Just before being asked to review Karen Tongson's book on queer viewership of normie television, I finished a personal project in which I rewatched the 2006–2011 teen sports drama Friday Night Lights and diligently documented every time that I cried and why (ex. “S5E11: Vince hugs his mom”). The nature of this independent research cum art project would work well as another case study for Normporn, which opens with a close reading of Parenthood, another weepie from Friday Night Lights showrunner Jason Katims, in conversation with Joe Biden's 2020 election celebration. Tears are an important part of Tongson's location of normporn as genre: the affectual response to a play of fantasy and grief stemming from a realism in dialogue with reality but also eluding it.
The norm in normporn refers to the realist mode these television programs work in, as well as the subjects they take up: “capacious...
