PREORDER: I Blame Television: Essays on the Pop Culture that Raised, Ruined, and Enraptured me

In her debut essay collection, I Blame Television, writer and comedian Elizabeth Teets has started to notice everything around her seems a little off. She has always used the fluorescent glow of the television to guide her, but there’s a suspicion that everyone else is reading from a completely different script. Born into a body that’s set on permanent “frolic mode” and unable to understand her peers’ ongoing cynicism, Teets wonders if she may be the punchline. With wit, vulnerability, and a feminist eye for the ridiculous, this essay collection explores what happens when you refuse to play the role society assigns you.

From her mother’s Oregon living room, to underground comedy stages, and eventually the glamorous and brutal Los Angeles, Teets writes about growing up feminine, queer, and unapologetically earnest in a world built on irony. I Blame Television: Essays on the Pop Culture that Raised, Ruined, and Enraptured Me fuses a pop culture lens with Elizabeth Teets’s signature wit and charm to showcase her quiet rebellion against cultural cynicism. From making questionable financial decisions reinforced by Sex and the City to the thrill of finding discount designer garb with Marge Simpson, each essay balances warmth with moments of laugh-out-loud humor. 

Because even in a world where the joke seems to be on you, you can put on some platforms, brush out your hair, and decide to flip the script. 

Praise for I Blame Television

Elizabeth Teets has written a book that feels like it was made for a queen like me. I Blame Television is sharp, hilarious, and disarmingly sincere, using pop culture not just as reference but as a survival language. Her writing on parody is a standout, reframing it as a space where queerness, femininity, and humor collide in the most revealing ways. And her “Final Girl” chapter hit me right in my corseted gut, a smart, personal, and unexpectedly moving take on one of horror’s most enduring archetypes. This is a book for those of us who built ourselves out of movies, television, and the strange, beautiful debris of culture. I saw so much of myself in these pages.

~ Peaches Christ
Filmmaker / Cult Leader