Playing Nice: Sincerity and Irony in Television
Television has long been a space for comfort. Often, we watch television in the most intimate surroundings with our closest family members. Additionally, viewers are often encouraged to develop relationships with characters or situations over multiple serialized seasons. With the advent of Peak (or Prestige) TV over the past twenty years, our relationships to characters and situations have grown more complicated as both dramas and comedies have placed viewers in uncomfortable situations with unlikeable characters. However, recent works on television have played with the relationship between irony and sincerity in determining how “nice” we want our television.