Queerness, the Quality Audience, and Comedy Central's Reno 911!

Abstract

Comedy Central currently attracts the same kind of quality audience that broadcast television networks courted in the 1990s, one that resulted in the sharp increase in gaythemed content on the networks at that time. Yet the parodic mode of address that so permeates the cable network's content makes the different levels of gay cultural competency a heterogeneous viewership brings to a program like Reno 911! an issue of considerable import. A parodic situation-comedy based on reality crime programming, Reno 911! narrativizes an ambiguously gay police detective who, in turn, provides different viewing pleasures for differently situated viewers. As such, the character foregrounds questions about the political consequences of television's use of queer cultural signifiers and the pleasures that viewers take in a parodic representation of queerness on television.