Manifestations of camp became increasingly prevalent across
American culture in the 1960s. More significantly perhaps, this was the decade
in which camp moved from the margins and subcultures into the mainstream. Susan
Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp,” published in the autumn of 1964, and the
premiere of Batman on ABC’s prime-time lineup less than a year and a half
later, in January 1966, notably mark this shift. Both before and after Batman
and its egregious use of exaggerated clichés, a number of other television
programs employed a loose set of textual and narrative characteristics
generally associated with camp strategies, including Get Smart’s satire, Green
Acres’s surreal humor, and the anarchic nature of The Monkees. The medium of
television was clearly critical to camp’s move into popular culture.
Pinedo and Phillips, the editors of this new collection,
argue in a 2018 article in the Journal of Popular Television that these shows
and a handful of others constitute a genre of 1960s television that can be
identified as “Camp TV.” Almost simultaneously, Quinlan Miller's new book (May
2019), Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History, engages a different set of
theoretical and historical perspectives to similarly designate such a
televisual genre. The shows they analyze not only allowed but seemed to
encourage viewing practices that transcended the infantilized conceptualization
of that era’s television audiences, appealed specifically to a youth audience
(separate from the juvenile audience many of these programs targeted), and lent
themselves to multiple readings. Moreover, and in line with other expressions
of camp, many of these programs possessed a disguised but nonetheless
subversive political edge relevant to the cultural contestation and social
transformation of that decade.
