51–60 of 138 posts
I think television just reflects the career-obsessed nature with society today. Characters are not just competent employees, they tend to be excellent at their jobs (top of their field, seemingly) while spending very little time doing their job. I don't know if blue-collaredness is looked down upon, but it feels like writers go out of their way to let it be known that the characters we are supposed to like, are extra…
I think television just reflects the career-obsessed nature with society today. Characters are not just competent employees, they tend to be excellent at their jobs (top of their field, seemingly) while spending very little time doing their job. I don't know if blue-collaredness is looked down upon, but it feels like writers go out of their way to let it be known that the characters we are supposed to like, are extra…
Indeed, the "Daddy's bad because he works too hard" trope is just about everywhere. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhenYouComingHome...
I think television just reflects the career-obsessed nature with society today. Characters are not just competent employees, they tend to be excellent at their jobs (top of their field, seemingly) while spending very little time doing their job. I don't know if blue-collaredness is looked down upon, but it feels like writers go out of their way to let it be known that the characters we are supposed to like, are extra…
I think that's more "needs of drama" than anything else, though. It's basically impossible to show somebody doing a job on TV. You can show the social interactions, you can show very carefully selected highlights, you can show quick dramatized representations in the language of drama (e.g., a man holding a shovel in front of a ditch that wasn't there in the last scene, dirty from head to toe, taking a deep breath and blowing it out loudly, and wiping sweat from his brow; this is a man who just spent hours digging, but we don't have time to show that), but there's no way to truly show them doing the job, because who would watch that?
And I'd also suggest that what it is is the extreme positions of their jobs; either they are very good or they are very bad. Again, standard-issue dramatic heightening. Though "average" comes up, but the way it is represented is simply to ignore the job. I can recall several instances where we are informed some character has a job, and maybe one episode will center around their job, but for the most part it's just completely unimportant.
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Better Call Saul is about a family of lawyers, the Big Bang Theory is about academics, and Silicon Valley is about tech millionaires. I'm not sure what you're seeing there.
I've only watched the first ep of Silicon Valley and a few eps of Big Bang Theory, but... Better Call Saul is about a poor lawyer who works out of the back of a nail salon. Not exactly rich. Yes, his brother is, but the show is about Saul. Big Bang Theory is about guys that live in apartments, and they don't seem very rich to me. Maybe they're headed there, but they aren't there yet. I'll admit they don't lack for te…
I grew up upper-lower-middle class in a dying manufacturing town near Chicago so the The Simpsons, Married with Children, Roseanne always felt like home. I can't agree with the article tho. I still see that same grasping in current shows like Better Call Saul, Shameless (which, aside from Season 2, is fantastic), and, in a different way, The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley. Most comedies are just joke delivery med…
You know, there is the option to just stop watching TV. If, after skipping all the series that you don't find relevant to your life, you find there is nothing left to watch, then just turn it off. Nothing compels you to watch TV.
You want to talk about class struggles, how about the modern depiction of feudal systems as fundamentally good, if not for a few "bad apples"? Disney/Pixar movies are particularly bad for this. I like to think the White Walkers in Game of Thrones are an allegory for democracy and capitalism, that as the aristocracy send more commoners to clash against the inevitable, unstoppable wave, it just creates more corpses and more converts.
There is so much freely available content out there to spend your time on that you don't have to be beholden to the major production firms. Stop watching network television. They have perversely skewed incentives. It's like people who pass a local restaurant they've never heard of to go to McDonald's. Why not take a chance on a burger that will probably be better, rather than go eat a the burger you know, that you know will be shitty?
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Having lived thru that era, and having been a poor starving student around the time of Married with Children, my experience was they bolted on the poverty but never internalized it to the show. The characters clothing budget exceeded mine by a factor of perhaps 100, their house and possessions were fancier than my parents by a large factor (and my parents were pretty well off, wealthier than I'll ever be) and when th…
Why would your parents be wealthier than you'll ever be (unless of course they're extremely wealthy)? That seems like a very pessimistic attitude to have towards money and income. I grew up in a lower middle class family and I'm wealthier than my parents ever were, just because I worked hard and improved myself, and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Why would you want to resign you…
Not everybody can do that, in fact, most of America can't.
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But that wouldn't seem to explain the many years of success Roseanne had. Also, as to the comedy, viewed in its time-period, it was a very funny show.
Do you consider it(Roseanne) a classic ? would you rewatch it today, like i watched blackadder(just an old example) ? or like i rewatched 30 rock ?
Maybe it's a thing that only people who grow up in that kind of area get (I'm about 250 miles from Landford's fictional location) but seriously most sitcoms just make me cringe with disgust. "THAT's your biggest problem today? I'll trade you any day of the week and you can find out what a REAL problem is."
I think the main artistic factor here is that the sitcom, an awfully convenient medium for telling middle class stories, is dead. A 30 minute comedy where every episode was basically an island could be an oddly touching medium to talk about a teacher dying or a dad losing his job. But these tiny canvases were mostly the result of the constraints of 20th century TV.
Without those constraints, consumers don't have that much interest in slices of everyday life, just as most consumers don't read Raymond Carver stories. Our imaginations go to the rich, powerful and supernatural. I'd argue that other mediums - podcasts, reality TV, social media - fulfill the basic human need behind the sitcom: to simply bask in the company of agreeable/relatable sounding human voices.
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Why would your parents be wealthier than you'll ever be (unless of course they're extremely wealthy)? That seems like a very pessimistic attitude to have towards money and income. I grew up in a lower middle class family and I'm wealthier than my parents ever were, just because I worked hard and improved myself, and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Why would you want to resign you…
> and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Not everybody can do that, in fact, most of America can't.