Lonely Bowling and Other Critical Contexts

Abstract

In a January 1996 episode of The Simpsons, Homer joins a bowling league. The episode aired one year after Robert Putnam published his essay, “Bowling Alone,” in which he laments the decline of civic participation in America, as evidenced by, for example, declining memberships in bowling leagues. This chapter links the visions of community presented on prime-time television in the nineties to the observations of American cultural critics like Putnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., Tom Wolfe, and Christopher Lasch. In the final decade before the American television audience became increasingly fragmented, TV shows were already depicting a fragmented community within an America which, itself, was in the midst of a fragmented age.