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TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

nytimes.com

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Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#101

Post by dmclain »

CocaKoala wrote: post #88
bobbyi_settv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim of the article is that we never see regular people with ordinary jobs except for "police precincts, crime-and-forensics teams and legal-medical-Beltway dramas". The counterexamples you came up with are shows where the characters are police, politicians and drug dealers, and you had to reach back to a show that has been off the air for 8 years to even find those. Doesn't that kind of demonstrate the article'…

An obvious counterexample is the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother", which featured an environmental lawyer, an architect (turned college professor in later seasons), a teacher, and a news reporter.

I don't think a show featuring a lawyer, college professor, media personality and whatever the heck it is Barney does is a counterpoint at all. All those jobs are upper class, college degree requiring positions.

Other than a few episodes where Marshal (the lawyer) contemplates a job he doesn't love to pay off the massive consumer debt accrued by his wife (the teacher), the money problems and job tradeoffs on the show are very much in the classless hanging out genre the article describes.

Even the consumer debt is from spending on luxury goods, which is surprising for a teacher supporting a law school student in New York, ostensibly the arrangement in the first few seasons.

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#102

Post by [deleted] »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #22
TillE wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a difference between British and American English. In the UK, "middle class" basically means rich. In the US, it means that maybe you own a house.

In the US middle class has always meant middle - not at top in income/wealth (mostly income) but not at the bottom. How they obtain the money (education, job) or how they spend it (house, holiday) is not important by definition - however there is some social expectations of the American middle class. Many Americans don't have the time off work for two holidays a year, even if they have plenty of money, which is anoth…

[deleted]

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#103

Post by takno »

Touche wrote: post #65
saturdaysaint wrote: post #59

There are lots of prominent counterexamples. The Office was a pretty direct attempt at making a modern middle class show. Breaking Bad at least started with one man's middle class problems. 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…

Didn't basically every character on The Office become the manager at some point? It felt like it. Jim left the company for a while to start a sports agency or something? The Office definitely fell into the modern trap of every character needing to be upwardly mobile.

To be fair even Creed was made manager for a while, but I don't think he ever showed any signs of being upwardly mobile.

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#104

Post by brnstz »

If you create a show with the set design of Roseanne or even the Cosby Show in 2016, you're missing out on opportunities for product placement:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/04/brett-ratner-...

The logic is, "Well, I need to have a car in this movie anyway. Why not get a free car instead of paying for one, and in fact, the manufacturer will pay me to place their brand new car?"

The good news is more art is created at a lower cost. Great.

But the bad news is you perpetuate the idea that everyone has a new car (or new kitchen or new 3000 square foot house or whatever) all the time, no matter what their financial situation would be like in reality. This is especially insidious when there is easy consumer credit.

Here's a scene of a doctor buying a car from 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKMlx5p6n8k#t=1m58s

The premise, if you don't bother to watch, is he doesn't want the car salesman to know his job, because then he won't get a good deal.

The quaint part is that 30 years ago, a doctor and lawyer raising a family in New York City were considered almost unimaginably rich by TV standards. Now they would be "middle class."

The sad part is it would be hard to justify a scene like this on a modern prime time TV show. "So, we're going to have a car in this scene? Great! I'll call up Ford. Wait, but what do you mean the car salesman would overprice the car? Don't you know they're running 0% APR or $2000 cash back for President's Day?"

Sure, there are shows that try hard to be more authentic. But for every Breaking Bad, there are 10 spinoffs of lawyer / doctor / detective shows where the characters live in a bubble of perpetual newness the article describes.

And even Breaking Bad did its share of product placements: http://www.bustle.com/articles/5963-how-breaking-bad-product...

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#105

Post by nommm-nommm »

logfromblammo wrote: post #90
herbet_gayson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? There wasn't anything remotely middle class about Dan and Roseanne in my memory. They were proudly working class. To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.

That time when the Conners started a sandwich business was sort of middle class. Even though it failed, entrepreneurship is mostly out of reach for working class. They might get one chance to try it, from an inheritance, insurance, personal injury settlement, or lottery windfall. Middle class Americans don't get two foreign holidays a year. They get two foreign holidays per lifetime. One if they also decide to visit…

>And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross individual income

Actually that number is median -household- income, not individual income.

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#106

Post by logfromblammo »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #22
TillE wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a difference between British and American English. In the UK, "middle class" basically means rich. In the US, it means that maybe you own a house.

In the US middle class has always meant middle - not at top in income/wealth (mostly income) but not at the bottom. How they obtain the money (education, job) or how they spend it (house, holiday) is not important by definition - however there is some social expectations of the American middle class. Many Americans don't have the time off work for two holidays a year, even if they have plenty of money, which is anoth…

As America is an automobile culture, you could break down the class boundaries like this:

  destitute - checks discarded transit cards for remaining balances
  poor - buys monthly transit passes
  lower - buys used car with predatory/dealer "pay here" financing
  lower-middle - buys used car with bank/CU financing
  upper-middle - buys used car with cash, or new car with bank/CU financing
  upper - buys new car with cash
  rich - drives company car leased by an owned business, but uses taxis and Ubers in the city
  ultra-rich - never drives; has on-call professional driver/pilot employees

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#107

Post by gauthr »

jon-wood wrote: post #55
miiiiiike wrote: post #25

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…

Upper-lower-middle class huh? Makes me glad to live in the UK, where we have working class (manual labour, shop work, emergency/healthcare), middle class (anything in an office), and upper class (whatever you like, your income is from return on investments).

"I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class." -- The Road to Wigan Pier, Ch. 8.

I'm fairly certain George Orwell lived in the UK as well.

cf. http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/7.html

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#108

Post by StevePerkins »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #72
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'd day you were "upper class"? What I don't understand is why you'd turn class into a proxy for personal wealth, there are already lots of ways to refer to that - wages, household income, net worth - whereas class [in the UK] is a far more nuanced measure of ancestry, culture, occupation and attitudes to all of those things.

Probably because our history and collective cultural values are very different in that regard. And we don't have, like, actual royality. The US has a very "anyone can get rich" kind of cultural ethos so it makes sense our definitions would be very different. There's also a distinction between upper class and the "frigging filthy rich" (salary in the millions) in the US. Lately they've been called "the 1%."

The "1%" starts at $193K, which would easily include a household with two 30-year old software developers (or similar professionals).

http://whatsmypercent.com/

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#109

Post by saturdaysaint »

gregmac wrote: post #93
saturdaysaint wrote: post #59

There are lots of prominent counterexamples. The Office was a pretty direct attempt at making a modern middle class show. Breaking Bad at least started with one man's middle class problems. 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…

Modern Family, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Middle, Raising Hope, How I Met Your Mother, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt were all fairly recent examples of decent modern sitcoms (and wow that list is bigger than I thought it'd be), and for the most part, generally centered around middle class families/people. Some are a bit more outlandish and over-the-top at times, but that can also be their appeal. By modern, I…

Those are all interesting cases that I had in mind when writing the parent post. At the risk of sounding the "No true scotsman" alarm, to me, many are just evidence that contemporary TV needs a pretty big dose of the fantastic (Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock).

To me, even the most "everyday" of those fall prey to the usual U.S. tendency to elide class at all costs - even the no-good slackers in a lot of these shows seem to have the comforts of someone in the top 20%.

Re: TV’s Dwindling Middle Class

#110

Post by logfromblammo »

vidarh wrote: post #61
VLM wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They were basically low class, not lower class.

They had crass, not class.

I think it was a similar situation as the Simpsons being neighbors to the Flanders. As I recall from that show, Ned Flanders actually earned less annual income than Homer Simpson, but had a nicer home and more wealth, because he spent it more prudently.

The implicit assumption in MWC is that no matter how much Al Bundy might earn, Peg and the kids would always spend 101% of it, leaving him with -1% to spend on himself. That makes Al, specifically, the poor guy in a lower-middle household; working all the time with nothing to show for it personally.

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