Intro; Acknowledgements; Contents; Chapter 1 Watching TV After the Wall Came Down; The State of the Television Industry in the Nineties; What Was on TV in the Nineties; Popular Nineties Television: A Collage; References; Chapter 2 Lonely Bowling and Other Critical Contexts; Community and Loneliness on TV; Television and the Communitarian Critique; References; Chapter 3 They Let You Just Sit There: The Failure of the Coffee Shop in Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier; Seinfeld's Distinctions; Sitcom History; The Impossibility of Individual Progress; Narcissism Is Inherent to Human Nature

Friendship Should Be TherapeuticCommunity Is a Burden; TV's Third Places: Cheers's Bar Versus Seinfeld's Coffee Shop; Coffee and America in the Nineties; Schultz's Vision: Starbucks as Third Place?; TV's Third Places: Friends' Central Perk; Where Only Your Family Knows Your Name; Consequences; References; Chapter 4 I'm Doing This My Own Way: Redeeming NYPD Blue's Racist Hero; NYPD Blue: Origins and Controversies; Andy Sipowicz, Hero; Bad Cops; Bad Boys; Fancy and Sipowicz; "Raging Bulls" and Rodney King; Character Types on Police Dramas; Workplace-as-Family

NYPD Blue and ER, Sipowicz and Ross9/11 Heroes; References; Chapter 5 It Was a Different Time: Law & Order, White Rabbits, and the Decline of Sixties Radicalism; TV's Procedural Dramas; Nineties New York in Reality and on TV; Down the Hole, and What the Detectives Found There; Collective Memory of the Sixties; Finding Forrest; Radicals on Trial; Remnants of the Sixties; Forrest Tamed; Margaret Pauley, Torch Carrier; William Kunstler; Nixon v. Kunstler; Run, Forrest, Run; References; Chapter 6 The Truth Is Out There ... and He Loves You: Depictions of Faith in The X-Files and Touched by an Angel

The Priest and the SheepCulture Peaces; The X-Files: Wanting to Believe; Fans and Serialization; The Betrayal of "Gethsemane"; Alien Autopsy; Science and Lies; Faith Reborn; Touched by an Angel's Inspirational Formula; The Angel of Death; Angels Flying High; The Self-Congratulating Clip Show; Conclusions; References; Chapter 7 This Town Ain't so Bad: Eternity in Heavenly Springfield with The Simpsons; The Family Sitcom Genre; The Simpsons: Style and Form; Springfield; Bart at School; Homer at Work; Marge and Maggie at the Market; Lisa in the Band Room; Simpsons on the Road

Springfield, the Rest of ItHomer's Home; Simpsons Reunited; References; Chapter 8 TV After the Nineties; Continuities and Discontinuities; TV and Reality; Nineties TV and Community: A Final Assessment; References; Note on Television Sources; Index