In the late nineteenth century the literary genre of utopia enjoyed a boom inspired
by the success of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward, 2000–1887. These stories,
including novels by William Morris and H. G. Wells, often featured a cicerone who explained how
disordered nineteenth-century societies were transformed into superior future worlds. Because
this utopian didacticism, inspired by Karl Marx, fell quickly out of fashion and was parodied
ruthlessly by twentieth-century dystopias, it is hard to imagine how the form could be revived.
However, the TV show Portlandia, which premiered in 2011, avoids the future-oriented
“inevitability effect” of the fin de siècle utopias by returning to an earlier moment in the utopian
genre: the satirizing of a society somewhere on Earth. Portlandia presents a lightly fictionalized
version of Portland, Oregon, as a happy, inclusive, and prosperous town whose inhabitants are
free to pursue their visions. Its “cringe comedy” satire of self-involvement complicates, but
does not substantially undermine, its depiction of a peaceful alternative to the militarized
American imagination of the early 2000s.