Poets, as described by Jo Gill in The Poetics of the American Suburbs, and novelists, with two key works by Jurca and Beuka analyzing themes, wrote about the growing American suburbs. But, the cultural products most studied that depicted and commented on suburbs are television shows and films. Writers, actors, networks and production companies, and others helped bring the suburbs to many screens. Some of these products are well known – think the suburban sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s that still influence scripts today or the Oscar winning film American Beauty – while others are more obscure.

With all of this academic study, I want to highlight the work of one scholar whose work I have found very helpful in my own research on suburbs on screens. After that, I will list several other books that cover similar ground from different angles.

Lynn Spigel published Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs in 2001. This collection of essays covers a lot of cultural objects but the work on television in fascinating. This includes analysis of the “fantastic” family sitcom, television for children, and how TV reruns affected the memory of viewers. After finding this book, I went back to her earlier 1992 book Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. In this book, Spigel considers how Americans discussed the role of this rapidly-adopted technology and how its presence affected everyday life. Combined with her numerous additional works on television and other parts of popular culture and her focus on gender, I would recommend anyone interested in screens and suburbs start here.

A number of other scholars have also addressed screens and suburbs. Here is the bibliographic information for several recent texts I have cited multiple times in my work:

–Coon, David R. 2014. Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television.

–Huq, Rupa. 2013. Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture.

–Rowley, Stephen. 2015. Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs: Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities.

–Vermeulen, Timotheus. 2014. Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television.

It makes sense that there is more academic work on television and movies and suburbs. As mass suburbanization picks up in the United States after World War II, television spreads rapidly and Americans quickly devote hours a day to watching the box in their living room. And television often had a particular angle on the suburbs, as the studies above suggest. While films had been around longer, the prosperous postwar era expanded their reach. Furthermore, while poetry or novels might appeal to a smaller slice of the American population, these mediums are clearly popular and accessible. Together, these dominant visual mediums in the twentieth century provided many images of the suburbs.

Tomorrow, I will come back to the question at the start of Gill’s book – “who sings the song of suburbia?” – and address studies of music about the suburbs.