutionary “heroization of the ‘little man’” in opposition to the canonical tradition of glorifying the larger-than-life literary hero dating back to Homeric epics.106 Meister is not a remarkable character in terms of his traits, strength, or finances. Indeed, the primary narrative drive for Meister is to be an actor, and he fails in this endeavor. There is no archetypal aspect that marks him as a traditional “hero,” and yet he remains the focal point of the paradigmatic bildungsroman. Meister is celebrated for his ordinary nature.107

Similarly, I Love Lucy offers a parallel contention with the cultural hegemony of 1950s

America. The “conflict” for each I Love Lucy episode, afterall, derives from Lucy’s restlessness within the confines of her domesticity, and the series did not shy away from depicting marital tension between the Ricardos. Lori Landay argues, “I Love Lucy resonated so loudly in the early

1950s because the show suggested the failure of the domestic ideal - based on the rigid gender roles portrayed in popular culture - to match up with people’s real experiences of everyday life.”108 The

105 The French Revolution, after four phases of grueling warfare, came to an end in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte became France’s “first consul” upon his dismantling of the Directory. (See “The French Revolution - The New Regime,” Encyclopedia Britannica online, accessed January 14, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution/The-new-regime). 106 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 14. 107 Goethe was influenced by French Revolution ideology, and Meister demonstrates economic, as well as characterological, critiques of the status quo. Meister, through Werner’s capitalistic ventures, depicts land speculation as a viable economic alternative in which bourgeois and aristocratic unite to revitalize the old feudal economic system, and at the novel’s denouement, there are many marriages across class lines. (See Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 20). 108 Landay, “I Love Lucy: Television and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology,” (2016), 35.

primary narrative tenet of I Love Lucy is Lucy boredom as a housewife. She is always trying to get out of the house in spite of the angst that it causes in her marriage. Lucy is an adult at the narrative onset, unlike Wilhelm, but both characters show deep dissatisfaction with the roles that their relative societies prescribe for them. The narrative of each episode of Lucy depicts Lucy’s attempts, in her own limited way, to shirk the traditional responsibilities of domesticated adulthood that are being thrust upon her. Lucy’s restlessness and her resistance to the gendered confines placed upon her reflected the lived experiences of post WW2 America. There was a circulating cultural ideology that affirmed the positive, redemptive potential of the decidedly gendered nuclear family, but this family image conflicted with the real-world experiences of soldiers coming home traumatized from the war and women being forcibly displaced in the workforce. These women who were being coerced back into the home saw their confinement displayed and reflected through Lucy’s experience. Read through one lens, with attention to the surface-level domestic imagery, I Love

Lucy certainly reinscribes domestic ideology. However, through a characterological or narrative reading in which Lucy’s unhappiness is foregrounded, in which her dissatisfaction with the status quo is present, it becomes possible to see the resistance that I Love Lucy was demonstrating to mainstream gendered culture while remaining a touchstone within popular culture. Similar to criticism of the bildungsroman, perhaps more attention should be paid to the narrative middle as opposed to the denouement. It is the tension between cultural reinforcement and resistance that made this sitcom, and its numerous successors, so incredibly popular. Lucy resonated with viewers because she provided catharsis for audiences who saw elements of their own lives reflected on the television screen.

Perhaps in part because both forms arose as amalgamations, the bildungsroman and the situation comedy demonstrate degrees of self-reflexivity. The bildungsroman is more subtle than

the situation comedy, but it is self-referential regardless. Back to the paradigmatic example of

Meister, the protagonist of the bildungsroman is a “reading hero, shaped by the literature that they read and in turn influencing the readers who identify with their experiences.”109 Thus, the bildungsheld demonstrates meta-literary awareness as reflective of the growing literate, bourgeois consciousness of the eighteenth century. As an example, Meister himself is greatly influenced by

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though the source of inspiration later becomes ironic fodder when Hamlet is the only theatrical production in which Meister participates. In a literary parallel, just as Hamlet fails in his mission to avenge his father’s murder, so too does Meister fail in his initial desire to be a successful actor and unite the disparate Germanic states through theater.

Likewise, Lynn Spigel describes the sitcom as a “self-referential” medium that proved capable of bringing to light the entirely prefabricated “artifice of postwar consumer culture.”110 The sitcom’s roots in vaudeville make it a vehicle of self-reflexivity, a hallmark trait that dates back to the form’s 1950s origins. In other words, from its inception, situation comedies were inherently aware of their propensity for entertainment.111 In contrast with other genres that develop self- reflexivity through history and adaptation, the sitcom reveled in its constructed nature from the

109 Todd Kontje, Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 8. 110 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 163. 111 Vaudeville entertainment developed from a different aesthetic than that of live theater. Live theater was conceived of as a more aristocratic and respectable pastime, and “aesthetic distance” was a primary element of theatrical entertainment in part because of that association with propriety. In attempts to foreground the reality of the performance and create an illusion, there was an intentional distance created between the audience and the actor. Because of its presumed “genteel respectability,” live theater anticipated a quiet and demure audience. By contrast, vaudeville was a more economical entertainment option that attracted both middle- and working-class audiences. One primary aesthetic of vaudeville entertainment sought to break the distance between audience and actor. Vaudeville performers typically directly interacted with their audiences and highlighted the very presented, or constructed nature of their performances. This legacy of performative “self- awareness” was thus inherited by the situation comedy in attempts to feel familiar to audiences viewing at home. (See Spigel, Make Room for TV, 159).

beginning. Through self-reflexivity, sitcoms revealed the artifice of gendered domesticity in the post-war years, and more importantly, gave audiences the ability to laugh at the very constructed nature of these rigid, restrictive conventions that left many feeling irrevocably trapped.112 Even scholars who are critical of situation comedies admit that the form is capable of expressing the audience’s “values, attitudes, dispositions, fears, and hopes.”113 From the onset of the sitcom’s history then, there has been a supposed critical disparity between the potential for subversion and the sitcom’s status as a mass entertainment medium. In other words, the sitcom’s potential for subverting hegemony has been largely overlooked. Spigel highlights that “Culture is a process that entails power struggles and negotiations among various social ideals,” articulating that culture is always susceptible to change. Television, and situation comedies in particular, are keen sites for cultural struggles because they do not pretend to be a naturalized form. Instead, both forms acknowledge their constructedness.114 Situation comedies, and to a lesser degree, bildungsroman realize, and at times, even foreground their own artifice, and thus they are able to bring to light new ideals and grapple with the consequences of changing the status quo without being off-putting. Both the sitcom and the bildungsroman are inarguably normalizing genres, and yet, because both function as popular mass mediums, there is great potential to alter culture and renegotiate what should be considered a norm. Lucy tested the dominant cultural myth of domesticity while being inscribed within it, but it is this tension that makes her image so durable. Mass popularity has been critically translated into conservatism, but the question remains about how what is read as conservatism in mass culture can perhaps be re-read as subversion that enables viewer catharsis through character identification. Thus, both the bildungsroman and the situation comedy, as mass

112 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 165. 113 Mintz, ““Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” 50. 114 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 8.

narratives, demonstrate a nuanced propensity for bildung because both forms acknowledge their own constructed nature, and this acknowledgement enables both genres to regenerate and develop.

Shared Propensities for Bildung

In essence, bildung is inherent within both the bildungsroman and the situation comedy because both forms have continued to evolve. Throughout the nineteenth century, the bildungsroman is disseminated across Europe and into the New World as authors beyond the

Germanic states adapt the ground-breaking literary genre to better suit their cultural and political ideals.115 In England, the female bildungsroman begins to take form in the mid-nineteenth century when women authors, including Charlotte Bronte, question the established “restrictive proscription of femininity” and “reinvigorate” the bildungsroman form.116 In Jane Eyre, Jane is defiant in spite of her impoverished economic state, and she asserts her agency in her various encounters with

Rochester in spite of their class and gender differences. Jane’s protestations are limited, however, because her bildungsroman ends in marriage to Rochester and her assimilation into economic prosperity. In a century-long prelude to the relatability of I Love Lucy, literary heroines such as Jane

Eyre reflect the lived-experiences of Victorian women and girls who faced restrictive social norms that effectively effaced the possibility of fiscal independence or career choices.117 The English bildungsroman also had several prominent male bildungsheld characters, but the female narratives were more profound because they were demonstrative of the real-life cultural shifts in which women were no longer content with their marginalized and stagnant position in society. This desire

115 Germany is not a “discrete nation” until 1871, and so at the time of the bildungsroman’s dissemination across Europe, Germany more closely resembled a grouping of semi-autonomous states. (See David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], 200. 116 Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 204. 117 Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 204.

for social and political shifts found visibility in popular literary forms.118 Beginning in the early twentieth century, “bildung became a reality for women, in general, and for the fictional heroine, in particular” once societal structures evolved to better support women’s journey for independence.119

Jane Eyre, alongside many other prominent texts, set the stage for later developments within the genre, and indeed, literature in general, in the wake of the upheaval caused by the First World War and the 1918 Representation of the People Act in the UK.120 Several countries away from the bildungsroman homeland, the evolution of the female bildungsroman indicates the genre’s propensity for bildung, both as it precedes and reflects cultural shifts.

The situation comedy likewise demonstrates propensity for bildung in the face of radical cultural changes. Cultural evolutions of the 1960s and 70s, including second wave feminism and the youth movement, altered the television landscape in many meaningful ways. One primary tenet of social and cultural fissuring was the tension between boomers, who were coming of age and reaching adolescence or early adulthood, and their highly conservative parents. The situation comedy’s intimate relationship with culture, and its status as a dominant television genre at this time, made it a site upon which these cultural fluctuations could be explored and negotiated.121

118 Three of the most well-known and widely read English bildungsroman texts with a male bildungsheld include Dickens’s Great Expectations and David Copperfield, and Thackeray’s Pendennis, but arguably, some of the most enduring British bildungsroman texts are written by female authors like Bronte, Austen, and Eliot. Indeed, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is considered an archetype of the British bildungsroman. (See Richard Salmon, “The Bildungsroman and Nineteenth-Century British Fictions,” in A History of the Bildungsroman, ed. Sarah Graham [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], 57-83). 119 Esther Kleinbord Labovitz, The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 7. 120 The Representation of the People Act granted women over the age of 30 the right to vote. (See Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 209). 121 Mintz, “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy,” 42.

Social critique was thus reflected on people’s television screens, and the situation comedy, as a purveyor of popular culture, was up to the challenge.122 Kutulas discusses this phenomenon:

A lot of 1950s families stayed together out of necessity; by the 1970s, however,

women had economic options other than marriage, and the singles lifestyle tempted

both men and women...Lifestyle choices also alienated many boomers from their

parents.123

The proposed, and indeed, illusive family stability that became a trademark of the 1950s post-World

War II era no longer rang true for the new generation of “baby boomers” who were coming into adulthood during the 1970s. Thus, the long-standing domestic comedy that reflected cultural values of the post Second World War culture no longer felt relevant to young adult audiences who were searching for independence outside of that biological family. In an attempt to reach the youth audience of the late 1960s and burgeoning 1970s: “TV in the 1970s was antiauthoritarian in style as well as structure, reflecting the influx of boomers into the production process. The result was programming that embraced 1960s values and was irreverent, topical, and mocking of institutions and traditions.”124 Regardless of the sitcom’s historicity as an “institution” of television, the form adapted to suit viewer needs through the development of the workplace sitcom which depicts unrelated characters in their work setting.125 Archetypal examples of this sitcom include WKRP in

Cincinnati, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H. The workplace comedy broke free of its established domestic setting restraints and reflected the sitcom’s ability to adapt to new audience demands while still retaining its central focus upon comedy and character interactions. The

122 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 8. 123 Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 23. 124 Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 24 125 Mittell, Television and American Culture, 249.

“situation” of the situation comedy now takes place beyond the confines of the home and it is liberated to depict larger ensembles of characters that are joined by non-biological tethers.

Importantly, the workplace comedy led to another tangential development. Born from the workplace comedy and driven by a similar cultural anxiety about the security and stability of the nuclear family, came the sitcom trope of the constructed family. In the constructed family, the ensemble cast is comprised of peers, coworkers, or friends that all support each other and provide validation in ways that the biological family cannot.126 One fundamental ideological tenet of these constructed family sitcoms, that goes back to its relatively radical roots of 1960s counterculture communal living concepts, is that constructed families operate without explicit family roles and their associated power hierarchies.127 Each individual character is granted equal significance within the narrative (and importantly, equal significance within the constructed family), because the constructed family is one of choice rather than biology.128

By making constructed families visible on a mainstream platform, these sitcoms demonstrate alternatives to the nuclear family and work against its cultural reification. Significantly, series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show exhibit an independent female lead, Mary Richards, who prioritizes career over familial pursuits. Ironically, in spite of its roots in counterculture, the sitcom brought counterculture into the mainstream by portraying the constructed family in a variety of incredibly popular series, including WKRP in Cincinnati, M*A*S*H, and Three’s Company.129 Each of the series’ popularity helped to naturalize a social construct that was once marginalized.130

126 David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy & American Culture (New York/London: Routledge, 1989) 169. 127 Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 24. 128 Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 24. 129 Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 24. 130 It is worth noting that the sitcom’s ability to naturalize dates back to its origins when the sitcom functions to naturalize the “strange new technology” of television itself. Spigel notes that by utilizing a familiar, domestic setting and quotidian narratives, the sitcom performed the work of

Through the normalization of the constructed family, the situation comedy performs cultural work, or bildung by promoting viable alternative solutions, such as a career, to young adults attempting to forge their path forward into adulthood. Though sitcoms of the 70s could not easily be considered bildungsroman texts, there is a general move throughout series such as Three’s Company and The

Mary Tyler Moore Show to depict youthful characters who are not adolescent, but who are less sure of their cultural footing than their televised predecessors. Many of these series were successful, and they depicted characters who endured comedic obstacles either in their workplace or with other young adults with whom they resided. Situation comedies of the late 1960s and early 70s then, are closer to the canonical bildungsroman, in terms of the exploratory nature of the protagonists, but the characterological development is lacking. This new explorative evolution in the sitcom genre, however, was definitely liberating for women: Lucy Ricardo’s domestic restlessness was contained in many ways by her marriage, but mainstream characters such as Mary Richards and Chrissy Snow revel in their pre-marital escapades. The sitcom, then, because of its popularity, comes into a discourse with culture and its American audience. Though the sitcom, like the bildungsroman, is a normative genre, it is both susceptible to current audience demands and enables the creation of new norms through its cultural visibility and pull.

As indicated by the prior history, bildung, or the propensity for formation, is not limited to the bildungsheld. Bildung is inherent in the sitcom form just as it is in the literary bildungsroman.

The bildungsroman in its archetypal form was limited in scope; the narrative revolved around a white heteronormative bourgeois male, and he encountered external tests that then manifested interior changes. However, because of the malleability of this form, other countries around the

normalizing television when it was a burgeoning medium back in the late 1940’s and early 1940s when consumers were initially wary of the new, invasive technology. (See Spigel, Make Room for TV, 136).

world were able to adapt it and appropriate it according to their own customs. The bildungsroman survives because it has been purposefully reinvigorated and re-energized throughout its history.131

When considered against the backdrop of the bildungsroman’s Westernized evolution, the situation comedy has a propensity for faster change. Jane Eyre was published in 1847, a minimum of fifty years after the canonical Apprenticeship. In contrast, situation comedies developed significant narrative alterations of their original forms less than twenty years after their inception, reflective of the immediacy of television as a form that responds to audience demands. The sitcom of the 1960s and 70s performed similar cultural bildung as the literary bildungsroman, and through an emphasis on young adult characters in these decades, the cultural stage is set for the likes of Friends and Will

& Grace, two series that both characterologically and culturally function as modified bildungsroman texts.

From domestic to workplace comedies, to representations of women beyond traditionally conscripted domestic roles, the situation comedy has repeatedly demonstrated growth and interior formation made possible by the form’s inherent self-reflexivity and acknowledgment of its own artifice. The sitcom’s malleability is reflective of its innate ability to act as a “therapeutic voice” for

American audiences; guided by a sense of “empathy,” television, and sitcoms in particular, are able to “minister” to an audience’s needs through distraction and entertainment value.132 Sitcoms are familiar, recognizable, and possess a status that privileges their visibility within the American cultural milieu, and yet in spite of their institutionalized status, the dialectical nature between sitcoms and the need to remain popular creates tension in which they must continually adapt. The sitcom’s ability to “express” an ever-evolving audience sentiment is diametrically opposed to the argument that sitcoms promote stasis, but this idea of stagnation has haunted the sitcom for decades.

131 Kontje, “The German Tradition of the Bildungsroman,” 24. 132 Lipsitz, Time Passages, 19.

It is the sitcom’s mutability, in contrast with its supposed inertness, that allow the sitcom to remain culturally ubiquitous seventy years after its cultural induction. Sitcoms go beyond the traditional bildungsroman in their ability to question or critique mainstream ideals by constantly “testing” the social and cultural myths in which we are inscribed and calling attention to when the “need for change becomes pressing.”133 This is in part due to the sitcom’s serial nature, and its ability to run for a period of years, or even decades in some cases. The situation comedy’s status as a popular culture medium actually allows it to question current norms and be subversive, and its wide reach enables it to be pedagogical. Early situation comedies are not bildungsroman texts, but they work as a prelude to later series, Friends and Will & Grace for example, that more fully embody, and importantly, build upon, the bildungsroman tradition. Sitcoms and the bildungsroman work in tandem with the culture that produces them, and importantly, both forms act reciprocally upon those cultures and promote its bildung. Both Friends and Will & Grace, as contemporary situation comedies of the 1990s and early 2000s moment, reflect a coalescence of archetypal situation comedy formal elements that make the series recognizable and pleasurable, and yet it is through the development of more nuanced narratives that they mimic the canonical literary bildungsroman.

These situation comedies are in dialogue with their history, and yet they are durable because they reflect near-immediate cultural shifts that occur throughout the duration of their production. Friends and Will & Grace portray young adult characters grappling with a variety of Gen X challenges, and they free the bildungsroman from its traditionally gendered definition by situating the audiences in multitudinous heterosexual and homosexual perspectives.

133 John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London: Routledge, 2003), 27-8.

CHAPTER II

Friends and Will & Grace reinforce and reinvigorate the bildungsroman pedagogical tradition by blending archetypal formal elements of the situation comedy genre with more complex character narratives. Traditionally, bildungsroman literary texts function pedagogically for readers through depictions of character bildung. In contrast with the established European literary tradition in which the hero remained steadfast, the hero/ine of the bildungsroman is inherently unstable, and it is this ability to confront change that designates her strength as a protagonist. Characterological development, in fact, is foregrounded more so than external plot events.134 Scholars do, however, comment upon the necessity for characterological alterations that are both interior and exterior.

Bakhtin notes that some of the primary changes the hero endures are “shifts in fortune or social position,”135 perhaps best exemplified by Wilhelm Meister and his desire to change his occupation from running the family business to working as an actor. These external shifts are significant because they function as the narrative catalysts for the internal changes that comprise the majority of the bildungsroman’s plot significance.136 The interior, psychological evolution of the bildungsheld functions as the narrative focal point(s) of the work, but these shifts only occur through the character’s dual process of enduring external tests and reflecting upon decisions made.

The blending of external and internal elements then alters the character’s sense of self. In other words, the bildungsroman presents to the reader an “image of man in the process of becoming,” and that process of “becoming” has inherent internal and external elements.137

134 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 12. 135 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 2. 136 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 21. 137 Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance,” 19.

Characterological Emphasis

Though different in mode, presentation, and form, Friends and Will & Grace foreground characterological change as a primary narrative device in much the same way as the traditional bildungsroman. Both depict the same tension of the interior and exterior characterological changes that mark canonical bildungsroman, but they are only able to do so because these situation comedies have narratively evolved. Historically, sitcoms have abided by an episodic narrative in which, “plots...commence and resolve within each episode…”138 so that the narrative conflicts or

“situations” within each episode do not translate to the subsequent one.139 Any character change, development, realization, or “lessons learned” will be “forgotten or ignored” in later episodes.140

The status quo is maintained, and later episodes will not typically reflect narrative evolutions that came before. Thus historically, sitcoms did not demonstrate investment in their own diegetic framework, and beloved series from I Love Lucy to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and even examples as late as Roseanne, abide by this episodic narrative.141 In opposition to the episodic is the

138 Mittell, Television and American Culture, 228. 139 It should be noted that there are exceptions to this purely episodic narrative style that date back to archetypal sitcom works. For example, the birth of new characters, like Little Ricky in I Love Lucy, are not purely episodic because Little Ricky did appear in subsequent episodes, but I discuss the episodic narrative framework as it relates to the interior development of characters’ subjectivities. 140 Mittell, Television and American Culture, 229. 141 I intentionally include Roseanne here because it is a representative text of the sitcom’s shifting narrative strategies. Roseanne premiered in 1988, and the first season is primarily composed of episodic narratives, but as the series progresses, it begins to reflect more and more serial narrative elements. By the middle of the series’ run, in the early 1990s, many episodes have a parallel narrative structure to that of Friends and Will & Grace. An especially keen example of this trend is the majority of Roseanne, season 5, in which Roseanne and Jackie look to enter into a business together because Roseanne is unfulfilled with her role as a wife and mother. Likewise, in season 5, the series addresses Jackie’s character development when she grapples with her abusive boyfriend, Fisher, and her reconciliation with self-acceptance and independence. (Among other season 5 episodes, see Roseanne, season 5, episode 6, “Looking for Loans in All the Wrong Places,” perf. Roseanne Barr and Laurie Metcalf, aired October 20, 1992, on ABC, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07476M8MS/ref=atv_dl_rdr?autoplay=1. Also see Roseanne, season 5, episode 14, “War and Peace: Part 2,” perf. Roseanne Barr and Laurie Metcalf,

serial narrative, in which: “The key feature...is continuing storylines traversing multiple episodes with an ongoing diegesis that demands viewers to construct a story world using information gathered from their full history of viewing.”142 Significant in the serial narrative is the viewer engagement: it demands that the viewer tune in on a repeated basis and immerse themselves in the program’s narrative because the story world of the series continues to build and grow as time goes on. Serial narratives typically need to be watched in order because the events, both plot- and character-driven, of the prior episode will undoubtedly be prominent in the current one. One of the most recognizable television formats to display serial narration is the daytime soap opera, in which narrative arcs last for seasons, years, and even decades.

Recent scholarship in television, however, has expanded archetypal narrative theory to propose that perhaps these two narrative modes are not sufficient for describing current television programs. Jason Mittell highlights that just as genre can be manipulated and is susceptible to play, so too is narrative framework. Mittell is careful to delineate how contemporary sitcoms are structurally different because they, “have much more variety in plotting and narrative structure than early examples of the genre, even though many critics still view the sitcom as a wholly formulaic genre.”143 Indeed, as he argues, sitcoms produced within the past three decades are structured by a blended narrative, better conceived of as episodic-serial, and as Jeffrey Sconce argues, this narrative mode is burgeoning in the late 80s and comes to its full-fruition in the early- to mid- 90s.144 As the name suggests, episodic-serial narratives balance an episodic treatment, in which a singular narrative can come to conclusion within an episode, alongside longer arcs that build throughout

aired January 12, 1993, on ABC, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07476M8MS/ref=atv_dl_rdr?autoplay=1). 142 Mittell, Television and American Culture, 230. 143 Mittell, Television and American Culture, 254. 144 Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” 97.

multiple episodes, seasons, and in some cases, an entire series.145 Significantly, in the case of

Friends and Will & Grace, this narrative investment is character-driven because character arcs provide narrative interest and depth while still foregrounding the comedy of each series.146

Alterations in the narrative structure, from episodic, to episodic-serial, prioritize character development in a way that mirrors the canonical bildungsroman because Friends and Will &

Grace’s character development is given a more enduring treatment than other episodic plot elements.

From a narrative standpoint and the demonstrable success of both series, the episodic-serial narrative format is generative amongst viewers because it balances the archetypal familiarity of the traditional sitcom with a more nuanced form of storytelling. By retaining elements of the episodic format, contemporary sitcoms reflect how “the effectiveness of popular culture depends on its ability to engage audiences in active and familiar processes.”147 Friends and Will & Grace retain familiarity by indulging in episodes with narrative closure, and in an echo of Kontje’s argument regarding the bildungsroman, sitcoms fulfill viewer expectations. Yet, when balanced with serialized character arcs, Friends and Will & Grace are also able to “engage” with their audiences through characters that are multi-dimensional and in a constant state of development. Multi-episode and season arcs from these series that demonstrate characterological bildung include, but are certainly not limited to Phoebe Buffay’s emotional search for her biological father who abandoned her that ultimately ends with her acceptance of his absence; Monica Geller’s and Grace Adler’s parallel journeys to grapple with their psychological neuroses and compulsive behaviors that stem

145 Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” 97-98. 146 Mittell, Television and American Culture, 254. 147 Lipsitz, Time Passages, 14.

from problematic relationships with their mothers;148 Rachel Green’s struggle to find a meaningful career and obtain fiscal independence from her parents when she chooses to walk away from her impending marriage to Barry at the series’ onset; Ross Gellar’s journey to establish a family for himself that is thwarted over and over again throughout Friends’s run; Joey Tribbiani’s and Jack

McFarland’s various potential career and romantic trajectories in the acting profession; Will

Truman’s psychological endeavor towards self-acceptance of his simultaneous desires to have a normative, traditional family while remaining true to his gay identity; and Karen Walker’s emotional shifts in her on-and off- marriage with Stan. When compared to the repeated situation of

Lucy to escape her domestic confinement, these narratives are by contrast, much more nuanced and overtly based upon each character’s changing interiority. Lucy’s emotional dissatisfaction with her domestic confinement was largely in the series’ subtext, but the emotional and psychological turmoil in Friends and Will & Grace are at the forefront.

In conflict with one long-standing scholarly notion that sitcoms work against “significant character development,”149 Friends and Will & Grace demonstrate how the “situation” of the situation comedy has evolved from a funny event that happens to the characters to one that is intentionally characterological.150 The characters in Friends and Will & Grace are not objects upon which a narrative event is thrust; they are the drivers of the episode’s situation through their various

148 For Monica, one of these compulsive habits is cleaning, while Grace frequently indulges in painful overeating when she is faced with a stressful decision or situation. Notably, both of these character traits play out over a number of seasons, and neither trait is ever fully “resolved,” even by the denouement of both series. 149 Alice Leppert. “Friends Forever: Sitcom Celebrity and Its Afterlives,” Television & New Media, 19, no. 8 (2018), 742. 150 When referring to historical examples of the genre, Horace Newcomb defines the “situation” in situation comedy as the “broad outline of events,” that occurs in each episode, and he is careful to delineate that the situation is nearly always a “thing” that is inflicted upon the protagonists. This total externalization of plot shifts with contemporary sitcoms. Which foreground their characters’ agencies. In both Friends and Will & Grace, in contrast to archetypal situation comedies, the ensemble characters are active narrative agents. (See Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 31).

choices and (mis)steps. Indeed, literary scholar D.A. Miller comments upon the narratability of

“character indecision (no matter how small) [that] creates an open structure which is “infinitely expandable” in terms of narrative potential.151 Though Miller is referencing narrative theory as it plays out in the novel, his ideation can easily translate to sitcoms because of the prolonged nature of long-running series. Friends and Will & Grace both aired more than 200 episodes, demonstrating the immense potential and popularity of familiar characters that become more developed through their decisions and indecisions.152 Character-driven plots in which they must overcome obstacles and grapple with their own decision-making abilities create near-infinite opportunities for narratability. In both series, these choices are fiscal, spatial, and employment- or romantically related. Thus, in a parallel fashion to the literary bildungsroman, Friends and Will & Grace demonstrate characterological bildung on a consistent basis because all of the bildungsheld characters in each series are looking for both self-actualization, or self-acceptance in some cases, and successful integration into larger society, two imperative facets of the canonical bildungsroman.153

“Pseudoclosures” and Character Bildung

Character bildung in contemporary situation comedies is largely made possible because of the balance between episodic-serial narratives. Both Friends and Will & Grace frequently layer narratives so that there is space for both an episodic conflict and serial developments that derive from character traits or habits. Episodic-serial narratives make narrative closure tenuous from one

151 D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 7. 152 Friends aired 236 episodes during its ten-season run, and while Will & Grace technically had less than 200 by the end of their original run, they have since aired more than 40 additional episodes, bringing their total to 241 at this thesis’s publication date. 153 Moretti, The Way of the World, 18.

episode to another, and thus, the end of episodes from these series can perhaps best be understood as “pseudoclosures.” Miller defines pseudoclosure as a narrative device of frustration that anticipates and works toward the end of a work, but inevitably proves incomplete.154 In other words, pseudoclosures provide potential stepping stones towards the final denouement, but they are insufficient in and of themselves to bring the text to its “moment of full, true explanation.”155

Miller’s narrative framework applies to Friends and Will & Grace because the individual plotline of one episode may come to an end, but narratives of character development provide longer overlaying arcs that pose the potential for future narratability. There is also potential for multi-episode arcs, so that the subsequent episodes rely entirely on the narrative of the one prior.

One way in which Friends and Will & Grace demonstrate their propensity for character bildung and pseudoclosures is through flashback episodes. Flashbacks create bends in the linear structure of traditional narrative temporality by expanding the diegetic framework beyond that which is presented to the audience in the narrative present. Bending temporalities helps the sitcom revel in the “pseudo” of pseudoclosure because sitcoms reveal that the constructed nature of their temporal realities are subject to change. Flashback episodes play with supposed narrative stability, and they enable the series to extend its narrative scope and depiction of character development in the same way that a work of literature can embark on an intratextual vignette or character backstory.

The viewer is brought into a narrative milieu that impacts the sitcom’s diegesis, and yet because

Friends and Will & Grace both maintain episodic aspects of and episodic-serial narration style, the flashback can be contained within the narrative of the particular episode(s) while still influencing, without displacing, other long-term narratives.

154 Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, 53. 155 Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, 53.

One particularly poignant example of a multi-episode flashback arc is Will & Grace’s

“Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Parts 1 and 2.” The episode poses a multiplicity of narratives, including

Will’s coming out to Grace during their freshman year of college (and the subsequent, temporary rupture of their friendship) and, perhaps more importantly, the origin of Will and Jack’s friendship

(a relationship that is largely taken for granted as an accepted norm within the series’ present).156

The episode begins with Will, Grace, Jack, and Karen having dinner together at a restaurant the night before Thanksgiving. While they are waiting for their table, they notice a woman, Pam

(played by Ever Carradine), crying at the restaurant bar over her boyfriend, Tom, who has unexpectedly put a pause in their romantic relationship. When Pam reveals that she and Tom are best friends who are both “dance majors that like Victorian dolls,” Karen and Jack react in recognition of Tom’s assumed covert homosexuality, much to the humor of the studio audience.157

To console Pam, Jack decides to tell her about when Will and Grace dated in college, and the narrative continues to cut back and forth between 1985, the year in which Will and Grace dated while attending Columbia University, and the narrative present of the restaurant waiting area. In the initial cut, the viewer is situated at a college party in Will’s dorm room, and it is separately revealed through their mutual friends, Rob and Ellen (played by Tom Gallop and Leigh Allyn Baker, respectively), that though Will and Grace have been dating for three months, they have not been sexually intimate. Ellen tells Grace that she and Will should consummate their relationship because

156 By “taken for granted,” I mean that the emotional nature of Will and Jack’s relationship is not foregrounded. Will and Grace’s friendship is consistently sentimentalized throughout the series, but Will and Jack’s largely depicted as sarcastic and linguistically scathing. 157 Importantly, the audience’s laughter is not targeted towards Tom’s queerness. The laughter comes as a response to Jack’s and Karen’s synchronized responses of recognition. Jack and Karen’s embodiments of queerness, and innate understanding of both Tom’s secrecy and Pam’s emotional trials as an unknowing straight woman provides the comedic impetus for the scene. (See Will & Grace, season 3, episode 8, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part I,” perf. Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally, aired November 23, 2000, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/8b738762-56b8-4edb- a77e-4e7e27fe166f).

otherwise Grace will be “friend-zoned,” much to her mortification. Grace’s reaction is an overt demonstration of comedic irony because the viewer knows that Grace will, indeed, be friend-zoned for the next fifteen years.158

In the next scene, the party ends and there is an establishing shot of Will picking up various red plastic cups. This then shifts to a medium shot of him putting clothes away in the closet. When he opens the door, the viewer is introduced to Jack, circa 1985, who linguistically, corporeally, and visually foregrounds queerness even in his adolescence. Will asks Jack what he is doing in his literal closet, and Jack responds by stating, “I could say the same of you,” referring to Will’s closetedness and his unwillingness to acknowledge his homosexuality. Will reacts in horror, claiming, “Hey! I’m not gay,” as the camera then cuts back and forth between Jack and Will so that only one character occupies the frame at a time. The alternating shots are significant because they parallel Will’s conflicted interiority and his competing senses of self and sexual identity. The shots of Will, in his stance of shock, are metonymic of his long-standing denial of his queerness while the shots of Jack represent a competing desire to simply be “out” (as high school-aged Jack already is at this point) and truthful about his sexual identity to himself and others. The last shot in this alternation sequence is definitively queer as Jack remains the triumphant locutor as he quips that a

“well-worn Dreamgirls soundtrack begs to differ” as a counter to Will’s contestations that he is straight.159

The narrative tension surrounding Will’s sexual uncertainty comes to a head when Grace brings Will home to her parents in upstate New York for Thanksgiving. When Grace attempts to initiate intercourse with Will by sneaking into the bedroom that he occupies, he panics and calls

Jack, who left his card in Will’s jacket, from the adjoining bathroom. While Will and Jack are on

158 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 1.” 159 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 1.”

the phone, the shot cuts back and forth from Will in the bathroom and Jack in his bedroom, an oscillation that reinforces the previous cuts from Will’s dorm room. When Jack fervently tells Will that there “ain’t no closet big enough!” in which to hide his homosexuality, the audience erupts in laughter as the shot cuts back to Will’s dawning realization. Jack’s mention of the closet is especially poignant considering Will’s inability to consummate his relationship with Grace. Yet

Will retorts that he simply cannot be gay because he “can’t wait to have sex with his girlfriend.”160

Once again, Will linguistically voices his conception of himself as heterosexual that is immediately refuted by Jack’s persistence that Will is, indeed, queer. Jack responds to Will’s declaration by asking him about why he even bothered to call Jack in the first place if he was so anxious to have sex with Grace. Will responds with silence, and the silence holds as the shot foregrounds Will before cutting to Jack.161 Silence reinforces the ideology of the closet in which Will has confined himself for his adolescent and young adult life.162 In a play on the traditional coming out narrative in which an individual reveals their sexuality to others, Jack seemingly inverts Will’s coming out by revealing his queerness to him.163 In the wake of Will’s silence, Jack is proactive by declaring that

160 The layers of imagery and language in this scene are comedic and compelling. As Will tells Jack that he “can’t wait” to have sex with Grace, the overlaying image is of Will sitting on the toilet with his legs crossed while he applies perfume to his wrists. The overt effeminate posture of Will’s body is clearly something that he only displays when he is in the privacy of his own company, and yet, there are narrative hints that Jack provides Will with a space in which he feels secure and comfortable enough to express his true identity. Will’s proclamation about wanting to sleep with Grace evokes the audience’s laughter because that audience knows that his claim is erroneous, but in the wake of Jack’s questioning Will’s actual hesitation to act on his words, there is silence that permeates to the audience as well, demonstrating the seriousness of this coming-out moment. 161 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 1.” 162 This moment of the episode comes into an interesting dialogue with Eve Sedgwick’s argument that the “closetedness itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of silence,” because Will’s silence seemingly marks his emergence from the closet, an emergence only made possible by Jack. (See Eve Sedgwick, “Introduction: Axiomatic,” in The Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990] 3). 163 Another important adaptation to the “coming out narrative” is that this episode does not take place at the series’ onset. Will’s queerness has been a foregrounded narrative tenet for more than fifty episodes at the time of this episode’s original air date. In this case, the coming-out narrative is

the two young men are now best friends, and he proceeds to hang up the phone, a significant move in protecting Will’s agency. Jack has initiated the conversation regarding Will’s sexuality, and he provides Will the space in which to admit his queerness to himself, but he will not deny Will the choice of how to proceed with this new - or at least, newly acknowledged - information. He does not dictate to Will how he should act nor does he imply that Will must tell others if he does not feel it is right.164 The scene ends with Will in the bathroom; he hangs up the phone, and he turns to consider his reflection in the mirror. The conversation with Jack has literally and figuratively brought Will to a significant point of reflection where he considers his self-conception.

Ultimately, in spite of a series of physically comedic twists and turns, including a short-lived marriage proposal so that they can both “save themselves” sexually for marriage, Will reveals to

Grace that he cannot continue his romantic relationship with her because he is gay.165 He tells Grace that “maybe on some level” he had always known the truth of his identity, a verbal affirmation of

Jack’s earlier statements. In a narrative turn, the second part of the episode deals with the impact of

Will’s coming out upon his and Grace’s friendship. Upon hearing that Will is gay, Grace sends him out of her family’s home because she is devastated and heart-broken.166 Thus, Grace embodies the heteronormative rejection of queer identity that has been a mainstay of the queer coming out

more of a vignette that adds depth to Will’s bildung as opposed to a totalizing narrative in its own right. 164 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 1.” 165 Will & Grace, season 3, episode 9, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 2,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired November 23, 2000, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/fe5924d1- 5e00-40c3-97bb-0f1447efcae4. 166 There is a compelling characterological doubling in this episode between Will and Julius, Bobbi Adler’s (played by Debbie Reynolds) musical arranger. Earlier in the episode, Bobbi quips that it is a marvel that no woman has “snatched up” Julius, and Julius later makes a closeted pass at Will. Julius is an important foil because he is middle aged, and he is representative of older, more traditional attitudes regarding sexual propriety. Will can choose to come out in a way that, it is implied, was not available to Julius in decades past. Upon overhearing that Will is gay, Bobbie tells Julius that “she owes him 20 bucks,” indicating that they had made a bet about Will’s sexuality when they first met him.

narrative for much of its history, but Will & Grace presents a narrative spin on this established narrative. It is not Will’s homosexuality that Grace cannot accept, but the fact that Will cannot be in a romantic relationship with her that she finds so devastating.167 After Will reveals his news, Grace breaks down in tears and mourns that one look at her “must prove that Will is queer,” referencing a proliferation of references to Grace’s boyish figure.168 In the wake of his fractured friendship with

Grace, the episode reveals that Jack steps in and indeed, becomes Will’s closest confidant for the year in which he and Grace are not speaking. Jack then comes to embody the queer community that supports Will when he is rejected by those he once considered to be his friends. Jack is thus both the catalyst for Will’s recognition of his queerness, and a tether of support when he is temporarily rejected by Grace.169

Though Will and Grace ultimately reconcile in the flashback, it comes to light in the second part of the two-part episode - accidentally revealed by Jack in the present - that Will slept with a woman in college after his breakup with Grace as an attempt to eradicate any last shred of sexual uncertainty. Present Grace is furious over Will’s willingness to keep such a secret and Will’s

167 Grace’s inherent narcissism is a characterological trait that has been narratively foregrounded since the onset of the series. Grace’s rejection of Will because he cannot love her in the same way that she loves him is an aspect of her character that audiences would have been familiar with because Grace’s complex feelings for Will is a hallmark of her character bildung for the entire series. Again, this episode’s positioning is significant because long-term viewers would have been familiar with Grace’s neurotic psychological insecurities regarding her physical body and her sense of self-esteem. 168 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 2.” 169 A tangential, homosocial narrative with homoerotic subtext that factors in the episode is Karen’s recounting of the night she met Rosario. An ambiguously aged, but decidedly younger-looking Karen is dancing in a night club, and she proceeds to break off three different engagements that she supposedly maintained simultaneously, including famous tennis player, Martina Navratilova, who quips that she “went gay” for Karen. Karen utilizes a rehearsed speech to end her three relationships citing her love of Stan Walker as the reason. At the end of the night, when Karen is one of the last left in the bar, she encounters Rosario, a cigarette salesgirl, and the two exchange their trademark verbal barbs before Karen asks Rosario to come work for her. They walk off-screen arm-in-arm, and the scene cuts to present-Karen as she reminisces, “and we’ve been together ever since.” (See Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 1,” and “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 2,”).

unwillingness to try a physical relationship with her in a mirror of Part 1’s narrative. Yet in spite of the overt attempts to foreground Will and Grace’s friendship, the subtext regarding Jack’s long-term knowledge of Will’s past sexual encounter speaks volumes regarding the significance of their friendship. Will and Grace are the supposed central duo of the series, and yet, when it came to the sojourn of accepting his queer identity, Will confided in Jack. Jack is the confidante, the resource to whom Will could turn when he was questioning, testing, and exploring his queerness. It was only after the year-long separation, and only after his acceptance of his gay identity, that Will could reconcile with Grace.

In the present narrative, once Grace becomes privy to Will’s secret, she storms out of the restaurant. When Pam asks Jack and Karen about the point of Will’s coming-out story, Jack delivers the news to Pam in regards to her now ex-boyfriend, Tom: “He’s queer, dear,” and through his definitive statement, the flashback arc comes to an end.170 Interestingly, Jack’s revelation to Pam of

Tom’s queerness acts as a narrative doubling for Jack’s earlier revelation to Will. The narrative then entirely transitions to the present moment in a familiar trope of Grace and Will are fighting. In spite of Grace’s hurt regarding Will’s dishonesty, Will reminds her of the incredible emotional burden with which he was grappling at the time, and he begs for her understanding. In an intentional parallel, Will and Grace make up in front of the same grocery store that functioned as their site of reconciliation back in college. However, in spite of the imagery that assures the solidity of Will and

Grace’s friendship, there is the subtextual reminder of a motif in which Will must apologize and ask

Grace forgiveness for his sexuality, an acceptance freely given by Jack more than ten years prior.

Grace’s selfish anger ignores the emotional burden of coming out that Will endured, and it is a metonymic example of queer experience facing subjugation and admonishment from a heterosexual

170 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 2.”

perspective. Thus, the nuanced flashback episode in this case offers narrative fissures and added depth to the present, and it represents meaningful character bildung because, in Will’s case, his journey towards acceptance of his sexuality has begun long before the narrative diegesis of the series. Likewise, in spite of the demonstrative sentimentalizing of Will and Grace’s friendship, this multi-episode flashback reveals that Will’s queerness functions as a setback within the supposed primary relationship of the series. In contrast, Jack is a site of openness and acceptance. He is a prominent connection for Will to his queer identity, and he has been a source of support longer than

Grace has. Will need not apologize to Jack to maintain their relationship, and in effect, Jack accepted Will before Will was willing to accept himself. Jack is paramount to Will’s positive emotional bildung, and intriguingly, Grace is revealed to be a setback or at least a conciliation.

Aside from traditional flashback encounters in which the audience is completely transported back into a different setting and temporality, Friends and Will & Grace also utilize meta-televisual moments to depict the past in such a way that both characters and audience alike partake in the spectator role. Friends indulges in this meta-televisuality in “The One with the Prom Video.” The group sits down to watch a home video, recorded by Jack Gellar (Monica’s father), before Monica and Rachel’s high school prom, roughly 9-10 years earlier.171 The pre-recorded home video at first occupies the television screen in Monica’s apartment, before transitioning to fill the viewer’s screen at home, literally bringing the audience into a recorded memory in a way so that both the sextet and audience at home occupy the same spectatorial position. As the home video is playing, it appears that Rachel’s date, Chip, will stand her up, and she will have to go to prom alone. In response, both

Gellar parents employ Ross to grab his tux and accompany her to the prom after Rachel states,

171 Friends, season 2, episode 14, “The One with the Prom Video,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, aired February 1, 1996, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274034?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C13%2C7b359af5-7884- 435d-97b4-2f1dc695a3b2-13808118%2C%2C.

emotionally, that she will not go to the prom alone. Ross obliges his parents, indeed excitingly because of his unrequited (and what he believes are unknown) feelings for Rachel, and he changes into the tux off-screen. After the outfit change, Ross grabs flowers from a vase at the top of the stairs. The hand-held camera operated by Jack Gellar is the focalizing lens through which the viewer sees Ross, anxiously peering down the stairs after an indeterminate amount of time. From

Ross’s vantage point, in an over-the-shoulder shot from the top of the stairs, the viewer witnesses

Rachel leave with Chip, who arrived late. Because Ross’s position is the focal point, the viewer is subvertly aligned with his position and brought into his painful and embarrassing affect. The shot then quickly cuts to a medium shot of Rachel in the present day in Monica’s apartment. As currently embarrassed Ross tries to leave Monica’s apartment in the wake of this revelation to his friends and Rachel, the camera tracks Rachel as she walks from the living room, through the kitchen, and kisses Ross in front of Monica’s apartment door in sight of the entire friend group.

The kiss functions as a pseudoclosural moment to the present-narrative arc of the episode in which Ross tells Rachel that he has feelings for her. The past seeps in through the home video to inform, and indeed alter, the present. However, made manifest through the home video of Rachel’s unbeknownst rejection, there is a narrative duplication because Rachel has rejected Ross’s feelings over the course of the episode. The kiss functions as a pseudoclosure because it is ambiguous: it could lead to the further promise of relationship between the pair, but there is no certainty. The kiss could function as only a momentary redemption of Ross’s long unrequited feelings. The episode closes without utilizing dialogue to affirm if Rachel’s feelings have changed towards Ross or if the kiss functions as a physical gesture of appreciation for a past kindness of which she had been ignorant. Potential for renewed, inward “formation” comes to the narrative present; there is potential that Rachel’s kiss symbolizes her acceptance of Ross and his feelings, but it is not certain.

Ross and Rachel are in a state of continued romantic bildung, as made apparent through the

“pseudoclosure,” because bildung cannot be achieved; instead, it must be “grown” and cultivated through an inward process of reflection.172 This process is initiated by the prom video, which acts as the catalyst for Rachel’s reflection, and it literally alters the present because Rachel’s initial rejection of Ross seems at least temporarily overturned by the episode’s end.173 However, to read the kiss as a complete denouement would be incomplete. Though there is a hint of a prospective relationship between the two, long-term viewers are aware of the tempestuous relationship between the two characters that functioned as a season-long character arc in the season prior. The symbolism of the kiss both provides pseudoclosure and implies potential for further characterological bildung because the meta-televisual of the home video literally enables Rachel to “re-see” Ross’s affection in a new light.

Balancing Nuanced Narrative with a Familiar Form

Friends and Will & Grace foreground character development through a balancing act: they foreground character-based narratives, and yet they retain several traditional elements of the sitcom genre. This balance enables these shows to act as powerful pedagogical sites. As Jeffers notes, the pedagogical potential of the bildungsroman derives from the evolutions, the bildung, of the bildungsheld. Bildung requires a turning “inward” to promote intrinsic growth and reflect one’s education, and sitcoms have long used video techniques and staging to reveal characters’ internal perspectives. Historically, television has always favored medium and close-up shots,174 and George

Lipsitz suggests that “Where motion pictures favor the panoramic shot, television privileges the

172 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12. 173 Friends, “The One with the Prom Video.” 174 David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly, 55, no. 3 (2002): 22.

zoom shot, looking in rather than out.”175 While film often shows the viewer an entire scene, television typically privileges a “zoom shot,” bringing the audience closer to the characters. The sense of “looking in” provides intimacy so that the viewer can focus on what each character thinks and feels.

The filming set-up for sitcoms works to both utilize the looking “in” of the televisual tradition and create a spatial plane that foregrounds the characters and their interactions with one another. Sitcoms traditionally use a three-tiered camera structure, and they shoot on a small physical set that primarily functions as a backdrop against which each character’s performance is highlighted. This filming convention was originally conceived of by producer Jeffrey Fairbanks in the late 1940s, but in his original design, only one camera was operating at any given time in order to save on film costs.176 Desi Arnaz and Karl Freund adapted Fairbanks’s three-tiered camera system for I Love Lucy in the 1950s, but in an attempt to capture scenes from multiple angles, they decided to run all three cameras simultaneously. The middle camera “...covered a wide, establishing shot while the other two were each mid-shots of each performer.”177 This technique demonstrates the sitcom’s prioritization of character interactions, and it reflects on the sitcom’s drive to bring theatricality to the small screen. The three-tiered camera style functions like literary narrative focalization. The entire focus of the sitcom becomes a microcosmic reaction between or amongst actors, and thus the inward, intimate nature of each character’s interaction takes precedence over externalized narrative factors like setting. The characters are, and always have been, the inarguable focal point of the sitcom.

175 Lipsitz, Time Passages, 19. 176 Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 54. 177 Mills, The Sitcom, 39.

Significantly, the three-tiered camera style allows for both establishing shots, and the all- important “reaction shot” in which there is a cross-cut from one character’s action or statement to another character’s comedic reaction.178 Both Friends and Will & Grace consistently use the reaction shot to demonstrate character interaction, and effectively, through the reaction shot, imply judgment on a particular character’s remark or action. The reaction shot establishes a focalizing point of view, a framework in which the viewer can interpret their own responses, whether that be humor, shock, or at times, offense.179 Reaction shots and zoom shots enable the audience to feel as if they are a part of the unfolding action. Through the multiple perspectives of both establishing and character reaction shots, the diegetic world of the sitcom unfolds. However, it is the reaction shot specifically that functions as a bridge between the camera staging, and another paramount formal element of the sitcom: the live-studio audience.180

The live studio audience, or for other series not filmed live, the “laugh track,” has been repeatedly criticized for its connection to hegemony and imposing a certain perspective upon the audience. It has been supposed that the “mass” response drowns out individual reactions to the presented narrative.181 However, just as a critical reading into I Love Lucy reveals its points of subversion, so too can a critical examination of the studio audience redeem, or at the very least, complicate traditional readings of this often demonized sitcom institution.182 What is missing from

178 Mills, The Sitcom, 39. 179 Reaction shots have their roots in the hybrid nature of the situation comedy because they were employed to mimic the live theater experience in which the audience would have visual access to each character’s action and reaction on stage. (See Mills, The Sitcom, 39). 180 Mills, The Sitcom, 103. 181 Mills, The Sitcom, 103. 182 As a caveat, it should be noted that not all sitcoms utilize the laugh track or the studio audience. In a decidedly twenty-first century trend, several series, such as Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family, do not utilize this familiar trait of the sitcom genre. However, the laugh track or live studio audience remain hallmarks of the sitcom genre, and there are far more series that employ these devices than d. (See Elana Levine and Michael Z. Newman, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status [Routledge, 2012], 60).

the reading of the studio audience as uniform hegemony is the fact that live studio audience responses, especially in the case of Friends and Will & Grace, are often heterogeneous.183 Mills eloquently cites how, particularly in the case of Friends, the audience is “often heard to be responding in a range of ways to a series of events, and it’s clear that these run across many emotions.”184 For example, he discusses how Ross and Rachel’s first kiss is accompanied by audible whooping and cheering, and he likewise indicates that audible responses of surprise and shock can be heard from the audience when Chandler and Monica have their first kiss in London during season 4.185 Through acknowledging the ways in which the live studio audience can react diversely, the audience can ideologically be re-appropriated. The audience is not a singular site of power that dictates how the viewer at home should see the scene. Instead, the studio audience welcomes a variety of responses. Individual viewers are free to form a reaction that is in line with the communal one - in the case that there even is a unified audience response - or against it.186

Indeed, Mills highlights how by making “explicit” that the audience is a part of the sitcom narrative, these sitcom series invite each audience member to consider her own position to the community.

The live studio audience is a significant formal element that reinforces the closeness between performer and audience while also creating a literal porous boundary between the fictional

183 I limit my analysis here to the studio audience (rather than the laugh track) because the studio audience was utilized in the filming of Friends and Will & Grace, and the analysis of the laugh track requires a different scope (and different comedy series) than the one offered by this project. In opposition to the studio audience, the laugh track is uniform in its response of humor, and it provides a different aesthetic than that of the studio audience because the response is automated. 184 Mills, The Sitcom, 103. 185 Interestingly, what Mills implies, but does not specifically state, is that serial, or long term, viewers of the show have different reactions compared to audiences that are first-time or new viewers. (See Mills, The Sitcom, 102). 186 Mills, The Sitcom, 104.

and non-fictional world.187 The studio audience foregrounds the sitcom’s slippage because the audience diminishes the already-thin barrier between the actor and the viewer by playing a part in the actual filming of each episode. There is no protective barrier or distance between the spectators and the actors as spectacles that nearly all other television genres have. Friends and Will & Grace were both filmed live, and thus both were “interruptible by the audience,” and the delivery of all lines was subject to audience responses.188 The studio audience thus inarguably foregrounds not only the audience’s position, but also their agency, within the sitcom narrative. Friends and Will &

Grace, through a continued use of traditional sitcom elements like the three-tiered camera apparati, the reaction shot, and the live-studio audience foreground the interiority of various bildungsheld(s) while inviting, indeed, even foregrounding community responses and participation in their narratives.

Inviting communal response is an important aspect of a pedagogical text, and this sense of social engagement is further reinforced through the sitcom’s reliance upon quotidien narratives.

Situation comedies have been depicting the ordinary since their inception in the 1950s, and that remains true in the case of both Friends and Will & Grace.189 Importantly, the “ordinary” narrative is of paramount significance to the bildungsroman because the genre concerns itself with the everyday experience of commonplace bildungsheld characters.190 John Fiske articulates that as popular culture artifacts, sitcoms have “leaky boundaries” so that the distinction between constructed fiction and real-life is blurred.191 These leaky boundaries derive in part from the

187 Michael Skovmand, “The Culture of Post-Narcissism: Post-Teenage, Pre-Midlife Singles Culture in Seinfeld, Ally McBeal, and Friends,” in Television and Criticism, ed. Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson, (Bristol: Intellect, 2008), 94. 188 Skovmand, “The Culture of Post-Narcissism,” 94. 189 It must be posited that the “ordinary” of many beloved sitcoms is indeed limited in its scope, especially along racial lines. See note 223 for further explanation. 190 Moretti, The Way of the World, 12. 191 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York/London: Routledge, 1989), 127.

situation comedy’s relatability; sitcoms propose to intentionally replicate viewer experiences.192

David Pierson explains that sitcoms have a historical precedent of presenting character identities that intentionally reflect the larger American society of their contemporaneous air dates.193 Through

“every-day” narrative elements and insistence upon a porous boundary with reality, situation comedies become sites of cultural circulation that are both communal and personal. Michael

Skovmand comments that, in particular, sitcoms of the late 1980s and 1990s did not section themselves off as “self-contained cocoons,” and instead, consistently insisted upon their “potential openness to the real world.”194 Friends and Will & Grace, then, carry on the legacy of their sitcom predecessors by presenting normative (though often dramatized for comedic effect) experiences that are in touch with cultural realities. Prominent and relatable narratives in both Friends and Will &

Grace include fissures and acts of betrayal in a friendship,195 economic struggles to make financial

192 Mills, The Sitcom, 20. 193 David Pierson, “American Situation Comedies and the Modern Comedy of Manners,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder [Albany: State University of New York, 2005], 43-5. 194 Though Skovmand anchors this reading of contemporary sitcoms from a narrative emphasis to claim that the narratives of popular sitcoms are permeable and able to reflect real-world socio- cultural evolutions, the counter argument could be posed that sitcoms have always insisted upon their openness with the real world. Lynn Spigel first commented upon this phenomenon (from a characterological stance) that dates back to the inception of the sitcom with series such as Burns and Allen Show and I Love Lucy, in which these archetypal programs intentionally collapsed distinctions between characters and the actors who played them. Dating back to the 1950s, the sitcom aimed to be both “authentic” and “intimate” with its audience, intentionally blending on- and off-screen realities. (See Spigel, Make Room for TV, 158. See also, Skovmand, “The Culture of Post-Narcissism,” 94). 195 See Friends, season 2, episode 2, “The One with the Breast Milk,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, aired September 28, 1995 on NBC; also see Will & Grace, season 2, episode 16, “Hey La, Hey La, My Ex-Boyfriend’s Back,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired March, 7, 2000, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/e071bb4c-875b-4fef-8974-2d79bb575a97.

ends meet, shifting jobs or working jobs that are unsatisfactory,196 romantic break-ups and divorces,197 and roommate changes.198

Chandler Bing’s long-standing dissatisfaction with his career demonstrates how the emphasis on the ordinary endures in a serial character narrative. Chandler works for a large corporation doing obscure “data configuration,” and though he earns a high salary, the job does not bring him joy.199 He struggles to find a meaningful career path, and the tension between Chandler’s work and home life becomes especially apparent in a season 9 arc that requires him to live in Tulsa,

Oklahoma and work through Christmas. Ultimately, Chandler quits his job to spend time with

Monica, whom he prioritizes over his career.200 This narrative arc is relatable for contemporary audiences in a modern, performance-driven capitalist society where the reality of the job market

196 See Friends, season 2, episode 8 “The One with the List,” perf. Courteney Cox, aired November 16, 1995, on NBC; also see Will & Grace, season 2, episode 6, “To Serve and Disinfect,” perf. Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack, aired November 23, 1999, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/34684b58-8192-4419-b51c-99c8f1547025. 197 See Will & Grace, season 3, episode 16, “Cheaters, Part I,” perf. Eric McCormack and Megan Mullally, aired February 22, 2001, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/556476ea-49a4-4c0d- baeb-5ed02fc222ec; also Will & Grace, season 5, episode 23, “23,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired May 3, 2003, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/4ad1ac29-985b-4e1e- be3d-0f9c03323e48. 198 See Friends, season 6, episode 2, “The One Where Ross Hugs Rachel,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer, aired September 30, 1999, on NBC; Friends, season 6, episode 18, “The One Where Ross Dates a Student,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc, aired March 9, 2000, on NBC. Also see Will & Grace, season 1, episode 22, “Object of My Rejection,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired May 13, 1999, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/1a5e0de1-f16f-4d60-b542-5b88b21aa223; Will & Grace, season 2, episode 1,“Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired September 21, 1999, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/20338716-3fc0-4c53-a75e- 14c78879ef1f. 199 Friends, season 1, episode 15, “The One with the Stoned Guy,” perf. Matthew Perry, aired February 16, 1995, on NBC. 200 Throughout the first half of season 9, Chandler lives in Tulsa for work, but Monica prioritizes her career as a successful chef and remains in New York City with her friends. In an inversion of traditional gender norms, Chandler sacrifices his career prospects to be with his wife when he quits on Christmas Eve. (See Friends, season 9, episode 10, “The One with Christmas in Tulsa,” perf. Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry, aired December 12, 2002, on NBC).

often demands a challenging competition between one’s career aspirations and maintaining meaningful personal relationships. Likewise, many lucrative jobs, exemplified by Chandler’s, are stressful and not personally fulfilling. Chandler’s dissatisfaction with his work, and his struggle to find a job that brings him joy, is an enduring arc that is seemingly intentionally unresolved even at the series’ end.

Another mainstay, and perhaps the most paradigmatic element, of the situation comedy genre that is retained by Friends and Will & Grace is the comedic impetus.201 Comedy poses a series of complex ideological possibilities because comedy, as a construct, presupposes to have no goals beyond the humor, and yet, purposeful, intentional humor can have incredible sociological implications. Counter to the argument that the sitcom is nothing more than a “...comprisal of safe and familiar popular culture conventions,” it is the illusion of its “safety” that can make the situation comedy subversive.202 Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed note that the inherent pleasure and entertainment of a sitcom, largely driven by its comedic impetus, enables the form to proverbially tread where other television forms have not.203 Indeed, under the mirage of being

“comedy,” sitcoms pose a variety of resistances to established norms, and through the sitcom’s mass-media status, they create potential for new norms to develop. In effect, comedy tests and re- examines various social ideals, and since the sitcom is reliant upon comedy as one of its driving narrative and ideological forces, so too can the sitcom pose critiques against current cultural norms.204

201 The comedic impetus has been a staple of the sitcom since its inception 70 years ago. Comedy is so significant to the sitcom that it is even part of the genre’s name. (See Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 27. See also Mills, The Sitcom, 6). 202 Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces,” 89. 203 Castiglia and Reed, “‘Ah Yes, I Remember It Well,’” 250. 204 Landay, “I Love Lucy: Television and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology,” (2005), 91.

The implied critique once offered by archetypal sitcoms has become more overt throughout the twentieth century. The Mary Tyler Moore Show demonstrated feminist principles by portraying a single female protagonist driven by her own ambitions, and yet because of the sitcom’s supposed

“safety,” this construct of female representation has thus developed in tandem with cultural expectations to become an established norm - in both the sitcom and larger society - regarding women’s independence and choices beyond marriage and domesticity. In the case of Friends and

Will & Grace, they worked toward different cultural aims, but they were both generative texts for their cultural context. Friends worked to assuage the cultural uncertainty that Gen X felt regarding their future fiscal, romantic, and employment endeavors, and the series normalized a whole plethora of choices regarding how to live a healthy and productive life, made apparent by each character’s different positionings (in terms of employment, romantic relationships, and living situations) during the run of the series and at its denouement. Will & Grace retained the ethos of Friends in terms of depicting various potentialities for adulthood, but they grounded these potentials in a queer experience, providing a significant site of identification for those audiences.

Will & Grace utilized humor to present a contextually unprecedented representation of queer visibility that the series then normalized through its use of imagery.205 In much the same way that archetypal sitcoms repackaged the gender-bending antics of vaudeville, so too did Will & Grace

205 I use the term “unprecedented” here to note the unapologetic way that Jack and Will are foregrounded as primary characters in Will & Grace. Though there were queer characters on sitcoms dating back to Jody Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) in Soap in the late 1970s, and on primetime with Steven Carrington (played by Al Corley) on Dynasty in the early 1980s, both characters are treated homophobically. Their gay identities are both denied when Dallas and Carrington end up with female romantic partners, and in the case of Dallas, fathering children through these heterosexual unions. Importantly, Will and Jack’s homosexuality is not an “issue” that other characters must grapple with; it is an accepted status quo at the series’ onset. (See Visible: Out on Television, episode 2, “Television as a Tool,” perf. Jane Alexander and Dustin Lance Black, aired February 14, 2020, on Apple TV, https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/television-as-a- tool/umc.cmc.1u80weyc2q64oi0n62pof7xzi?l=en).

partially contain its queer depictions. Both Will and Jack are white, conventionally attractive characters from middle to upper class backgrounds, and they dress in largely traditional masculine clothing. Will, as the primary protagonist, provides the most normative representation of masculinity in a variety of ways. He has a white-collar job as a lawyer, and he financially provides for his friends, Grace and Jack. Jack, in spite of his normative appearance, is a more stereotypical, and indeed, outlandish representation of flamboyant homosexuality. The constraint of Will and

Jack’s imagery arguably made them more palatable for sitcom audiences, but much like I Love

Lucy, the surface image does not encapsulate the work the series is enacting. Will could arguably

“pass” as straight in a way that Jack could not, but it is in this tension of these varying performances of homosexuality that homosexuality remains nonetheless foregrounded as a continuum of various expressions and experiences. Will and Jack’s queerness is also demonstrated in their verbal exchanges, Jack’s physical performance, and their numerous romantic trysts. Amidst a cultural of ambivalence regarding queer representation, containing the image of Will and Jack enabled the series to break new ground, and create the opportunity for future depictions. The sitcom, then, through its familiarity and cultural presence, can normalize new cultural standards of visibility and representation. The sitcom not only demonstrates inherent generic bildung, but it also promotes cultural bildung as well as gay representations became largely more accepted throughout the end of the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century.

A critical examination of Friends and Will & Grace reveals the various ways in which both series can be read as bildungsroman texts. Through the employment of serial character narratives in which the protagonists are in the constant process of self-improvement, both foreground characterological bildung as their primary narrative arcs in a way that earlier situation comedies did not. The bildungsroman, through its depiction of character bildung, invites reflection, and it

suggests the ways that readers could successfully assimilate into American society. Friends and

Will & Grace likewise function pedagogically through a generic reliance upon intimacy between viewer and character, an insistence upon its ability to be “real,” the literal incorporation of the audience in the narrative through the live-studio audience, and a retained comedic emphasis that has defined the “com” in sitcom since its inception. Friends and Will & Grace can be read as bildungsroman texts because of a balance between character-driven narratives and the retention of formal elements that make them intimate, familiar, and pleasurable, but that pleasure is pedagogical.

Just as the bildungsroman educated readers more than two centuries ago - and arguably continues to do so today - so too does the sitcom act as an educational force upon contemporary audiences, normalizing what were once marginalized experiences and creating new norms.

CHAPTER III

Though there are several elements of Friends and Will & Grace that align with the bildungsroman, both series also make significant departures from the framework. One of the most important adaptations being both series’ ensemble castings which enables multiple sites of audience identification and provides avenues of regeneration in terms of gender and sexuality representations.

Another important departure is the inversion of the traditional bildung narrative framework in which there is a model character that the bildungsheld seeks to mimic. Both Friends and Will & Grace nuance this canonical outline, and it is in part because of this inversion that both are able to perform pedagogical cultural work. Another significant alteration that Friends and Will & Grace make are their representations of delayed bildungsheld characters. Compared to the adolescent examples in traditional bildungsroman, the ensembles of both series are significantly older. Friends and Will &

Grace also depict affective ambivalence regarding aging and moving forward out of young adulthood, an emotional motif that is consistently represented throughout each series, and a phenomenon that clearly dominates both finales. The finales of Friends and Will & Grace, because of their own intrinsic nostalgia, have marked the ensuing cultural images, ideas, and ideologies that they are associated with more than a decade after their air dates. Because both finales look backwards and foreground the bildung journey, as opposed to the denouement of fully realized adulthood, both series leave their endings open to new narrative potentialities.

Ensemble Casting

One of the most important ways that Friends and Will & Grace adapt the traditional bildungsroman form is through ensemble casting. In traditional bildungsroman, there is a central

bildungsheld, or “hero of self-cultivation”206 around which the narrative revolves. Importantly, in the Germanic tradition of bildungsroman, all other characters ensconced in the narrative are subordinate: “their job is to water, fertilize, and prune the growing ‘plant,’ the bildungsheld, whose nursery is the world.”207 The central bildungsheld is prioritized over all others, and this bifurcation typically occurs along gendered lines, dating back to the archetypal Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeships.208 Though the Anglo-Saxon tradition re-appropriated this concept into Western bildungsroman through the likes of Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Pendennis to create a protagonist that was more “intersubjective” and connected to his social milieu, the singular, masculine hero of the story remained the central focus of the narrative.209

Interestingly, archetypal situation comedies likewise emphasized the importance of a singular protagonist over others, though often with less prioritization upon male characters. Horace

Newcomb argues that though there was an ensemble of “regular characters” on situation comedies such as I Love Lucy, their primary narrative purpose was to “serve as foils for the antics of the star.210 He cites examples such as Ethel Mertz from I Love Lucy, Banker Drysdale in The Beverly

Hillbillies, Darrin from Bewitched, and Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. As argued by

Newcomb, these regular characters were much more relatable for audiences at home because they were typically more “natural,” and life-like than the protagonist, whose presence was much more

206 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 6. 207 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 35. 208 The overt prioritization of the singular male character is narratively abundant in Wilhelm Meister when Wilhelm abandons his love, Mariane, when he presumes she has been unfaithful, and she dies giving birth to his son. Likewise, he then rescues another performer, Mignon, from an abusive acrobatic troupe. Both Mariane and Mignon are denied bildung, and their character development is not considered to be of issue because they are sacrificed to ensure that Wilhelm remains in the narrative foreground. Succinctly put by Maroula Joannou, “Mariane and Mignon are Wilhelm’s mistakes.” (See Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 201). 209 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 36. 210 Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, 36.

attention-grabbing through their dramatic antics and ideas. In opposition to the bildungsheld of literature, traditionally exemplified through Wilhelm Meister or Elizabeth Bennet, the ensemble casting of both Friends and Will & Grace retains the archetypal “recurring” characters that define the situation comedy as a genre, but they also nuance their characters by making all of the protagonists relatable to different viewers and indicating that there is a number of ways in which to viably assimilate into society. Thus, Friends and Will & Grace can be read as diffuse bildungsroman works: they foreground the potential for multiple characterological identifications from male/female and straight/queer perspectives that is much more inclusive than earlier bildungsroman models.

Especially when considering the historically gendered bildungsroman, Friends provides a rich opportunity for regeneration of the form when considering the series’ female protagonists.

Traditionally, the female bildungsheld’s narrative arc ended with marriage as the ultimate symbol of productive assimilation into society. Maroula Joannou comments upon this narrative pattern when she states: “For much of its history the Bildungsroman was grounded thematically and structurally in the ‘naturalness’ of gender polarities. A woman was valued as an object of male desire and female quest narratives were often deflected into romance and marriage.”211 Historically, female bildungsroman have naturalized gendered disparities in which men are the active subjects and women the passive objects of male desire. Thus, female bildungsroman was embedded in the ideology that the character could not reach adulthood outside of matrimony with the lingering promise of procreation on the horizon because domesticity posed the only viable option for a young woman to productively assimilate into society. Even ground-breaking bildungsroman novels for

211 Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 208-9.

their time, such as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, ultimately contained their female bildungsheld characters in matrimony.

Friends breaks from the canonical bildungsroman model by providing viewers with multiple potentialities; the female characters in Friends are not confined in the same way as bildungsheld(s) of the past. Friends retains a balance: the three female protagonists all have a relationship with matrimony and motherhood, but none of them are defined by these characteristics. Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel all embark on unique journeys toward adulthood, and each female character is granted near equal narrative consideration. In season 5, Phoebe gives birth to triplets for her half-brother

Frank,212 but she does not rear biological children of her own. In the season 10 series finale, Monica adopts twin babies after a two-season serial arc regarding her infertility;213 and Rachel becomes a single mother when she gives birth to daughter, Emma, during the end of season 8. Significantly, after Emma’s birth, Rachel verbally articulates that she is unsure about her future and the ability to raise a child on her own. She is emotional and scared in a moment that is markedly distinct from the series’ traditional comedy.214 Certainly, Rachel is in a position of privilege given her constructed family of friends and support network, Ross’s involvement, and her upper-class socioeconomic

212 Friends, season 5, episode 3, “The One Hundredth,” perf. Lisa Kudrow, aired October 8, 1998, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274096?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C2%2C83ef0f30- 71cb-435b-9197-9c74e1b9ebdb-35958242%2C88d5bc88-16b0-4fd8-8a11- d01ed3b78c4a_50088149X3XX1576069438261%2C88d5bc88-16b0-4fd8-8a11- d01ed3b78c4a_ROOT. 213 Friends, season 10, episode 17, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2,” perf. Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry, aired May 6, 2004, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274231?trackId=14170286&tctx=2%2C2%2C6fb62ebf-5800- 4d3d-9a98dd9e83fab3e3-58018601%2Cf5432e98-ab38-42b9-93a7- f2c6beacff23_1931032X3XX1569860059828%2Cf5432e98-ab38-42b9-93a7-f2c6beacff23_ROOT. 214 Friends, season 9, episode 1, “The One Where No One Proposes,” perf. Jennifer Aniston, aired September 26 2002, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274191?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C0%2C83ef0f30-71cb- 435b-9197-9c74e1b9ebdb-35958242%2Ce7499d6f-af98-4901-9e4d- 7f54ca65a27f_50476169X3XX1576069695610%2Ce7499d6f-af98-4901-9e4d- 7f54ca65a27f_ROOT.

status, but the very utterance of such a recognizable, mainstream character to acknowledge the hardship of a largely marginalized group such as the single mother is a significant departure from traditional bildungsroman. Rachel makes visible the angst and uncertainty of starting a family accidentally, and this image demonstrates the intensely relatable nature of the sitcom. Likewise,

Rachel’s status as a regular character on the series positions her sympathetically; she is a prominent site of viewer identification. By contrast, traditional bildungsroman works would largely cast aside characters who conceived a child out of wedlock. Through Phoebe’s, Monica’s, and Rachel’s varying relationships with motherhood, the series provides multiple sites for understanding it, including the ability and the intentional choice not to have children alongside the reality of having a child by accident.

Karen Walker from Will & Grace also provides another site of female, and queer, viewer identification. Intriguingly, Karen is of an age traditionally conceived of as an adult, and she possesses the traditional markers of assimilation in terms of her wealth and family, but her characterological bildung derives from her dissatisfaction with that family. Karen functions as a character foil for Grace Adler, who desires a lasting relationship from the series onset, and ultimately ends the series married with a young child. Karen, by contrast, is married to Stan Walker from the series’ onset, but it is an unhappy union, and she has no maternal affection for her step- children.215 Karen and Stan later divorce after Stan’s infidelity, though Stan dies before the divorce can be finalized, and Karen’s bildung comes to fruition through her freedom from marital and

215 Like Stanley, his children are never seen on-screen during the series. Karen only ever refers to them in passing, and it is typically in an unfavorable way. One of Karen’s most famous comedic lines from the show quips that “reading to your kids is a waste of time.” In other episodes, Karen remarks that she has left the children in the limo with the “window open” while she has dinner with her friends. (See Will & Grace, season 2, episode 20, “Girls, Interrupted,” perf. Megan Mullally, aired May 2, 2000, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/c3733469-bda0-4bfb-8292- 1b9b4eeba7f8; also Will & Grace “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 2”).

domestic restraint.216 Karen has frequently been celebrated as one of the most queer characters on the series because of her flexible sexuality and her unapologetic nature regarding her sexual and gender deviances. In one particularly notable episode of Will & Grace, Karen becomes accepted by a group of drag queens who mistake her for one of them. Rather than be offended, Karen relishes this role and continues to play along by giving the women advice on how to physically attract men and women.217 Through a variable range of female characters on both series, surrogacy, adoption, single-parenthood, and not electing to become a mother at all, are all normalized through the female protagonists, echoing the contemporary idea that female characterological “individuality” must be maintained, and that established depictions of female “normalcy,” a long-standing hallmark of the bildungsroman, must become more flexible if the female bildungsroman is going to reflect the lived experiences of adolescent girls and women.218 Friends and Will & Grace foreground female individuality as a primary narrative arc by celebrating female characters and their varying choices equally.

Likewise, Will & Grace provides a significant site for queer male bildungsheld identification. Will Truman embarks on a more traditional journey towards adulthood when he ends the series with a partner, Vince D’Angelo (played by Bobby Canavale) and son Ben, achieved through surrogacy, while Jack’s bildung is marked by aversion to traditional family ideals.219 Jack’s

216 Will & Grace, season 5, episode 22, “May Divorce Be With You,” perf. Eric McCormack and Megan Mullally, aired May 1, 2003, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/29f87fa6-37ed-4596- ba6b-05d47ac8ac8c. 217 Will & Grace, season 1, episode 5, “Boo! Humbug,” perf. Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally, aired October 26, 1998, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/26f2b7f6-281b-4d48-931b- cd08348cf31f. 218 Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 216. 219 Interestingly, two years prior to the premiere of Will & Grace, Friends also depicts queer characters assimilating into heteronormative patterns. In season 2, Ross’s ex-wife, Carol (played by Jane Sibbett) marries her partner, Susan (played by Jessica Hecht), with whom she had an affair while still married to Ross. In an especially relatable episode for queer audiences, Carol’s conservative parents refuse to attend the ceremony, and in spite of his discomfort (stemming from

journey includes tenuous employment and a string of casual relationships. Importantly, though Will is more successful in a traditional sense, Will is often overcome with anxiety regarding the tension to be both normative and true to his sexuality. In contrast, Jack is completely accepting of his sexuality, and he is overt in demonstrating it. Jack’s promiscuity is directly contrasted with Will’s conservatism, but the dichotomy between the two characters creates an implied sense of inclusivity.

Will provides a site of identification for queer audiences seeking traditional values. He attains his own nuclear family while still remaining true to his sexual identity. Christopher Pullen argues that

Will & Grace is a series that proliferates with queerness, and it “offers the potential to stimulate co- presence with the audience.”220 Through the visibility of two vastly different gay characters, Will &

Grace invites an array of audience identification. Castiglia and Reed write, “...although Jack is the gayest character, Will is not not-gay: one of the greatest attractions of Will and Grace is its recognition of a range of positions within gay identity.”221 Jack and Will’s disparity is an intentional, and indeed, centrally comedic, element of the series. By creating two characters that are seemingly juxtaposed against each other, an entire spectrum of gay identity manifestations becomes created in the middle.222 Importantly, Jack and Will assist each other in varying ways so that like

Friends, friendship is the central relationship that helps facilitate character bildung even more so

his broken marriage to Carol), Ross walks Carol down the aisle so she can achieve her matrimonial dreams. (See Friends, season 2, episode 11, “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” perf. David Schwimmer and Jane Sibbett, aired January 18, 1996, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274031?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C10%2C83ef0f30-71cb- 435b-9197-9c74e1b9ebdb-35958242%2C7c037293-6a46-4302-a366- 2d487a5adb6c_48729363X3XX1576078725385%2C7c037293-6a46-4302-a366- 2d487a5adb6c_ROOT). 220 Christopher Pullen, Straight Girls and Queer Guys: The Hetero Media Gaze in Film and Television (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 99. 221 Castiglia and Reed, “‘Ah Yes, I Remember It Well,’” 254. 222 Pullen, Straight Girls and Queer Guys, 95.

than romantic pursuits or other factors. Will & Grace celebrates queerness and creates a milieu in which queerness is the central functioning relationship of mutuality and support.223

Inversions of Traditional Exemplarity

Another significant difference between archetypal bildungsroman texts and these contemporary sitcoms is an inversion of the traditional bildung model in which there is an example, a vorbild,224 that the bildungsheld seeks to model himself after. Dating back to the word bildung’s

223 Though Will & Grace and Friends create opportunities for varied gendered and queer representation, I acknowledge there are limitations in terms of racial representation. Historically, black situation comedies have been marginalized, and those that are successful often rely on negative racialized stereotypes to promote humor. (See Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. McIlwain, “The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms,” in The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder [Albany: State University of New York, 2005], 125). Indeed, concurrent with I Love Lucy in the early 1950s, Amos n’ Andy was also an incredibly popular sitcom in part because of the harmful stereotypes that it foregrounded. The popularity of this situation comedy has led to some scholars to term the 1950-1953 era as the TV Minstrelsy Era, an ugly racial co-current that is in conflict with the productive gender work being done by I Love Lucy. (See Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. McIlwain, “The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms,” in The Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder [Albany: State University of New York, 2005], 127. The black situation comedy has had a turbulent history, alternating between degrading representations and a lack thereof, and other minority groups have been treated in a similar fashion. Asian American characters were largely absent from major networks until 1994 with Margaret Cho’s All American Girl on ABC, and it was not until Fresh off the Boat premiered in 2015 that an Asian American family was represented on a major network. Both Friends and Will & Grace have been justly criticized for their lack of racial representation.(See Shelley Cobb, “I’d Like Y’all to Get a Black Friend”: The Politics of Race in Friends, Television & New Media 19, no. 8 [2018], 710). Friends does not have a recurring black character until Aisha N. Tyler plays Ross’s girlfriend, fellow paleontologist Charlie Wheeler for portions of season 8 and 9, and the only recurring black character on Will & Grace is Will’s boss, attorney Ben Doucette, played by Gregory Hines. Karen’s maid Rosario Salazar is likewise problematic given that Salazar is written as an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, but the actress playing Rosario (Shelley Morrison) was from the Bronx. (See Andrew Limbong, “Shelley Morrison, Rosario on Will & Grace, Dies at 83,” National Public Radio, December 3, 2019). https://www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784343513/shelley-morrison-rosario-on-will-and-grace-dies-at- 83). Inarguably, both Friends and Will & Grace are limited in their non-white racial representations, indicative of their historical context and larger cultural ideologies that are admittedly not the central focus of this thesis. However, in spite of these representational gaps, there are realms in which both Friends and Will & Grace participated in the process of cultural growth. 224 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12.

linguistic origins in German mysticism, in which God was the original model that individuals tried to mimic, bildung is a process marked by attempted imitation. Marc Redfield illuminates this intratextual bildung when he distinguishes between characters that are ephebes and exemplars. The ephebes are characters that have yet to endure the process of bildung; they move through the narrative, and their bildung is marked by their attempts to mimic the exemplar, or the model character. Redfield describes this narrative phenomenon:

...Bildung brings into play the figurative and temporal complications of exemplarity.

An identity must be formed through identification with an example: a model that on

the one hand is the true identity of the identity-to-be-formed, but on the other hand is

separated from the ephebe by the temporality or process of Bildung itself.”225

In Redfield’s conception, the exemplar must be older than the ephebe and more experienced. In a labor-based economy, the exemplar/ephebe relationship might be modeled after a master/apprentice dichotomy; or in a family, the exemplar/ephebe could be demonstrated through parental/child dynamics. Whatever the desired domain of the ephebe, exemplars excel. There is a duality to the process of bildung in which the ephebe attempts to mimic the exemplar in physical duty or performance, and there is also an accompanying interior motive. Redfield states that the ephebe must “identify” with the exemplar and internalize the various motivations that are inherent to the exemplar. The bildungsheld then works to make those intrinsic characteristics his own and become a mirror of the exemplar.

Though on the surface this process of bildung seems straight-forward, the quest of the ephebe to mimic the exemplar is inevitably one that cannot be fully realized. Redfield notes that bildung is marked by melancholy because bildung requires the effacement of differences between

225 Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the "Bildungsroman,” 49.

an ephebe and the exemplar, a task that is altogether impossible.226 Redfield’s analysis echoes back to a similar theme in Gadamer’s definition of bildung. The quest to become God can never be fully realized because of human limitations; the image of God must suffice as a model because one cannot hope to be equal with the supposed creator of existence.227 The ephebe is never able to fully efface the difference between itself and the exemplar; the task of becoming is therefore “infinite” because a slippage, a difference, will always be present between the two characters. The never- ending nature of this quest for likeness where total likeness is not possible creates a situational irony that permeates the entire process of formation and marks it with melancholia. The exemplar is the goal, but it is a goal that cannot be attained.

Though Redfield’s model of ephebe/exemplar is an important framework for many bildungsroman texts, Friends and Will & Grace portray the ephebe/exemplar relationship in a way that complicates this model. Both series disrupt the traditional relationship between these characters, and thus, they intervene in Redfield’s conception of bildung’s melancholy. In modern society the exemplar is readily embodied by the parent, and in the case of Friends and Will &

Grace, these exemplary characters take form as the boomer parent generation, who are largely middle aged or older.228 The promise of success, ideologically tied to assurance in the nuclear family, does not endure in the post-Reagan era, and thus, the Gen X characters on Friends and Will

& Grace have complicated relationships with their boomer parents. Kutulas comments that boomer characters on Will & Grace and Friends are often “inappropriately randy and prone to divorces that shock their adult children, who must rely on one another within their constructed families to get

226 Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the "Bildungsroman,” 53. 227 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 12. 228 “Baby Boomers,” Oxford English Dictionary online, accessed December 9, 2019, https://www- oed-com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/view/Entry/14250#eid30782931.

by.”229 As Kutulas writes, the constructed family becomes each character’s source of support. In

Friends and Will & Grace the parent exemplar is actually depicted as a counterexample, and the traditional model of the nuclear family is inverted. The Gen X characters of these series, by not turning to their parents for guidance, rely on each other to be their exemplars because each character possesses different strengths. Thus, the bildungsheld characters on Friends and Will & Grace embody a tension: they remain ephebes in their own individual trajectories, and yet friendship functions as a site in which characters can educate one another depending on their various strengths.

For example, Will is an exemplar for Jack in terms of his steady employment and monetary success, while Jack is an exemplar for Will in terms of his self-acceptance.

Boomer characters on these TV series also pose a tension, albeit a different one because they represent a heteronormative family ideal, and Friends and Will & Grace demonstrate how this ideal is flawed. Boomer characters reflect the short comings of the cultural mandate for a nuclear family, a mandate that many rebelled against in their youth, but a mandate to which some ultimately assimilated. Both Friends and Will & Grace reveal the supposed exemplarity of their parents to be false because the boomer characters are often unhappy with their relative family realities, and this unhappiness translates to an often-strained relationship with their now-adult children.

Intergenerational conflict is not an isolated phenomenon to sitcoms in American culture, but the

229 As Kutulas notes, part of this trend to depict boomer characters in such an unfavorable light derived from a cultural phenomenon in which boomers lost their cultural pull that they once enjoyed as young adults in the 70s and 80s. Boomers were largely active in the counterculture movements of the 1970s, and they made up the target audience for progressive sitcoms like Mary Tyler Moore in that time period. They were also partially responsible for the slew of family sitcoms that proliferated in the 1980s (including Happy Days, Full House, The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, Who’s the Boss?, Family Matters, Roseanne and Kutulas), but they lost their cultural pull in the 1990s when Gen X reached adulthood, and as Kutulas states, the boomer generation also lost the ability to “dictate how family looked on TV.” (See Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost?,” 27).

ways in which Friends and Will & Grace address this tension is both nuanced and entertaining.230

The melancholy of effacing the difference between the ephebe and exemplar in Redfield’s model is then disrupted; the goal of the ephebe is to not become the exemplar, and moments in which the ephebe can prove to be different from the supposed parent exemplar are marked as successes. By contrast, moments when protagonists, the proposed ephebes, act similar to their parents provoke laughter from both the live audience and the viewer at home through the ephebe’s mortification and embarrassment. In lieu of parent characterological exemplars, the bildungshelds of the series become the exemplars for each other and for the audiences watching at home because they are the sites of identification. The experiences of the young adult characters on each of these series mimics the anxieties and uncertainties affecting Gen X in the real world.

One such character who rebukes her parent’s normative model and carves an independent path for herself is Friends’s Rachel Green. In a consistent serial arc for the first two seasons of the series, that then makes frequent appearances in several of the later seasons, Rachel grapples with her anxious relationship with both of her parents. Her infrequent and fraught interactions with them demonstrate an inversion of the traditional ephebe/exemplar relationship because Rachel’s independent choices are celebrated within the milieu of the show in comparison to her parents’ adherence to traditional conventions. In “The One with the Two Parties,” Rachel’s parents, Sandra

Green and Dr. Leonard Green (played by Marlo Thomas and Ron Leibman respectively), have recently announced that they will be getting a divorce.231 Rachel is devastated as she questions what her family will look like in the aftermath of this decision. Once again, the constructed family of the

230 Indeed, intergenerational conflict has proven to be a durable narrative device in many sitcoms dating back to the 1970s with the bumbling and bigoted Archie Bunker character from Norman Lear’s All in the Family. 231 Friends, season 2, episode 22, “The One with the Two Parties,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and Marlo Thomas, aired May 2, 1996, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274042?trackId=200257859.

sextet provides Rachel the support that she needs when her nuclear family ruptures. Her friends throw two separate birthday parties for her, (Monica’s in her apartment, and Joey/Chandler in theirs across the hall), when her parents refuse to occupy the same space. While Rachel is talking to her mother, Sandra divulges that she actually looks up to Rachel because Sandra claims that she moved from “my father’s house to the sorority house to your father’s house” implying that she played into heteronormative domestic and gendered rules.232 Sandra confides in Rachel that she married her

“Barry,” referring to the fiancé that Rachel left at the altar at the beginning of the first season because she realized that matrimony, while providing the security of a plan, would ultimately be limiting because she did not love Barry.

The inversion of seemingly antiquated conservative values thus becomes apparent. Though second wave feminism and the radical youth movement would have theoretically coincided with

Sandra’s youth, she did not partake in these, and instead, opted for a normative, conservative marriage and family. For Sandra, the family ideal fell short in the lived reality when it is consistently revealed by Rachel throughout the series her parents’ marriage was largely distant and marked by constant dissension.233 For the viewer, identification with Rachel is paramount. Indeed, even her conservative mother can view the merits of what she has chosen when she refused to marry

Barry. Rachel chose the uncertainty of independence in direct opposition to the domesticity chosen by her mother. Rachel’s independence, complete with fiscal struggle, uncertainty, and a menial job

232 Friends, “The One with Two Parties.” 233 Later in the episode, after Sandra’s verbal praise of her daughter, and the Greens’s realization that there are indeed two parties, Rachel laments to Chandler in the hall that holidays will be different now that her parents will not be living in the same home. She tells Chandler a vignette about the Fourth of July that largely highlights how Rachel has inaccurately romanticized family memories of incessant arguing, unhappiness, potential alcoholism, and dysfunction. Chandler relates to her given that he has also survived the rupture of his family, but he also shows support by reminding her that she will endure in spite of this setback. (See Friends, “The One with Two Parties,”).

as a waitress, is lauded in comparison with her mother’s misguided pursuance of domestic bliss that has ultimately ended in a bitter divorce. Importantly, the casting of Marlo Thomas as Sandra Green was not unintentional given Thomas’s earlier career choices and the cultural images with which she was once associated. Of note is that Thomas played Ann Marie on That Girl, from 1966-1971, a pioneering feminist character who moves from her hometown of Brewster, NY to New York City to pursue an acting career in spite of her father’s concern. The character of Ann Marie was hailed by second wave feminism, and she performed important cultural work by inspiring young female audiences to assert their own independence.234 Ann Marie, then, is a direct contrast to the characterization of largely-dependent Sandra, and in this meta-televisual moment, Thomas is seemingly passing the proverbial gauntlet of female independence to Rachel Green. To reflect evolving cultural values in which Generation X was grappling with insecurity and changes that made their parents seem out of touch with contemporary experiences, Friends celebrates Rachel for her willingness to forge a life path that contradicts that of her parents. Thus, Rachel’s status as an exemplary character, as opposed to an ephebe, is brought out of implied subtext. Through Sandra’s narration of her own experiences, and her linguistic affirmation of the maturity of Rachel’s choices, she becomes narratively foregrounded as the model.

Not all boomer characters featured on these sitcoms, however, depict a traditional model.235

In “The One with Mrs. Bing” the audience is introduced to Norah Bing, Chandler’s divorced mother

234 Herbie J. Pilato, “That Girl: The One Who Changed Everything,” The Television Academy, published April 4, 2016, accessed February 18, 2020, https://www.emmys.com/news/online- originals/girl-one-who-changed-everything. 235 It is worth noting that Norah Bing, though introduced to the audience as a sexually liberal character, only developed those characteristics in the wake of her divorce and her husband’s infidelity with another man. Cited by Chandler numerous times during the run of the series, Norah and her husband Charles Bing were happily married until Charles decides to become a woman, a revelation that only comes to light after Norah discovers Charles’s extra-marital affair.

who supports herself by writing “dirty,” indeed, nearly pornographic, literature.236 Norah Bing is played by Morgan Fairchild, an actress easily recognized by the boomer generation; and indeed

Morgan Fairchild is just one example of Friends’s tendency to cast a number of older stars who were “closely identified with the 1970s and 1980s.”237 In a referential moment, Norah Bing is being interviewed by Jay Leno when he asks her about a recent arrest in London. Phoebe asks if Chandler was aware of his mother’s arrest, and Chandler replies that he is, of course, “beaming with pride.”

Chandler employs this parental colloquialism ironically to reflect his disapproval and embarrassment regarding his mother’s behavior.238

Later in the interview, Norah reveals that she is completing part of a book tour in New York, and she says to Leno that she will be visiting her son. When the camera cuts from Norah’s face to

Chandler’s in a classic reaction shot, the viewer witnesses Chandler’s surprise at his mother’s visit, exclaiming: “This is how I find out; most mothers use the phone.” The studio audience laughs, and interestingly, none of the sextet get to comment on Chandler’s sentiment regarding his mother, but there is a present implication regarding Chandler’s lack of communication with Norah. In a series that frequently relies upon critiques from one friend to another in order to generate laughter, the silence of the friend ensemble comments upon the seriousness of Chandler’s feelings of tension with his mother. The camera then cuts back to Norah’s interview with Leno, and when Leno comments that Norah doesn’t seem particularly “maternal,” Norah further embarrasses Chandler in the interview by revealing to Leno that she “...is a fabulous mom” because she bought her son “his first condoms.”239 Norah Bing does not refute Leno’s implied statement that one cannot be both a

236 Friends, season 1, episode 11, “The One with Mrs. Bing,” perf. Matthew Perry, aired January 5, 1995, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274007?trackId=200257859. 237 Leppert “Friends Forever: Sitcom Celebrity and Its Afterlives,” 744. 238 Friends, “The One with Mrs. Bing.” 239 Friends, “The One with Mrs. Bing.”

sexually-realized woman and a mother. Instead, she partakes in the discourse and keeps her own sexualization at the center of the interview, reinforcing Kutulas’s characterization of boomer characters as “randy.” Significantly, she also sexualizes Chandler by acknowledging that she facilitated her son’s sexual endeavors.

The overt inversion of the traditional ephebe/exemplar model, an inversion that begins with the episode’s onset with Chandler’s disapproval of his mother’s actions, comes to fruition later in the narrative. The group goes out to dinner with Norah to celebrate the successful publishing of another one of her books. Ross gets drunk because he is upset about Rachel’s relationship with

Paolo, as part of a serial character arc that endures throughout the first season, and arguably the series. In an attempt to console him, Norah verbally encourages Ross and gives him a passionate kiss. When Ross tells Chandler, it gives Chandler the impetus to confront his mother about her inappropriate behavior. Within the self-referential nature of Friends, Norah’s status as a guest star, an effective outsider, promotes alignment with Chandler’s point of view and his discomfort with his mother having physically intimate encounters with members of his constructed family.240 Through

Ross’s confession to Chandler, the centrality of the constructed family is foregrounded, and when

Ross attempts to apologize, Chandler confesses to being more hurt by Ross’s complicity because his mother has always been a “Freudian nightmare.”241 Chandler explains his hurt by saying that Ross, given their long-standing friendship, knows the “crap” that Chandler deals with because of his overtly-sexualized and under-communicative, mother.

Chandler’s experience foregrounds the fragmented and unfulfilling nature of his nuclear family, and the constructed family of the Friends ensemble is narratologically foregrounded.

Chandler expects to be hurt and disappointed by his mother, but it is Ross’s secrecy, demonstrated

240 Leppert, “Friends Forever: Sitcom Celebrity and Its Afterlives,” 743. 241 Friends, “The One with Mrs. Bing.”

by his initial lack of confession to Chandler, that drives the majority of the episode’s narrative.

Chandler demonstrates considerable anxiety regarding his relationship with his mother, and in the narrative of the episode, one of the ways that he distinguishes himself from his mother is to confront her regarding her inappropriate behavior. Rather than be uncommunicative and “bury” his feelings, a storyline which long-term viewers will understand as being pertinent to Chandler’s parents and their divorce in his adolescence, he chooses to uncomfortably confront Norah. True to the pseudoclosural form, Norah leaves for Europe at the end of the episode, and though her complicated relationship with her son continues, Chandler’s forgiveness of his mother, at least for the particular choice to kiss Ross, and his willingness to confront her, demonstrates characterological growth.242

The “melancholy,” and indeed the comedic impetus behind this episode in particular, is that the exemplar is not a model at all, and that Chandler, as the ephebe and bildungsheld, is trying to avoid being like either of his parents, a narrative that is mirrored by Rachel’s experiences later in the season. Rachel and Chandler’s journeys, however, must be distinguished from one another because both characters endure bildung differently. Rachel rejects the heteronormative model of her parents, most clearly indicated by her running away from her own wedding, and seasons later,

Rachel only marries Ross when she is so heavily intoxicated, she cannot remember the action, and at the series’ end, Rachel remains unmarried. Chandler, however, has a more complicated relationship with the model provided to him by his parents. In the early seasons, Chandler is fraught

242 Chandler also struggles with his relationship with his father, Charles Bing. Not seen on screen until the end of season 7 but referenced throughout the series, Chandler discusses that the main reason for his parents’ divorce is because Charles was unfaithful to Norah, and more importantly, Charles was unfaithful because he endured a change in his sexuality and came out as homosexual. It is not until his own impending wedding that Monica implores Chandler to make amends with his father, now known by the pseudonym of Helena Handbasket (and played by Kathleen Turner). Helena, a drag queen, works at a nightclub in Vegas where she is a singer and comedian. Ultimately, in spite of his prior absence in Chandler’s life, Chandler forgives Helena and asks her to attend his wedding. (See Friends, season 7, episode 22, “The One with Chandler’s Dad,” perf. Matthew Perry and Kathleen Turner, aired May 10, 2001, on NBC).

with anxiety regarding his quest to find a long-lasting romantic partnership, hence his serial on- again, off-again relationship with Janice Hosenstein (played by Maggie Wheeler) in spite of his knowledge that the relationship with Hosenstein will be ultimately unfulfilling. Chandler does not reject heteronormative roles, but he is marked with anxiety about how to attain them because he witnessed his parents’ failures in this quest. Though Chandler ultimately marries Monica, and the series ends with their adoption of twins, his journey is repeatedly affectively marked by stress and insecurity.243

Other inversions of the traditional ephebe/exemplar relationship abound in Friends. In direct opposition with the de-rigueur mentor for the male bildungsheld,244 Joey confronts disillusionment with his father, Joseph Tribbiani Sr. (played by Robert Costanzo) when he discovers that he is having an affair behind Joey’s mother’s back. Joey confronts his father and admonishes him for his dishonesty and ultimately, it is only after Joey’s prodding that his father reveals the affair to his mother, Gloria Tribbiani (played by Brenda Vacccaro).245 Gloria’s response confounds Joey when

243 There are several examples throughout the series of Chandler inhibiting his own romantic success. When Chandler attempts to propose to Monica, he creates a scheme to ensure that she is surprised. He lies to her and tells her that he does not want to get married, ultimately causing a fight that ends with Monica proposing to Chandler in a gendered role reversal. Chandler also demonstrates considerable anxiety on his wedding day. He is so overwhelmed at the prospect of marrying Monica in spite of their long romantic relationship and their past experience living together, that he runs away while the group is getting ready for the ceremony. Phoebe ultimately finds him hiding in his office at work because he believes that the others would never think to look there. (See Friends, season 6, episode 25, “The One with the Proposal,” perf. Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry, aired May 18, 2000, on NBC. See also Friends, season 7, episode 23/4, “The One with Monica and Chandler’s Wedding,” perf. Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry, aired May 17, 2001, on NBC). 244 Joannou, “The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century,” 211. 245 Friends, season 1, episode 13, “The One with the Boobies,” perf. Robert Costanzo and Matt LeBlanc, aired January 19, 1995, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274009?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C12%2C0cf4cee1-ec3f- 4653-bb42-6f3348248556-15613762%2Cda6b2414-068f-4647-b31b- d88e04a4f733_1960087X3XX1576005577123%2Cda6b2414-068f-4647-b31b- d88e04a4f733_ROOT.

she reveals that she knows about the affair, and she prefers the current state of her marriage because

Joey Sr. is wracked with guilt and is attentive to her as a compensation. Joey’s confrontation with his parents is more contained in comparison with Monica’s long-standing complicated relationship with her mother. Judy Gellar (played by Christina Pickles) and Monica’s relationship provides ample comedic fodder for the series, from instances involving Judy’s intense criticisms of Monica’s appearance, her lack of a romantic partner, a confrontation in which Monica’s parents refuse to help her pay rent when she has fallen on financial difficulties, and the revelation that Judy and Jack

Gellar (played by Elliott Gould) spent Monica’s wedding fund on a beach house because they believed that Monica would never marry.246 Jack and Judy Gellar, though the only parents on

Friends to remain married in a traditional, monogamous sense, prove to be bumbling and largely clueless, perhaps best exemplified when Jack comments that Ross and Rachel’s baby, Emma, is his

“first grandchild,” and Ross is forced to correct him by asking about his son, Ben, who is a child at the time.247 Consistently in Friends, the sextet is narratively foregrounded, and it is revealed throughout all ten seasons that each bildungsheld character does not see their respective parent as a role model. Bildung is then developed through each bildungsheld’s relationship with their constructed family as opposed to their nuclear one.

Will & Grace likewise disturbs the traditional ephebe and exemplar relationship through a queer critique of conservatism. In “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, He’s Kept Me in the Closet and I’m So

Sad,” Will’s father, George Truman (played by Sydney Pollack) comes to New York City to accept

246 Monica’s hurt in this particular episode is amplified because she has been expressing desire to be married since she was a young girl. (See Friends, season 7, episode 2, “The One with Rachel’s Book,” perf. Elliott Gould and David Schwimmer, aired October 12, 2000, on NBC). 247 Friends, “The One Where No One Proposes.”

a prestigious award from his corporate office.248 In contrast to Chandler’s fraught relationship with his mother, Will idolizes his father, and the two characters enjoy a close bond. However, when Will and Grace go against George’s wishes and attend the banquet for George’s award, it is revealed that

George has never told any of his work colleagues that Will is gay. Instead, George created and circulated a heteronormative narrative for Will: he is married to Grace, and they have three children together. Will must grapple with disillusionment surrounding his father’s dishonesty, and he confronts George’s shame regarding Will’s homosexuality. When Will later argues with his father regarding the fabrication, Will confesses that his father is “just a guy,” and the illusion of exemplarity that Will once had towards his father is shattered. In spite of the fact that Will is a young adult, his comment has an affective echo of a much younger individual.249 Will is enduring the typically adolescent realization that parents are human and therefore fallible. When George later accepts his award, he is ashamed of his behavior and reconciles with his son by announcing that

Will is gay during his acceptance speech, but rather than apologizing to his son in earnest, he turns his acceptance speech into a rant about Wills queerness that embarrasses him, once again proving these parental characters fail as exemplars even when their actions are well-intended and trying to make amends.

George’s personal attempt to rewrite his own son’s life demonstrates the pervasiveness of heteronormative rewriting that Will & Grace breaks down when Will confronts his father. Just as

Will must rewrite his personal narrative against the one constructed for him by his father, so too is the series itself functioning as a reworking of gay cultural visibility. Indeed, just by making gay visibility the central milieu of the series, there is potential for a “true cultural reckoning” because of

248 Will & Grace, season 2, episode 13, “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, He’s Kept Me in the Closet and I’m So Sad,” perf. Eric McCormack and Sydney Pollack, aired February 15, 2000, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/01a30352-8080-4113-8aae-d9a963dc0d0c. 249 Will & Grace, “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, He’s Kept Me in the Closet and I’m So Sad.”

the consistent visibility of these gays characters.250 George Truman is a guest star, and as the self- referentiality of these sitcoms indicates, he is an outsider. His perspective is not the one with which the audience should identify, but the series continues to explore the complications between Will and

George as a result of Will’s gayness, a reality that George struggles to accept.251

In a role reversal of the traditional pedagogical model, Friends and Will & Grace position their protagonists as exemplars, and through the bildungsroman model, the ensemble casts become models that the audience, as real-life ephebes, can follow. Friends and Will & Grace nuance

Redfield’s conception of bildung in a significant way because the exemplars, in this case, the bildungsheld characters, do not pose unattainable models to the audience. Chandler’s anxieties regarding his own ability to be a stable romantic partner, and Will’s struggles with his parents in tandem with his own journey to fully accept his sexual identity are purposefully relatable to the ephebe audience. Rather than pose to the viewer characters that have already endured bildung,

Friends and Will & Grace intentionally narrativize the experience of these ensemble casts as they attempt to become more self-realized and successful versions of themselves. The exemplar then, is not an exemplar because they already excel or are near-perfect. Instead, these sitcoms foreground

250 Suzanna Danuta-Walters, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 97. 251 Will and his father’s complicated relationship ultimately comes to a head in season 8 when Will’s parents give now- pregnant Grace Will’s baby blanket. Will and his father have an intense argument regarding Will’s feelings of being consistently slighted because of his sexuality. When George states that he thinks Will’s life would be easier if he were heteronormative, Will storms out of his parents’ house and refuses to answer his father’s calls. In the following episode, George dies from a heart attack, and Will grieves that his last encounter with his father ultimately boiled down to his father’s long term inability to accept Will. Will’s narrative with his father thus reaches an ambivalent ending at best, and it is reflective of lived queer experiences in which children come out to their parents and are then unable to have a healthy relationship with their parents, even into adulthood, in the face of parental ignorance or unacceptance. (See Will & Grace, season 8, episode 19, “Blanket Apology,” perf. Eric McCormack, Sydney Pollack, and Blythe Danner, aired April 6, 2006, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/eb20ab18-3c52-4584-93f3-08710e5d94e2; also Will & Grace, season 8, episode 20, “Mourning Son,” perf. Eric McCormack, aired April 27, 2006, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/c28ec769-66f9-473f-a401-029fd2d1779a).

exemplars in the process of bildung, and it is their willingness to adapt, grow, struggle, and change that makes them attainable to the ephebe audience watching these shows. The process of characterological bildung is foregrounded throughout both of these series, and thus, both enact cultural bildung by modeling ever-evolving expectations and norms for mass audiences.

Delayed Bildungsheld(s)

Friends and Will & Grace not only depart from the traditional bildungsroman framework in terms of their female and queer representations, but they also depict bildungsheld characters that are considerably older than those traditionally represented. Franco Moretti posits that youth is a fundamental tenet of bildungsroman because only through youth is an individual malleable, and therefore, only in youth is bildung possible. Typical protagonists of bildungsroman are adolescents that then become burgeoning adults by the end of the narrative.252 In contrast, the narrative onsets of both Friends and Will & Grace pose protagonists that, from a Western understanding, are legally and socio-economically adult. All six of the Friends’s ensemble cast are in their mid- to late- twenties, while Will & Grace more broadly defines Will’s, Grace’s, and Jack’s ages in their late twenties, and Karen is even more ambiguously in her thirties or early forties. Thus, both Friends and Will & Grace can more accurately be described as delayed bildungsroman because of their bildungsheld representations. By depicting characters who are in the early (or even middle) years of adulthood, Friends and Will & Grace provide visibility for what was once invisible (at least in terms of the bildungsroman). Traditional bildungsroman ends at the precipice of adulthood; it is on the horizon, but it has not yet arrived. Though I Love Lucy questioned the mythos of domestic bliss,

Lucy was ultimately confined by her marriage to Ricky. More than forty years later, and reflective

252 Moretti, The Way of the World, 4.

of sitcom evolutions throughout those subsequent decades, Friends and Will & Grace reflect Gen X anxieties by creating narrative milieus around young adults who are intentionally not married, either by choice or because they do not have the emotional maturity or fiscal stability to make such a commitment. Friends and Will & Grace effectively dispel the optimistic mythos surrounding adulthood that often is circulated by the clean and optimistic ending of the canonical bildungsroman, a narrative pattern that these series undermine. The proposed certainty upon the traditional end of the bildungsroman is not achieved, indicated by the narratability of both series in which characters continue to develop long after their supposed end of adolescence.

Perhaps because of the relatively advanced age of the protagonists, Friends and Will &

Grace intervene in the ideological relationship between traditional bildungsroman and marriage.

For Moretti, marriage functions a closural necessity in the classic bildungsroman because marriage symbolizes the intertwining of individuality and social acculturation. Through marriage, the individual subverts their will for another because they accept being “bound” to another individual in matrimony.253 Thus, because the duality of the traditional bildungsroman that demands both the development of the self and the assimilation into cultural normativity, marriage is central to the ideology of the classic literary bildungsroman. Moretti describes this phenomenon when he states that “self-development and integration are complementary and convergent trajectories” that reach

“equilibrium” when one is married to another person. Marriage, in other words, was representative of the utmost moral and emotional maturity. The dual-process of “self-development,” or becoming one’s self, and social integration meet at the point of equilibrium that is marriage.254 Moretti describes how marriage occupies such a privileged position in the traditional bildungsroman that “... the classical Bildungsroman does not contrast marriage with celibacy, as would after all be logical,

253 Moretti, The Way of the World, 22. 254 Moretti, The Way of the World, 18-19.

but with death (Goethe) or ‘disgrace’ (Austen).”255 Indeed, to not marry was a sign that the character was not a viable participant in society, and typically these characters were cast out of the narrative before its denouement. The marriage trope in classic bildungsroman reinforced cultural, gendered norms regarding how an individual must conform in order to be a productive member of society. Canonical bildungsroman demanded heteronormativity, and thus marriage acted as a fundamental ideological tenet to reaffirm this norm. Significantly, as a contemporary regeneration of the classic form, and as a reflection of how the bildungsroman works within its respective culture even in non-literary forms, Friends and Will & Grace subvert the traditional conservative ending of the classic bildungsroman through consistent parodies of marriage. In contrast with Moretti’s conception that matrimony poses a “double-epiphany” (of self and social contract), Friends and

Will & Grace often utilize marriage as a trope for comedic fodder.

In opposition to criticism that Friends revels in “inherent conservatism,”256 regarding heteronormativity and marriage, the seemingly inevitable failure of marriage provides ample narrative content for the series. Friends foregrounds a mockery of marriage from its first episode. In the opening scene of the pilot, Rachel frantically storms into Central Perk because she is running away from her wedding to Barry. The image of Rachel in a wedding dress has been used by scholars to argue for Rachel’s conventionality and her status as the “visual embodiment of the feminine ideal.”257 Indeed, the verbal punchline that immediately precedes Rachel’s presence on screen in the wedding dress is that Ross has just bemoaned to his friends that he “just wants to be

255 Moretti, The Way of the World, 22-3. 256 Shelley Cobb and Hannah Hamad, “Friends: The Last One,” in Television Finales: From Howdy Doody to Girls, ed. Douglas L. Howard and David Bianculli (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018), 124. 257 Leppert, “Friends Forever: Sitcom Celebrity and Its Afterlives,” 753.

married again,” after revealing his impending divorce from wife, Carol.258 It is true that Rachel stands in the background of the shot, appearing as an apparition in response to Ross’s request, wearing her “gaudy wedding gown” and “tiara-like headpiece,”259 but to merely read Rachel as a figment of conventionality is incomplete because it presumes an isolation of the visual image from the narrative content of the episode. Rachel is dressed as a bride, but more significantly, she is a runaway bride. Crucial to the pilot’s narrative is that Rachel has abandoned her wedding because she does not want to be “bound” (to use Moretti’s terminology) to Barry. The image of the wedding dress can thus be reappropriated. The wedding dress symbolically represents a confinement from which Rachel is seeking to escape. Marriage is not ideologically reinforced here but revealed to be a well of anxiety. Significantly, Rachel’s anxiety is then inversely paralleled with Ross’s remorse regarding the demise of his own marriage in the wake of his wife’s discovery of her sexuality. Just as Rachel broke free from matrimony on its precipice, Ross’s wife Carol is likewise breaking out of her limiting matrimonial state so that she can pursue her lesbian lifestyle.260

From the pilot, Friends foregrounds Ross and Rachel as the pivotal “reluctant romance” of the series.261 Indeed, from the opening episode, in spite of Ross’s mourning of his marriage, it is revealed that he has harbored romantic feelings towards Rachel for years. The inherent nature of the reluctant romance is that it is marked with hesitation and ambiguity. Sconce argues that Friends treats Ross and Rachel as a “self-reflexive farce” that plays upon audience expectations and further

258 Friends, season 1, episode 1, “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer, aired September 22, 1994, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70273997?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C0%2C0cf4cee1-ec3f- 4653-bb42-6f3348248556-15613762%2Cacb24a77-9090-4871-aa7f- b309cab70fba_4362552X3XX1576007971406%2Cacb24a77-9090-4871-aa7f- b309cab70fba_ROOT. 259 Leppert, “Friends Forever: Sitcom Celebrity and Its Afterlives,” 753. 260 Friends, “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate.” 261 Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” 103.

parodies marriage.262 After spending four seasons in various degrees of unspoken sexual tension, a brief relationship, a breakup, and thwarted reconciliations, Ross and Rachel marry each other in a drunken ceremony Las Vegas during season 5. The “farce” as elucidated by Sconce is that audiences expect Ross and Rachel to eventually marry because of their long history of romantic entanglements. Likewise, weddings have provided common season finales for numerous television series. By the time Friends airs, the well-worn narrative trope is turned to parodied when Ross and

Rachel are seen by Monica and Chandler leaving a wedding chapel. To reinforce the parody, the episode is set in Vegas, a city built upon artifice and illusion, and after exchanging greetings with each other that comment upon their potential new nomers, “Hello Mrs. Ross,” and “Hello Mr.

Rachel,” both characters, from an establishing shot, lean over bushes outside of the chapel and begin vomiting.263 Ross and Rachel’s unintentional wedding actually functions as an impasse for

Monica and Chandler, who had previously decided to get married in Vegas on a whim before realizing the weight of that mistake when they come across Ross and Rachel. To continue the parody, and in a continued manipulation of audience expectations, both Ross and Rachel divorce at the start of season 6 after a multi-episode arc in which Ross lies to Rachel about getting an annulment because he does not want to have three failed marriages.264 Thus, the pinnacle reluctant

262 Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” 103. 263 Friends, season 5, episode 24, “The One in Vegas: Part 2,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer, aired May 20, 1999, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274117?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C23%2C0cf4cee1-ec3f- 4653-bb42-6f3348248556-15613762%2Cacb24a77-9090-4871-aa7f- b309cab70fba_3283350X3XX1576006879523%2Cacb24a77-9090-4871-aa7f- b309cab70fba_ROOT. 264 Friends, season 6, episode 5, “The One with Joey’s Porsche,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer, aired October 21, 1999, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274122?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C4%2C0cf4cee1-ec3f- 4653-bb42-6f3348248556-15613762%2C80373bf0-52b6-4a3c-a654- fa33019633a0_2757001X3XX1576006361507%2C80373bf0-52b6-4a3c-a654- fa33019633a0_ROOT.

romance of Friends spends the entirety of their seven episode marriage either intoxicated, in search of a divorce, or arguing about Ross’s dishonesty.

Other failed marriages abound in Friends. Phoebe has a green card marriage to a gay ice dancer from Canada (who then asks for a divorce),265 Ross’s divorce from Carol is on-going at the diegetic onset, followed by his subsequent divorces from Emily in season 5,266 and later Rachel a season later.267 Likewise, the sextet deals with divorce and unhappy marriage indirectly through their parents. Chandler and Rachel’s parents are divorced, Phoebe’s were never married (nor does she ever meet her birth father), and Joey’s discovery of his father’s infidelity creates anxiety regarding his own potential to be a loyal husband.268 Even Chandler and Monica, the long standing multi-season romance that is by far the most traditional depiction on the series, portrays anxiety surrounding marriage when Chandler panics and hides on his wedding day. The other members of the group are forced to look for him while keeping his absence a secret from Monica.269 Throughout

Friends’ ten-year run, marriage is continually coded as anxiety-inducing, and it is frequently mocked for the sake of comedy as the ensemble cast navigates their various relations to the conservative, hegemonic institution.

265 Friends, season 2, episode 4, “The One with Phoebe’s Husband,” perf. Lisa Kudrow and Steve Zahn, aired October 12, 1995, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274024?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C3%2C0cf4cee1-ec3f- 4653-bb42-6f3348248556-15613762%2Cacb24a77-9090-4871-aa7f- b309cab70fba_3049655X3XX1576006680119%2Cacb24a77-9090-4871-aa7f- b309cab70fba_ROOT. 266 Friends, season 5, episode 5, “The One with the Kips,” perf. David Schwimmer, aired October 29, 1998, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274098?trackId=14170286&tctx=2%2C0%2C43bcd212-392b- 4ae5-8112-e65017231c44-10959138%2C80373bf0-52b6-4a3c-a654- fa33019633a0_2382879X3XX1576005968318%2C80373bf0-52b6-4a3c-a654- fa33019633a0_ROOT. 267 Friends, “The One with Joey’s Porsche.” 268 Friends, “The One with the Boobies.” 269 Friends, “The One with Monica and Chandler’s Wedding.”

Will & Grace parodies marriage in a parallel fashion to Friends, both in the pilot and throughout the series eight-year run. Will & Grace mocks the supposed sanctity of matrimony in season 1 when Karen asks Jack to marry her maid, Rosario, so that she will not be deported. In spite of Jack’s homosexual identity, he consents to Karen’s request when she offers to pay for the celebration.270 The two even go so far to have a marriage ceremony, and Jack later moves in with

Karen to demonstrate the “legitimacy” of his marriage with Rosario to Immigration Services. In a comedic turn of events, Rosario asks Jack for a divorce in season 2 so that she can pursue Karen’s gardener.271 The Will & Grace pilot also uses marriage anxiety as a narrative device. In the pilot,

Grace accepts an off-screen proposal from her boyfriend, Danny. The narratability of this particular episode stems from Will’s condemnation of the wedding; he thinks that Grace is settling because she is anxious that she will not find a more suitable partner. After Will and Grace have a fight in her office and Will storms off, Grace turns to Karen for advice, who comically quips, “Marriage is…,” then pauses and tries to start again, “Marriage is…” before realizing that in spite of her own marriage to Stan, Karen cannot articulate precisely what marriage entails, and her confusion provokes ample laughter from the studio audience. Karen’s inarticulateness on the matter renders the topic of marriage ambivalent at best. Karen does not overtly condemn it, but her inability to describe it is a haunting silence that Grace identifies and internalizes, shown in a reaction shot when the camera cuts to a medium close-up shot of Grace attempting to heed Karen’s non-existent advice.

Later in the episode, Grace apologizes to Will while wearing her wedding dress, and it is revealed

(through Grace’s verbal retelling to Will that is not shown), that Grace decided not to go through

270 Will & Grace, “Object of My Rejection.” 271 Will & Grace, season 2, episode 23, “Ben? Her? Part 1,” perf. Sean Hayes and Shelley Morrison, aired May 23, 2000, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/37da3d65-ad75-4168-b284- 7fbce1f72390.

with her marriage to Danny.272 When Will and Grace decide to go to a bar to celebrate, customers at the bar continually congratulate the new couple on their presumed nuptials because Will is wearing a suit from work and Grace remains in her dress. Thus, just as Rachel’s wedding dress from the

Friends pilot can be re-appropriated as a symbol of anxiety, so too is Grace’s dress rendered as an empty signifier; Grace is wearing a wedding dress, but she has explicitly chosen not to be a bride, and instead, the public around her assumes that she has married a man the audience knows to be homosexual. In spite of Grace’s claim that Will is her soulmate, when the two protagonists kiss each other for the rest of the bar as a spectacle, Will quips that he feels “nothing.” Pullen notes that this scene is significant for queer identification because its mise en scene and setting are referencing the mid 1980s situation comedy Cheers, a longstanding series that foregrounded the heterosexual pairing of Sam Malone and Diane Chambers.273 Will & Grace purposefully incorporates a queer intervention in the traditional marriage plot and the reluctant romance plot because Grace’s feelings for Will cannot be reciprocated. Thus, the wedding plot of assimilation is reconfigured as a site of queer subversion. The wedding dress is re-coded as a site of spectacle, and ultimately, disappointment. Grace in fact did not get married, and the man that she supposes is her soulmate is unavailable to her, a character serial arc that defines Grace’s bildung both during and before the diegetic onset of the series. Far from the “double-epiphany” that Moretti conceives of, Friends and

Will & Grace ultimately subvert and queer the utopian promise of heteronormative marriage.

However, to argue that both Friends and Will & Grace irrevocably condemn marriage would miss significant nuances of both series. Both series do incorporate meaningful representations of characters who desire marriage. Ross Gellar and Grace Adler present two

272 Will & Grace, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired September 21, 1998, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/251dabfe-5465-49bb-9826- 78dfaec12199. 273 Pullen, Straight Girls and Queer Guys, 101.

different examples of characters whose bildung journey is partly driven by the desire for marriage, and yet both are caused anxiety by the prospect of it. Both characters grapple with their competing desires and anxieties from the series’ onsets, revealed by Ross’s statement that he “wants to be married again,” after his divorce from Carol, revealing that Carol’s liberation comes at the cost of

Ross’s disappointment and grief274 Likewise, Grace’s major conflict in the pilot is that she is torn between her competing desires to be married and her understanding that she would be settling if she chose Danny.275 Interestingly, both characters have turbulent relationships with marriage. As stated before, Ross marries two more times throughout the series after his initial divorce, but both marriages are short-lived.276 In a parallel fashion, Grace runs out on her first fiancé, Danny, but she then marries Leo Markus (played by Harry Connick, Jr.) in season 5 after only dating for a couple of months, but the two divorce when Leo has an affair while working for Doctors Without

Borders.277 Interestingly, in spite of the numerous romantic hurdles that both characters encounter,

274 Friends, “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate.” 275 Will & Grace, “Pilot.” 276 In Ross’s marriage to Emily, he iconically says Rachel’s name during the ceremony. The ceremony functions as the season finale for season 4, and though Emily makes attempts to forgive Ross, she asks for a divorce when he refuses to cut Rachel out of his life. Then, in season 5, Ross and Rachel get married while heavily intoxicated in Vegas. (See, Friends, season 4, episode 23, “The One with Ross’s Wedding,” perf. Helen Baxendale and David Schwimmer, aired May 7, 1998, on NBC; see also Friends, “The One with the Kips,” and Friends, “The One in Vegas: Part 2”). 277 Grace marries Leo in a televised mass ceremony in Central Park, hosted by Katie Couric (in a self-referential NBC moment, but not actually included in the episode), and the episode poses a series of intriguing ideological complications regarding matrimony. Will is hurt because he feels that as a queer man, he is denied the traditional wedding that he so desires. Then, at the reception that Grace and Leo throw, it is revealed by Leo’s mother that his real name is Marvin, and Grace panics when she realizes that she has jumped into a marriage without knowing much about her groom. In an interesting narrative turn, the first part of the episode reveals the injustice that for heterosexual couples, marriage can be taken for granted, while homosexual marriage (in the legal and traditional sense) is, by contrast unattainable. In the wake of Grace’s panic, Katie Couric later reveals that the judge who performed the televised ceremony did not have a valid license, rendering their marriage as invalid. Grace and Leo then decide to get married in a more traditional Jewish ceremony. Grace and Leo stay married through season 6 until Leo reveals to Will that he has slept with another woman. (See Will & Grace, season 5, episode 9, “Marry Me a Little More,” perf.

Ross and Grace both have a singular long-term romantic partner that remains their focal point for the majority of each series. Ross and Rachel reconcile with one another in the Friends finale, and

Grace ultimately remarries Leo in season 8 upon finding out she is pregnant with his child, but the opening of the season 9 revival in 2017 rewrites Grace’s marriage so that she and Leo are divorced.278 Through characters such as Ross and Grace, both series avoid a single-track argument of mocking marriage; instead, they present to audiences nuanced characters that desire long-term commitment, but they are also marked by insecurities. Perhaps most importantly, neither series romanticizes marriage; both Ross and Grace desire marriage, but they fail in their endeavors to successfully inhabit this reality because of the complications inherent in maintaining a monogamous long-term relationship. By presenting to the audience an ensemble cast in which characters regard marriage differently - some mock it, some avoid it, some purposefully seek it out - Friends and Will

& Grace normalized many potential life patterns and assuaged audience insecurities regarding their own lived experiences.

Importantly, both Friends and Will & Grace not only reflect cultural values in which Gen X was settling into marriage later, but both were also conducting predictive cultural work. By 1996, the median marriage age for women and men was 25 and 27 respectively (a rise from the median age of 21 and 23 in 1970).279 The social pattern of an increase in marriage age is then predicted on

Harry Connick, Jr. and Debra Messing, aired November 21, 2002, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/5f094e29-a300-42aa-b6c3-44784486939b. See also Will & Grace, season 7, episode 1, “FYI: I Hurt Too,” perf. Harry Connick, Jr. and Debra Messing, aired September 16, 2004, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/2bc496df-528e-400a-b404- 4995f963c7d3). 278 Will & Grace, season 9, episode 1, “11 Years Later,” perf. Debra Messing and Megan Mullally, aired September 28, 2017, on NBC, https://www.amazon.com/11-Years- Later/dp/B075DJ7Y8L/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2CAAP0I2Z1QAR&keywords=will+and+grace+revival+s eason+1&qid=1582552475&sprefix=will+and+%2Caps%2C146&sr=8-1. 279 Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development From the Late Teens Through the Twenties,” American Psychologist, 55, no. 5, (2000), 469.

both of these series, but also taken further because neither series depicts their protagonists being married until well into their thirties.280 The only Friends character who is married before the median age of 27 is Ross, but he then is divorced, and both Phoebe and Jack have temporary marriages that are ultimately performative. Both Friends and Will & Grace, through their incredible visibility and popularity, were important cultural texts amidst the larger social pattern of individuals choosing to marry later, and both are participating in the trend in which the median marriage age continues to rise. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2010, the median marriage age for women and men has risen again to 26 and 28 respectively.281 Thus, it is perhaps because of the ways that Friends and

Will & Grace depart from the traditional bildungsroman framework, in terms of their delayed bildungsheld and their complex representations of marriage, that they are able to uphold the bildungsroman tradition of being in dialogue with and even preceding the creation of new cultural norms.

Queer Visibility

Another example of cultural bildung put into motion by Will & Grace is queer visibility.

When the series premiered in the fall of 1998, “Will & Grace offered the first gay male lead character on broadcast television;” but, by the debut of its third season in 2000, there were 22 television programs with gay leads or recurring roles.282 Thus, through the very visibility and the familiarity of the sitcom, combined with its innate comedic pleasure, Will & Grace breaks ground in

280 Aside from Karen Walker from Will & Grace, who is married before the diegetic onset of the series. 281 “Median Age at First Marriage: 1890-Present,” United States Census Bureau, United States Department of Commerce, Economics, and Statistics Administration, accessed December 9, 2019, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and- households/ms-2.pdf. 282 Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces,” 87.

avenues of queer visibility, especially through the character of Jack McFarland. Brazen, unapologetic, and flamboyant in his actions, he acts as a character foil for Will Truman’s more conservative depiction of homosexuality. Jack is inarguably a comedic and highly performative character, but he is not just merely onscreen for the sake of spectacle; his humorous barbs are intentional. His very presence on screen was a radical shift for the mid 1990s moment, and though his effeminate portrayal is not completely unproblematic, it was unprecedented in mainstream television before that moment. Jack is a highly recognized adaptation of what Richardson, Smith, and Werndly describe as the ‘effeminate male character:’

The effeminate man provokes strong reactions: firstly, he is demonstrating that

femininity is not the exclusive property of female bodies and by implication that

masculinity is not the inherent or innate property of male bodies. The sissy is a male

body ‘doing’ femininity, and so makes explicit how gender is a performative

effect.283

As Richardson et al. argue, there is a meta-performance happening through Jack’s character.

Though acknowledging that gender as a performance is not a new theoretical construct, having an effeminate male character figure prominently in the narrative was a new cultural development for the 1990s moment. Prior to the airing of Will & Grace, the effeminate male character, termed by some scholars as the “sissy,” had “very little function other than a humorous extra.”284 Though Jack retains the humor, he is a primary narrative force within the series, and audiences of the series welcome Jack’s overt performativity. Richardson’s et. al’s review of internet message boards revealed that many fans of the series think Jack gets the most humorous lines and the most exciting

283 Richardson, Smith, and Werndly, Studying Sexualities, 62. 284 Richardson, Smith, and Werndly, Studying Sexualities, 61-2.

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narratives.285 Jack brought a character into the spotlight that had previously been relegated to the margins or completely erased from the proverbial page. Jack’s overtly performative nature, and his career as a struggling actor, highlight that play and charade can be a mask behind which subversion works. Through Jack McFarland, a gender-bending character, a character that revels in performance as a tool to reveal that social norms are all performative to some degree, Will & Grace does cultural work in bringing overt and importantly, unapologetic gay visibility into the mainstream cultural conversation.

Though the “sissy” character can perpetuate harmful stereotypes of gay visibility, Jack breaks the presumed stereotypical trope in a series of significant ways. Perhaps most importantly,

Jack complicates the effeminate male character that is traditionally desexualized and represented as pathetic or unattractive.286 In stark contrast to this historic depictions of gay “sissy” characters,

Jack’s presentation, both linguistic and corporeal, is sexualized, and he has a series of relationships throughout the show. Jack is not a traditional sissy character that is frustrated in desire for companionship or sexual pleasure; he revels in both. Castiglia and Reed argue, “With Jack onscreen, Will and Grace offers television audiences the unprecedented spectacle of gay subcultural interaction depicted as a practice of shared pleasure…”287 Jack’s character, as argued by Castiglia and Reed, draws upon queer experience, the “subcultural,” and brings it to life in a mainstream way.

Jack is a character driven by pleasure, and he is culturally aligned with camp and cruising.

Importantly, Jack’s alignment with camp is not merely in regards to his personal pleasure; he references an entire milieu of shared pleasure that is communal in its reach, and the power of invoking camp in network-televised sitcom is significant.288 Indeed, even critics of the series are

285 Richardson, Smith, and Werndly, Studying Sexualities, 66. 286 Richardson, Smith, and Werndly, Studying Sexualities, 62-3. 287 Castiglia and Reed, “‘Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well,’” 253. 288 Castiglia and Reed, “‘Ah Yes, I Remember It Well,’” 254.

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clear to delineate that Will & Grace did not just appeal to a niche gay audience; it was widely lauded by a mainstream audience as well.289 Likewise, Andrew Holleran summarizes how new, and indeed, ground-breaking, the gay visibility of Will & Grace was: “...this was the first example of gay subject matter going totally mainstream, for there is nothing so mainstream -- not Broadway, not movies, not novels -- as The Box”290 Especially in light of Will & Grace’s premiere a mere two years after the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, Jack demonstrates a queer triumph, capable of wielding his power in adverse situations. Jack is not only a singular icon of gay visibility, but he also embodies camp, and he does so in a way to redeem queer cultural memory and save it from its historical legacy of painful erasure.291 Jack refuses to be rewritten by heteronormativity, and thus, the ethos of bildung, of reforming both individuals and the cultures that produce them, becomes manifest.

Jack’s relationship with, and ultimate triumph over, heteronormative conservatism becomes explicit in the episode “Girls, Interrupted.”292 Jack encounters Bill at a gay bar and tells Karen that

Bill is so smitten, he gave a picture of himself to Jack. When Karen reads the flier, she tells Jack that Bill was not trying to flirt with him; he was instead trying to convert him to a group called

“Welcome Back Home.” Jack begins to read the various claims of the flier; “Renounce your homosexuality, Make the choice to be straight, Gay is not the way” as the camera pans from a medium shot to a medium close-up shot of Jack’s shocked face. He then turns to Karen with the flier in his outstretched hand and yells, “Jennifer Jason Leigh, these people are freaks!”293 The viewer, through camera movement and established characterological schema, is meant to align with

289 Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces,” 88. 290 Andrew Holleran, “The Alpha Queen,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, 7, no.3 (2000), 65. 291 Castiglia and Reed, “‘Ah Yes, I Remember It Well,’” 254. 292 Will & Grace, “Girls, Interrupted.” 293 Will & Grace, “Girls, Interrupted.”

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Jack’s point of view, his condemnation that any attempt to change a person’s sexual identity is a fruitless endeavor. Indeed, through Jack’s focalization, the compulsory heteronormativity is what is

“freakish.” With this statement, he inverts the traditional sexuality power hierarchy in which

“compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic,” and Jack reveals that it is nothing short of a farce.294 The idea that homosexuality is condemnable becomes laughable in this moment, made audible through the live studio audience’s reaction to Jack’s consternation.

Jack then decides that he will confront Bill at the “Welcome Back Home” group and attempt to persuade Bill to accept his homosexuality. In an over-the-shoulder shot he tells Karen, “What they are doing is morally wrong,” and that he would like to “Shine the light of truth upon them.”

Evangelical diction is being used by Jack to promote his mission for pleasure. Indeed, he is trying to

“convert” Bill, but not in the way the Church intends.295 Jack is invoking Christian images of

“truth” and “light” to mark how ridiculous the premise of forced sexual conversion is. When the reaction-shot of Karen reveals her surprise, Jack confesses that, in reality, he would like to “make out” with Bill and in effect convert Bill and reveal what Jack believes is his true homosexual identity. Jack’s individualistic statement of desire is not unproblematic through its temporary erasure of systemic oppression of queerness. Indeed, it has been argued that Will & Grace emphasizes interpersonal romantic entanglements at the “expense of gay politics,” but as the narrative of this episode unfolds, the systemic pressures and overt gay politics come back into play when Jack nearly single-handedly dismantles the “Welcome Back Home” group.296 Though Karen initially refuses to attend the meeting with Jack, he convinces her by telling her that she can pretend

294 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordinations,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michéle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York/London: Routledge, 1993), 312. 295 It is worth noting that Bill is played by Neil Patrick Harris, an openly gay actor and advocate. 296 Battles and Hilton-Morrow, “Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces,” 90.

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to be a lesbian. Thus, the meta-performativity and gender commentary seeps into the episode when

Jack and Karen enter the “Welcome Back Home” meeting, and Karen is preoccupied with her excitement to “French kiss a girl,” while Jack turns his attention to “acting straight” as a way to bring out Bill’s “inner homo.”297 Significantly, “straightness” becomes a performative act that the audience recognizes to be a farce, and it is a performance enacted with the goal of revealing homosexual attraction. Jack is inverting the traditional narrative in which queerness must be subverted in order to align with heteronormative social ideals.

Though Jack’s performance of “playing it straight” is for comedic effect, it exhibits an implicit message regarding gender, queerness, and performance. When Jack moves to greet Bill,

Karen reminds him to “take it out of the head voice,” and Karen helps Jack maneuver heteronormativity while in homosexual pursuit. The layered gender and sexuality performances, a layering that proves comedic for the viewer, makes powerful statements regarding the performativity and the very illusion of sexual norms and standards. When Jack’s performance of straightness ultimately falls apart, Bill condemns him for his homosexuality, claiming: “man and woman are meant to be together,” before making a larger statement to the room that if any of the members think that “Welcome Back Home” functions as a gay pickup joint, then they should leave.298 The camera cuts from a medium shot of Bill to an establishing shot of the entire set, and the audience watches all members of “Welcome Back Home” walk through the double doors to leave the room. The camera then cuts to a classic reaction shot of awe-struck Bill when he realizes that his facade of conservatism had been entirely utilized as a site of queer subversion. Through the establishing shot, and by making the entire group’s exit visible, the scene ends with a note of

297 Will & Grace, “Girls, Interrupted.” 298 Will & Grace, “Girls, Interrupted.”

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communal queer solidarity. “Welcome Back Home” has been dismantled, but its community members will persist without the added burden of the heteronormative performance.

Importantly, in light of the earlier discussion regarding how the ensemble cast functions as exemplars for one another, Jack’s overt queerness is significant in a pedagogical way. Unlike Jack,

Will is marked by anxiety regarding how to successfully assimilate into society while remaining true to his sexual identity. Jack’s bildung, by comparison, is largely marked by an affect of joy. Jack revels in his queerness from the diegetic onset, and he does not seek to assimilate in the more traditional ways that Will does. Jack’s self-acceptance is a paramount character facet; as mentioned earlier in Chapter 2, Jack actually becomes the vehicle through which Will realizes and accepts his queerness.299 Jack offers an important counterexample to the traditional bildungsheld because Jack prioritizes his own happiness instead of abiding by cultural norms. Thus, Jack offers a significant departure from traditional bildungsheld because he is the queer exemplar for Will’s struggling self- acceptance. Jack’s self-acceptance makes him an exemplary figure in one regard, but there are several other external factors that mark Jack’s bildungsroman. Most importantly, Jack struggles to find steady and meaningful employment that enables him to be creatively fulfilled. He desires to be a working actor, but he frequently comes across hurdles and setbacks that make the profession economically unattainable. In an inversion of Chandler’s dilemma from Friends, Jack struggles to achieve career fulfillment with economic success in a character arc that is acutely relatable for young adult audiences who often reconcile their ideations of their ideal jobs with the reality of what will pay the bills. Jack is not in search of many traditional markers of adulthood (such as marriage and children), and he represents how the queer narrative can follow an entirely different path from the heteronormative bildungsroman without losing relatability to a mass audience. In spite of his

299 Will & Grace, “Lows in the Mid-Eighties: Part 1.”

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unsteady employment, Jack is an exemplar for the more-traditionally successful Will because Jack is the model of queerness that Will relies upon when he struggles with anxiety or self-doubt.

Ambivalent and Resistant Finales

Friends and Will & Grace not only demonstrate regeneration of the bildungsroman tradition through their character representations, but both also complicate the relationship that the canonical bildungsroman has with its own ending. Moretti contends that the literary bildungsroman is largely decided by its moment of denouement. The beginning and end are “decisive moments” that circumscribe the “field of possibility” for the bildungsheld.300 When the bildungsheld demonstrates maturity and has endured the formation of bildung, then the narrative has “fulfilled its aim and can peacefully end.”301 Thus, once the bildungsheld no longer faces potential for change or growth, the bildungsroman is complete. By use of the word “peacefully,” Moretti indicates that the end of the work is a welcome relief to the turbulence of bildung. With the narrative denouement, the threat of change is over. The ending of a traditional bildungsroman is thus to be met with an affect of acceptance and an optimism towards the impending future of prosperous adult experience. Friends and Will & Grace, however, do not demonstrate this neat narrative closure. I have already discussed how both series revel in pseudoclosures at the episodic level, and both have a long history of crafting season finales that rely upon serial arcs (while also, significantly, creating new ones); but both Friends and Will & Grace also demonstrate affective ambivalence in their own series finales.302 Importantly, both series defy the illusion of closure by utilizing the finale to ground the viewer in self-referential moments of the series’ past narratives.

300 Moretti, The Way of the World, 28. 301 Moretti, The Way of the World, 18-19. 302 Nearly all season finales in these series narratologically set the ground for serial arcs in the subsequent season, and some season finales play upon tropes, motifs, themes or character traits that

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One of the primary narrative arcs of the Friends finale, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2,” addresses such a regression when Joey demonstrates his support for Chandler’s move to the suburbs by buying a chick and duck for him and Monica to keep as pets. The reappearance of the chick and duck in the finale is a significant self-referential moment that recalls several of the earlier seasons in which Chandler and Joey were roommates. When the chick and duck become trapped in Joey’s foosball table, they decide there is no other way to retrieve the animals other than to destroy the table. The foosball table acts as both a “symbolic signifier of their decade-long bromance;”303 but perhaps more significantly, the table serves as a metonym for Chandler and Joey’s deterrence of domestic adulthood; afterall, in season 1, the two men purchased the foosball table to replace their broken dining table, which Joey broke after having a sexual escapade upon it.304 The foosball table is both a symbolic agent and a significant aspect of the mise-en-scene for the entire ten-year run of the series: “It’s placement, between the kitchen and the ‘fourth wall’ of the camera ensures that the

have been present from the series’ onsets. Poignant examples of season finale narratives that align with the pseudoclosure form include: Will asking Grace to move out at the end of season 1 so that they can both pursue meaningful romantic relationships, Jack’s discovery and encounter with a son he did not know he fathered, Will and Grace’s complications while attempting to have a baby together, and Karen’s on-going marital struggles with Stan. Friends likewise has a history of creating compelling season finales, including Monica’s wedding to Chandler, Rachel flying to London to tell Ross that she loves him, and developing feelings between Joey and Rachel that they attempt to conceal from Ross. (See Will & Grace, “Object of My Rejection,” and Will & Grace, season 3, episode 25, “Sons and Lovers: Part 2,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired May 17, 2001, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/3b487066-5d64-454b-b705-0c7f5286a26c; and Will & Grace, season 4, episode 27, “Artificial Insemination: Part 2,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired May 16, 2002, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/ba319342-aa90- 4561-a105-3528336ba31a. For Friends, also see “The One with the Proposal;” Friends, season 9, episode 23, “The One in Barbados,” perf. Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, aired May 15, 2003, on NBC; and Friends, “The One with Monica and Chandler’s Wedding,”). 303 Cobb and Hamad, “Friends: The Last One,” 125. 304 Friends, season 1, episode 12, “The One with the Dozen Lasagnas,” perf. Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry, aired January 12, 1995, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274008?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C11%2C83ef0f30-71cb- 435b-9197-9c74e1b9ebdb-35958242%2C7c037293-6a46-4302-a366- 2d487a5adb6c_43154861X3XX1576073721194%2C7c037293-6a46-4302-a366- 2d487a5adb6c_ROOT.

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table is always literally foregrounded” in shots of Joey and Chandler’s apartment.305 Thus, both spatially and symbolically, the foosball table becomes a metonym for Chandler and Joey’s relationship as roommates, and thus is the physical embodiment of the homosocial. Pamela Wojcik cites that the roommate trope is particularly powerful in media representations of apartment living because: “[t]he trope of the male roommate shows the slippage between the homosocial and the homosexual and also between the gendered binaries of masculine/feminine and married/single.”306

Because the homosocial roommate is a proposed substitute for a romantic partner, the foosball table comes to embody the slippage of Chandler and Joey’s relationship in which Joey often plays into more traditionally feminine emotional roles in their friendship. Lauren Jade Thompson echoes this sentiment that Chandler’s and Joey’s relationship has “played with the boundaries” between homosocial and homosexual for years within the series.307 This slippage becomes particularly visible in season 6 when Chandler leaves Joey to move in with Monica. Joey breaks into tears when he learns that Chandler will be leaving him, and it is revealed that Chandler has been supporting

Joey fiscally for years when Chandler shows Joey the set of bills that need to be paid monthly, including rent and electricity, of which Joey has remained ignorant for years.308 In the season 6 episode that chronicles Chandler and Joey’s last night as roommates, Chandler plays Joey on the foosball table and bets him money, knowing that Joey will win so that Chandler can trick Joey into

305 Lauren Jade Thompson, “‘It’s Like a Guy Never Lived Here!’: Reading the Gendered Domestic Spaces of Friends,” Television & New Media 19, no. 8 (2018): 768. 306 Pamela Robertson Wojcik, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 126. 307 Thompson, “It’s Like a Guy Never Lived Here!,” 769. 308 Friends, season 6, episode 6, “The One on the Last Night,” perf. Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry, aired November 4, 1999, on NBC, https://www.netflix.com/watch/70274123?trackId=14170289&tctx=0%2C5%2C83ef0f30-71cb- 435b-9197-9c74e1b9ebdb-35958242%2C7c037293-6a46-4302-a366- 2d487a5adb6c_48210882X3XX1576073900761%2C7c037293-6a46-4302-a366- 2d487a5adb6c_ROOT.

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having the money Chandler knows he needs. The foosball table then becomes a site of economic transaction between the two male characters; they literally can perform their friendship through leisure, and it is a site in which Joey’s dependence, emotionally and fiscally, upon Chandler is foregrounded.

Significantly, in the finale, neither Joey nor Chandler is capable of destroying the symbol of their friendship. When Joey inevitably takes a crowbar to the table, he tells Chander, “I need to say goodbye to the table first.”309 Though Joey’s emotional delivery of this line creates an opportunity for Chandler to mock him, he uncharacteristically responds with a somber, “I understand.”310

Monica then walks into Joey’s apartment and asks if they have found the chick and duck. When an over-the-shoulder shot focalizes Chandler as he explicates the table needs to be destroyed, and

Monica quips, “I’ll do it. Give me!.”311 The camera then cuts away from Monica’s gleeful statement to a reaction shot of Chandler and Joey’s shocked faces. Because the audience has been witnessing their struggle with the foosball table, the audience identifies with their sense of grief rather than

Monica’s delight; she is the outside perspective.312

Inarguably, Monica revels in destroying an object from Chandler’s life that is representative of a period prior to their marriage, but that revelry is one-sided. It is not unintentional that

309 Friends, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2.” 310 After Chandler’s uncharacteristically somber statement, the camera zooms out to a medium shot of the two men with the table in the foreground. The focus on Chandler and Joey in this scene foregrounds the men’s importance to each other. For long-term viewers, the familiarity of this scene rings with grievance in regards to the action that needs to be taken. However, even first-time viewers would understand the surface level of grief demonstrated by Joey and Chandler. (See Friends, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2”). 311 Friends, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2.” 312 Monica’s status as an “outsider” in this scene is reinforced by several visual details. Upon Monica’s agreement to destroy the foosball table, the camera pans out to encompass all three friends and the foosball table. The physical proximity of Chandler’s and Joey’s bodies on one side of the table and Monica’s on the other sets up an overt spatial divide with Chandler in the middle. (See Friends, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2”).

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Chandler’s wife deals the death blow for the foosball table. Interestingly, in spite of Monica and

Chandler’s trajectory into heteronormative adulthood with their move to the suburbs and the birth of their twins via adoption, the pair is not narratively prioritized. Instead, the largest role that Monica arguably plays in the finale is her destruction of the foosball table, representative of Chandler’s prolonged adolescence.313 Monica rejoices in its destruction because she has desired marriage and children from the show’s onset, but the source of Monica’s joy is the cause of Chandler’s grief. As a demonstration of the diffuse bildungsroman model, friendship is indeed necessary to both Chandler and Joey’s bildung. Monica’s actions are metonymic of the prevailing heteronormativity in its erasure of Chandler and Joey’s overt bromance and sub textual homoeroticism. The heteronormativity embodied by Monica is enacting violence on the homosocial bond of male friendship. The road forward to “adulthood” is indeed a proverbial bag of mixed emotions that falls short of ubiquitous revelry at the forefront in canonical bildungsroman texts. Narrative emphasis, because of the Friends milieu, focalizes on the relative cost of moving into adulthood, and the losses (in terms of shifting friendships) one incurs as necessary sacrifices.

The “Last One” ultimately ends with two questions, indicative of ambivalence and uncertainty. The sextet is huddled in an establishing shot of Monica’s now-empty apartment, the setting for the vast majority of the series, and Rachel asks the group: “Should we get some coffee?” to which Chandler replies, “Sure. Where?.”314 In a verbal jest that references Central Perk, the cafe setting in which the pilot was staged, the series utilizes the last narratable moment to refer to the origins of the program itself. The finale, then, revels in language and mise en scene that can

313 The creators of the show, Marta Kauffman and Kevin S. Bright, have also indicated that the foosball is a symbol of the show itself because of its larger reference to preserving childhood tendencies in the face of adult responsibilities. (See Cobb and Hamad, “‘Friends: The Last One,’” 125). 314 Friends, “The Last One: Part 1 & 2.”

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“wittingly evade definitive closure”315 because the question proposes a circular narrative. The last shot sees the group leave Monica’s apartment, and their implied destination, Central Perk, is the setting in which the series began. The finale of Friends looks back upon its own history to bring the narrative to a tenuous close. By bringing the last moments back to the beginning, the series ends not in a narrative arc, but in a loop. The linguistic evocation of nostalgia, of looking backwards, is mirrored by visual cues. The finale marks a moment of transition, but unlike the canonical bildungsroman in which the lens of the denouement looks forward towards the future, Friends demonstrates a desire to return to the onset, before these impending changes.

The Will & Grace finale aired in 2006, two years after that of Friends, and yet circular narrative constructions that set the audience back at the series’ onset are likewise prevalent.316 The second part of the two-part finale episode traipses fast forwards through time and begins with Grace and Will in their retrospective marital and domestic unions, (Will with Vince and his son, Ben, and

Grace with Leo and their daughter, Lila), but Will and Grace are not on speaking terms.317 In spite of Will and Grace having both achieved the supposed markers of traditional adulthood so exalted in the traditional bildungsroman, the narrative arc of the finale emphasizes Will’s and Grace’s relative unhappiness because they are not in each other’s lives. Thus, just as in Friends, friendship functions as the dominant relationship in this narrative. In stark contrast to Grace’s and Will’s separation, the finale cuts between scenes of Will and Grace and scenes depicting Jack and Karen’s blissful cohabitation. Will & Grace’s finale avoids depicting the intermediary domestic years in which Will

315 Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, 33. 316 The finale discussed in this analysis is from the original eight season run from 1998-2006. 317 See Will & Grace, season 8, episode 22, “Whatever Happened to Baby Gin,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired May 11, 2006, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/36282ebe-e128-4807-bc16-74da8a2b4222. Also see Will & Grace, season 8, episode 23, “The Finale: Part 1 & 2,” perf. Eric McCormack and Debra Messing, aired May 18, 2006, on NBC, https://www.hulu.com/watch/2f913ce0-c188-496f-9f30-117f5f240774.

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and Grace would be raising their children, and instead cuts to Ben and Lila’s chance meeting in a college dorm, an echo of Grace’s and Will’s first meeting that is frequently referenced throughout the eight year run of the series. After Ben and Lila decide to get coffee together, Will and Grace see each other for the first time in a presumed sixteen years in an establishing shot, and they begin their friendship anew.318 In the final scene of the finale, the camera cuts between Will and Grace talking on the phone as they are watching ER in a perfect echo of the series pilot in which the two characters are discussing George Clooney, and they decide to meet at the bar where they kissed after Grace ran away from her impending marriage to Danny in the pilot. In a self-reflexive moment, all four protagonists meet in the bar and take a shot together to celebrate the fact that none of them have changed in spite of the years that have passed.319 The circularity in the finale is two- fold: the phone conversation between Will and Grace mirrors the phone conversation of the pilot, and the closing scene of the finale aligns with the closing scene of the pilot with the exception of

Jack and Karen. Whereas Friends linguistically referenced Central Perk, Will & Grace revels in additional visual associations with the pilot as well. Importantly, in the last moment of the finale, the camera cuts back to the narrative present to depict Will, Grace, Karen, and Jack as they are in real time. The finale does not end with a depiction of middle age, but instead, shows all four bildungsheld united again with one another.

Both Friends and Will & Grace utilize their finales to reinforce the ideology of the constructed family. Through self-referentiality, and by utilizing narratives that mirror threads set down in pilot episodes, the finales work to circularize the narrative milieu of each series. However,

318 Will & Grace, “The Finale: Part 1 & 2.” 319 The inclusion of Jack and Karen in this final scene is likewise significant because it is reflective of the increased significance of Jack and Karen’s characters that evolved throughout the show’s duration. Originally considered as side characters, Jack and Karen became characters of equal import to the eponymous Will and Grace.

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both offer audiences different temporal representations. Friends decidedly looks backwards: from the question of Ross and Rachel’s romance to the debacle with the chick and the duck, with the ultimate conclusion that both animals will continue to live with Joey, Friends retains the imagery, dialogue, and narratives of the series’ history, thus situating the audience seemingly back where they started a decade prior. Will & Grace presents time differently because the finale is largely preoccupied with the future, but it is not a future that includes the assumed domestic bliss that is hinted upon in the denouement of the canonical bildungsroman. Instead, the finale presents parallel journeys: Ben and Lila’s presumed onset of their bildungsroman in college, and the quartet all engaged in various middle-aged escapades. Time in Will & Grace is more liminal, but the last moments ultimately anchor the audience in the bar from the pilot episode; the foray into future potentialities is limited, and the resilience of the constructed family of Will, Grace, Jack, and Karen, is foregrounded. Both Friends and Will & Grace end with important images of the bildungsheld ensembles that highlight the journey they all took to get there, a journey largely informed by their relationships with one another. By ending with images that invoke the narrative bildung of the entire series, both series evade definitive closural moments.

Even scholars who critique the Friends finale for being “recidivist” in comparison with its progressive ten year run, acknowledge that the final scenes of the show make the supposed

“happily-ever-after” marriage plot “unrepresentable” because none of the Friends bildungsheld characters are seen enacting the adult duties that are implied in the finale’s denouement.320 Alice

Leppert likewise notes that the ending of Friends depicts only “transitions into marriage and parenthood.”321 The audience never sees Monica and Chandler in the suburbs, nor do they see Ross

320 Cobb and Hamad, “‘Friends: The Last One,’” 126. 321 Alice Leppert, “Friends Forever: Sitcom Celebrity and Its Afterlives,” Television & New Media 19, no. 8 (2018): 743.

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and Rachel’s relationship in the wake of their precarious reunion or Phoebe’s new marriage to Mike

(played by Paul Rudd). Will & Grace likewise indulges in a finale that narratively foregrounds Will and Grace’s young-adult children as the means through which the duo reconciles their long-standing feud before circuitously coming back to the quartet positioned in a bar from the pilot. The finales for both series help establish a legacy in which the bildungsheld(s) remain in a position of

“becoming;” they are on the precipice of adult life, but they do not cross the threshold, and their relationships to one another in sharing that bildung is of paramount importance even when compared to spousal relationships. Importantly, the finales of both series mirror that of the traditional bildungsroman in which the protagonist is on the cusp of adulthood, but adulthood itself: the days in and days out of matrimony and domesticity, is not depicted. Therefore, the abiding cultural images and associations - with both the traditional bildungsroman form in an implied sense, and more overtly with Friends and Will & Grace - retain the notion of bildung because the cusp of adulthood is presented to the viewer, but adulthood itself remains unresolved.

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CONCLUSION

Friends and Will & Grace strike a balance; both follow and make meaningful departures from the canonical bildungsroman form. Just like the bildungsroman, the 1990s sitcom is a hybrid within the larger self-reflexive sitcom form. Friends and Will & Grace retain important formal elements of the situation comedy genre including the live studio audience, the comedic impetus, and the insistence on quotidien narratives, that make both series feel familiar, and interestingly, un- dated because they retain an aesthetic that goes back to the origin of the sitcom. Because of these elements, Friends and Will & Grace keep the pleasurable, nostalgic sentimentality of the traditional sitcom. Nostalgia is comforting, familiar, and in the case of Friends and Will & Grace, two-fold. It is intrinsic to both series as they frequently indulge in narrative and character self-referentiality, and they retain a nostalgia for the archetypal sitcoms themselves. Friends and Will & Grace, however, also make character-based narrative adaptations that enable both to be read as bildungsroman texts, and it is perhaps the foregrounding of character bildung that enable both to feel relatable for audiences beginning with Gen X and spanning into current times.

Importantly, reading Friends and Will & Grace as bildungsroman works creates a dialogue.

There is potential for a reparative critical reading of these sitcom series, and there is also a reciprocal effect upon the bildungsroman genre. By posing to the viewer an ensemble cast of bildungsheld characters with equal narrative significance, Friends and Will & Grace function as diffuse bildungsroman texts that chart, and ultimately celebrate, various productive paths forward into adulthood. Traditionally, bildungsroman works have concerned themselves with the singular bildungsheld; the passage into adulthood was an individualistic one. By foregrounding the significance of friendship, Friends and Will & Grace intervene upon the individual model, and they

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transform characterological bildung into a shared experience. Both series narratively foreground the significance of friendship as a necessary tether in moving towards adulthood, and friendship functions as a pedagogical site and one of support that each bildungsheld can rely upon. This poses an interesting adaptation to the original bildung pedagogical model of the bildungsroman in which the individual reader would endure bildung in parallel with the bildungsheld. Sitcoms, by overtly foregrounding a communal experience at their onset, retain the pedagogical potential of the traditional bildungsroman while also prioritizing the idea of shared bildung. In this case, the diffuse bildungsroman is an enhancement of the traditional form because the implied cultural bildung now comes to the forefront of the text.

Friends and Will & Grace alter the established character representations temporality of the traditional bildungsroman in meaningful ways that resonate with viewers across generational lines.

Of significance is the portrayal of adult bildungsheld characters. The canonical bildungsroman concerned itself exclusively with adolescent and young adult characters, but Friends and Will &

Grace are reflective of modern cultural shifts in which adulthood itself has been delayed. In response to these cultural changes, Friends and Will & Grace foreground how the potential for change, for characterological bildung, can take place later in life. The “desire for metamorphosis” that marked the canonical bildungsheld no longer terminates with adulthood.322 Instead, adulthood opens with opportunities for continued personal development. Both series function pedagogically to demonstrate that change can continue to occur throughout one’s life; the precipice of adulthood is merely a new beginning rather than a point of denouement. A character can indeed endure bildung much later in their lives than the traditional bildungsroman poses, and thus, reading Friends and

322 Moretti, The Way of the World, 23.

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Will & Grace as bildungsroman texts opens the genre to be more inclusive of characters of varying ages.

Perhaps as a result of utilizing delayed bildungsheld(s), Friends and Will & Grace (in a narrative echo that stems back to I Love Lucy) continually question the supposed domestic bliss that was so paramount to the traditional bildungsroman. Marriage remains a significant element in the delayed bildungsroman - whether characters meet it with ambivalence, mockery, or a genuine desire for it - but matrimony no longer dominates the form as the only potential denouement, and this is especially true from a gendered standpoint. Through characters such as Joey Tribbiani, Jack

McFarland, and Karen Walker, Friends and Will & Grace foreground that a potential productive path forward is one which does not include a romantic partner, and Jack and Karen’s happy cohabitation poses the alternative of friendship as one’s primary form of companionship.

Inarguably, both the bildungsroman and the sitcom are normative genres because they work towards productive individual social assimilation, but by reading Friends and Will & Grace as bildungsroman works, the category of individualistic normality once narrowly prescribed by canonical bildungsroman works, becomes more flexible and susceptible to change. Friends and Will

& Grace retain the pedagogical potential of the bildungsroman, but by prioritizing the shared experience of friendship, the malleability of the bildungsroman is revealed.

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