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The sociology of celebrity (and its cousin, fame) is a relatively young field, despite having identifiable classical roots. While the topic was ignored by sociologists for many years, it has recently been taken up by both theorists and empirical researchers in sociology and a variety of related fields. In this article, I evaluate the current state of the field, and identify two major themes – celebrity as pathology and celebrity as commodity – that currently dominate the literature. In addition, I suggest additional research directions that I believe will help the field develop and mature; in particular, empirically grounded and meaning‐oriented research that reflects the lived experiences of those who swim in the sea of celebrity culture everyday. What does celebrity mean to the people who produce it, consume it, engage with it and live it? To the extent that researchers take up these questions, the sociology of celebrity will continue to be a vibrant and vigorous area of study.

Mass media influence interaction in important ways: fans of serial television use mass media to incorporate the fictional and the extraordinary into their real, ordinary, everyday lives. Using ethnographic and interview data, this article examines the activities through which certain fans seek face‐to‐face encounters with the celebrities they admire and how this intersection of the ordinary with the extraordinary creates problems of interpretation that fans attempt to solve. Fans make and take advantage of opportunities for prestaged encounters at official public appearances by their favorite actors. Some fans may also encounter their favorite celebrities by chance in the course of their daily rounds in “celebrity sightings,” or unstaged encounters. Certain fans, however, actively pursue actors, deliberately seeking them out and creating fan‐staged encounters. These efforts produce a distinctive interactional tension in which pursuing fans recognize the similarities between their behavior and that of “celebrity stalkers” and attempt to differentiate themselves from the stalkers celebrities fear. This article analyzes these interactions as a step toward a theory of fan‐celebrity interaction.

In this essay I observe that, as the field of celebrity studies established itself in the academy, there is a need for a distinctly sociological and interactional approach to celebrity. In particular, I argue for a focus on the experiential and relational dynamics of celebrity from the point of view of celebrities themselves, something which has so far been difficult for researchers to achieve. One way to accomplish this goal is to move in the direction celebrity itself seems to be headed: toward local or subcultural celebrities and their smaller, more segmented audiences. Empirical research on the lived experiences of local celebrities provides a practical way to generate celebrity-level data and makes an important sociological contribution to broader theorizing about the cultural phenomenon of celebrity.

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