Love Wars

An in-depth exploration of the key themes and changing cultural contexts of television romantic comedy, emphasising the central significance of women across the genre's development.

The first overview of romantic comedy on the small screen.

This is the first dedicated overview of the international television romantic comedy genre, Mary Irwin builds on the critical work on cinematic romantic comedy to offer a dedicated critical analysis of the romantic comedy on the small screen.

Drawing on series from the 1960s to the present day, Irwin presents five themed chapters around the theme of romantic love, from searching for it and finding it to the love wars of the book’s title to finding love later in life and in places you didn’t expect. Chapters explore the genre’s key recurrent themes: evolving attitudes to love, relationships, sex, class and money, feminism and post-feminism, changes in the nuclear family (dramatised through contrasting romantic relationships) and shifting discourses of masculinity, situating them within the specific socio-historic and cultural context in which the series are set.

Throughout, Irwin underscores the centrality of women, their friendships and their personal and professional lives and experiences to the television romantic comedy genre, demonstrating that it is prominence of female characters and their interests and concerns which have most significantly affected the genre’s thematic focus. Crucially, this thematic approach allows for explorations both of similarities in representations to be found in series decades apart and the way in which such representations ebb and flow across time. Additionally, the international nature of the comedies selected also makes possible comparison beyond national boundaries.