Laura Minor

Challenging industry and scholarly claims of digital disruption, it demonstrates how streaming giants like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video, alongside public service broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4, maintain deep continuities with television history, adapting established industry practices online rather than abandoning them.

This book explores female authorship in UK television comedy, with a focus on British and Northern Irish writers/performers. More specifically, it examines comedy texts produced between 2010 and 2020, a period marked by a proliferation of female-centric and female-created comedy. In the following order, comedians Julia Davis, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Caitlin/Caroline Moran, Michaela Coel, and Sharon Horgan will be analysed as key case studies. Drawing from these case studies, the book has two objectives. First, it seeks to update Kathleen Rowe's concept of the 'unruly' woman, shifting the emphasis from visibility and performance to the labour and contexts behind on-screen portrayals. Building on Rowe's existing scholarship, the book introduces the term 'fastidious' to describe how comedians display delicacy, precision, and control over their carefully crafted TV series. Secondly, the book aims to extend this concept to British and Northern Irish TV writers/performers who have been either overlooked or examined within broader transnational projects. In doing so, it 'reclaims' the authorship of women from the UK.

This book, which was selected by poet John Hodgen for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, ranges across rural Florida and Georgia as well as Los Angeles and New York City, include considerations of homesickness, memory, music, alcohol, love, and loss. With a voice at once inquisitive and prescient, Minor meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape. Minor's writing is unerringly lyric and blooming with elegant charm and keen description. This book is an alchemy of fortitude in the face of despair and all the transformative possibility that comes with the hope for a better future.