Television Parlor Games

This essay offers a phenomenology of television parlor games —those games dedicated viewers imagine, develop, and play in response to their viewing—and traces a related genealogy of television’s parlor games —those that appear as content onscreen. Some substrate persists from the middle-class Victorians and their delight in wordplay and logic problems, which has been functionally reckoned into the games that accompany a certain kind of dedicated television viewing. Using both life writing and the British reality series Gogglebox as a case study, the essay analyzes the set of viewerly effects—and affects—that obtain for those who play these games, and theorizes what such phenomenological analyses may contribute to the field of audience studies.