Hey, kids! How's 2009 treating you so far?
I have a question to start the new year. I don't intentionally watch much TV these days. I watch some HGTV, I watch whatever MTV or VH1 crap or cable news that D's watching when I happen to be in the same room (ditto for whatever game show or sitcom my dad's watching), and I watch the good cable drama series on DVD. And, of course, I watch baseball. That's pretty much it. But because I read EW, and I read the newspaper, and I occasionally read TWoP, I think I have some at least vague knowledge of what's being shown on the television these days.
So it occurred to me today that I don't think there are, at this point, any TV shows about poor or lower middle class people. This is different. When I was a kid, many of your most popular TV comedies were about poor people. Sanford and Son, Good Times, All in the Family...in the 70s, there were all kinds of people without money, living in crappy houses and apartments, all over the TV. They balanced out all the shows about the upper middle class or rich people. Then maybe they sort of went away in the early-mid 80s, the Dallas, Dynasty, Cosby show, Miami Vice years, and then we had Roseanne and Married With Children as sort of a backlash. "Don't forget not everyone has a beautiful house and designer clothes" slap upside the head, kinda.
[As an aside, there were poor people on TV even before the 70s, right? Look at the Honeymooners. I boggle at that show when I see it these days. That apartment they lived in is jaw-droppingly horrible, yet it was totally unremarked upon in the show. Of course, what strains my suspension of disbelief is that Alice and Trixie don't have jobs, because in the sociocultural milieu I grew up in, they'd have been working in a factory or waitressing or cleaning, gladly, so their families could have at least *slightly* better things than what they had. Though--and here we're back on the reminiscence train, alas--I had one little friend when I was in early elementary school whose family's apartment was Honeymooners level bad, dark, furnished with found-in-the-trash level sofas and TV-tray tables, and smelling of dirty ashtrays and the hotdogs, mac n' cheese, and Zarex those kids lived on. And her dad, though a drinker (like mine!), was gainfully employed (like mine!), as was her mom (like mine!)--she was a lunch lady at our school--so looking back I don't see why her family was so much poorer than we were. I guess I should subpoena their tax returns from 1971, ahahaha, so I can figure this out.]
Anyway! Back to our thread. So, I'm thinking, and I can't think of any shows for the past fifteen years or so where there are poor or lower middle class people as main characters without it being *the point* of the show. I mean, something like The Wire, the point of that show is, "look here, there's this underclass of people in the American inner city who are as varied as the comfortably middle class you-n-I are, but who don't have the chances you and I have", not in a preachy way, but it is part of the point of the drama. You aren't going to have a comedy today where the characters live in a building that looks like it should be condemned or where they're one or two paychecks away from eviction or foreclosure. Everyone on TV lives in The Hills, has a rich brother they can move in with when divorce impoverishes them, or is a doctor/lawyer/improbably well-paid coffee shop waitress.
Why is this? Is it gonna change now that so many more people *are* one paycheck away from eviction or foreclosure, or are we going to cling even more to a fantasy TV world where everyone has nice cars, beautiful houses, and expensive clothes? Where'd the poor people go and are they gonna stay away?
xoxo
4 comments:
Funny, I never gave that Honeymooners apartment a thought when I watched it as a kid in the dark ages...probably because so many people I knew lived close to that. People have forgotten what a trip it was just to have a place to live that you didn't share with some other family or dysfunctional relatives who weren't immediate family.
But naah, I think you've got it: the worse things are now, the deeper TV-land will retreat into delusional fantasy. Real reality would be very helpful, but I don't expect to see it.
I really think that *part* of the reason we're in so much of this mess we're in in this country is due to this unrealistic depiction of life in the all-pervasive media. Why do so many people with really good jobs have no savings in the bank, such that if they're unemployed for even a couple months, they're truly and deeply fucked? Why do so many people have such crippling amounts of credit card debt? Why are so many people losing their homes after taking out mortgages they should have known they couldn't afford?
You can (rightly) talk about evil credit card companies and predatory lenders, because they are evil and predatory, but, y'know, they don't *force* people to buy shit those people don't have the money for. Of course, the media doesn't either. But it subliminally influences people to think they *deserve* a 3000 sq foot house, a new SUV every three years, every updated piece of tech that comes along, and Jimmy Choos. Furthermore, that if they don't have those things, they're a loser.
Well, the stagnation in real wages since the 1970's has a lot to do with why people got in way over their heads, while the development of securitized debt has an even bigger thing to do with why financial institutions were willing to lend money to people who were in over their heads (it wasn't the institution's own money that was at risk).
I would agree that TV's depiction of upper-class living as the cultural norm does have something to do with aspirational desires that led some to get in over their heads... But I suspect a good part of the reason for that upper-class norm is that advertising agency media buyers think that shows which depict low-income people will only attract a low-income audience, and that audience won't fork up for the products they're trying to sell.
It's pretty much a form of advertising snobbery, just like they don't want to buy ads on shows that appeal to those over 50 or 55, although those people often have more disposable income than the more desirable (in the twenty-something media buyer's eyes) audience in the younger demographic.
Look at Depression-era movies, though: of the eight (well, five + two + one) major studios, only one-- Warner Bros--made a habit of depicting as central characters and situations those who were working class or below. (It's those socially realistic depictions that make Warner's films now the most consistently interesting and watchable of the 1930's).
Meanwhile the other studios, particularly MGM and Paramount, almost fetishized an upper-class fantasy aspirational lifestyle with working-class and poor characters only secondary characters or very occasionally the primary protagonists. Since they were pretty consistent about that, the Depreassion era audience must have been reliably paying the entry fee to be entertained those who had far more money than they themselves could ever hope to enjoy.
So an upper-class focused media is not just a recent phenomenon... and it does stand to reason that those who produce and direct and write TV are all, by having those very union-protected-jobs, themselves in the upper-class. They're writing what they know, and if they ever were once poor, they probably haven't been so for quite some time.
I could point out, though, that one of your favorite TV series is, in fact, set in amongst a working class milieu... but I agree it's almost unique on current American television.
I think it's because they're all guest-starring on Cops...
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