“Television has long had a fraught relationship with the ‘regular’ person. Many of its shows, from Leave It to Beaver on down, have relied on the power of aspiration—the ideal family, the ideal group of friends, impossibly beautiful people inhabiting impossibly beautiful places—to amplify the appeal of the ‘normal’ worlds they’ve served up to their viewers… Those shows and their many, many counterparts claimed to embrace averageness; they also, however, scene after scene, treated averageness as something to be overcome.”