The theme of all television is the tenuous relation of the public and private. Every essential genre of television involves a different relation to liminality: to the threshold that first constitutes the private and public through their reciprocal relations.

In  police and medical dramas, the gesture is always the same: violation. And the most important violations are not warranted, but take place under the sign of the localized “state of emergency.” It is telling, in this regard, that the doctors of House sneak into their patients’ houses.

In the sitcom, the door has lost all its force as a barrier. Uninvited guests wander in, and even thieves return what they have stolen and become benefactors, through an uncanny exchange (was it a Christmas episode of Different Strokes?) in which the poor give back to the rich their wealth.  Sometimes the space of the home has always already been violated by a guest who was never invited and refuses to leave: children, younger siblings, handy-men, space aliens.  And perhaps this is the norm: Schneider, the most famous uninvited guest, appeared in the first sitcom (One Day at a Time) about a divorced mother raising her children.   With divorce, it became necessary to claim one’s children as one’s own: children could no longer be regarded as parasites, but became property.  Other parasites became necessary to take the place of children.  Only a few years later, and Alf would appear.

In the suburban drama, there is a subtle progression of spaces from public to private: the street, the sidewalk, the front lawn, the doorstep, the foyer, the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the bedroom closet , the space beneath the bed, the basement, the attic.  The relation of public and private has become fluid, porous.  There is no longer privacy, but only secrets.  And the public space of the street, through the automobile, also bleeds over into the private.  The name for this constant system of negotiations is traffic, and thus (as in the fifth season of Desperate Housewives) the traffic accident becomes the central metaphor for all human contact.