in Film and Television: Critical Essays. Pamela Demory and Christopher Pullen, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 292 pp. $90 hbk.Edited by Pamela Demory and Christopher Pullen, in Film and Television: Critical Essays, is an essential addition to the libraries of scholars interested in diver- sity and media. breadth of the featured texts, the thematic range, and the multiple theoretical approaches that characterize the collection make it a major contribution to the field. In addition, the essays are consistently strong and carefully assembled under appropriate headings.Typically, the introduction is a summary of what follows, but the introduction to is this and more. In the co-written introduction, the editors suggest that the study demonstrates how recent films and television programs play with, imitate, sub- vert, mock, critique-and queer familiar conventions. Citing texts from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to network television's blockbuster Desperate Housewives, Demory and Pullen write:Romance is central not only to the conventional romance genre-in which a couple navigates various barriers to love and eventually reaches a happy, monogamous union-but also to less generic explorations of love, within couples, marriages, and families, in which closure restores the couple or family unit (in the happy ending) or fails to restore normal order (in the unhappy or open ending).Focusing upon romantic plots and subplots in film and television programs such as soap operas, primetime dramas, situation comedies, and reality television, explores alternatives to the existing heterosexual imperative in twenty-two compel- ling essays.Essays are gathered into four parts that make it easier for readers to locate subject areas and texts that interest them. For example, the fourth section includes six texts that were translated from word to image (Brokeback Mountain, Chris and Don, House of Mirth, Notes on a Scandal, A Single Man, and Talented Mr. Ripley). Demory and Pullen took care to organize the submissions in a manner that elevates the material and facilitates a reader's immersion into particular themes essential to a study of film, literature, and television.Part One, titled Romance, includes The Living Dead, or without a Future (Damon R. Young); Bad Boys Need Love, Too: Cinematic Negativity of Gay Romance in I You Phillip Morris (Kenneth Chan); Romancing the Soap: Representations of Gay and Relationships in EastEnders (Peri Bradley); Love's Narrative Lost: Romance Interrupted in L Word (Kathleen A. Brown and Brett Westbrook); It's Not So Easy for Two Men to Be a Couple: Revisiting Gay Dating in Will & Grace and as Folk (Ben Aslinger); and True Queered: Sex, Melodrama, and Romance in as Folk (Pamela Demory).Part Two, titled Marriage and Family, includes Donor Conception in Lesbian and Non-lesbian Film and Television Families (Julia Erhart); Housebroken: Homodomesticity and the Normalization of Queerness in Modern (Steven Edward Doran); Family Guys: Same-Sex Parenting and Masculinity in Modern (Peter C. Kunze); Allegories of Love: Quality Television and the Reimagining of the American (Jessica Murrell and Hannah Stark); and 'Queer' (In)tolerance in Children's Animated Films (Richard D. Reitsma).Part Three, The Margins, comprises six essays. They are 'Fearless Vulgarity': Camp as for Jackie Susann and Valley of the Dolls (Ken Feil); 'Can I Get an 'Amen'?' Marginalized Communities and Self-Love on RuPaul's Drag Race (Jessica Hicks); in New Trans Cinema (Nicole Richter); No Skin off My Ass: Bruce LaBruce and the Curious Case of Punk Love (Curran Nault); Queer Negotiations between and Work: A Critical Ethnographic Case Study of a Gay Porn Star (Michael Johnson Jr. …