Little Boxes

Building on Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong and Pretentiousness, Little Boxes expands CHP's investment in cultural criticism, this time inviting 12 writers to talk about TV, and what it means to be raised with television, not the internet, as the primary cultural background noise. These essays are less "Why I Loved Parker Lewis Can't Lose" and more "What Is Up with Everyone in the 80s Having a Domestic: The Different Strokes/Gimme a Break/Mr. Belvedere/Charles in Charge Story." The writers assembled come from a mix of genres, and work in very different modes, but for each one, TV is part of their cultural DNA, and the collection purposefully abrogates the space between the arts and pop culture, making an argument for how they seed and reflect each other. There was something essentially lonely about watching television in the era before the internetyou did it alone, one episode at a time. The essays here represent, in some ways, the opportunity to binge watch and live tweet togetherto turn viewing into a form of cultural production.