BOOK DATA. Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey, Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness. New York: New York University Press, 2020. $89 cloth, $30 paper, $16.50 e-book. 272 pages.
As someone who both loves and studies television, there is almost nothing I will not watch, with one exception: a particular group of shows about white people with problems. These shows center on mostly self-obsessed, middle-class, liberal white people stressed out by banal problems and out of touch with poor and working-class people and people of color. Thus, I was exceedingly delighted to read Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness.
Horrible White People addresses an impressive archive of television shows released, roughly, between 2014 and now, with a focus on 2014–16 (as the authors note, the years leading up to the election of Donald Trump). The shows included in this study feature mostly white...
University of California Press