Where is the middle-class on TV?

Really good article on wealth and class on TV here on Salon.com.

I grew up watching Roseanne, Full House, Family Matters, Cheers and other middle-class shows. They may have had larger than normal houses sometimes but they took care of the grandmother or had extra "uncles" living with them. It looked more like real life. I think Friends a bit but really Sex and the City (c'mon, that show was incredibly unrealistic for NY life finance-wise) has ushered in a new era were we watch characters live lives way beyond their means as they convince us it's normal.

From the article:

All of which is pretty funny -- when it's not making us sick to our stomachs, that is. As the economy skids, pundits scoff at the excesses of Americans who take out huge mortgages for five-bedroom McMansions, finance their Lexuses with adjustable-rate home equity loans and charge flat screens on their credit cards. But no one seems to consider it remotely odd that entertainment and media industries continue to celebrate an upper-crust existence that only a small percentage of the population will ever attain. It's not hard to see where Americans got the idea that a normal-size home and regular clothes will never be enough. Twenty or 30 years ago, after all, TV characters had cheap clothes and tacky furniture and bad hair, and they were happy to be getting by. Shows like "Roseanne" and "Laverne & Shirley," and more recently, "Seinfeld" and "Everybody Loves Raymond," brought us regular families with regular jobs and regular problems. Remember when people on TV talked all the time about whether or not they could afford stuff? These days, such conversations would be seen as deeply tacky if not utterly declassé. Aside from the teary-eyed families on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," whom we're told will be magically rendered happy by some combination of a redesigned family room and a brand new pickup truck, normal folks and their struggles aren't just uninteresting, they're somehow tainted. Unless there's a new wardrobe, a redone kitchen and a big check around the corner to save them from mediocrity, we don't want to know about it.

It's been obvious for years that Veblen's standard of pecuniary decency -- the minimum amount of conspicuous consumption one must maintain to be considered acceptable -- keeps inching higher and higher in this country, until Americans consider themselves struggling unless they're taking luxury spa vacations or redecorating that unbearably tacky half-bath. These notions aren't formed out of thin air, though. As a scan across the dial this fall makes clear, the TV doesn't just celebrate the supreme excitement and importance of money, it presents a lavish lifestyle as the norm, while casting average Americans as its money-grubbing guinea pigs, poised to stab each other in the back in the pursuit of the material wealth it taught them to covet in the first place.

Earlier the author Heather Havrilesky wrote:

Other than "Friday Night Lights," "The Office" and a handful of cop shows, America's middle class is tough to find. And if you go looking for the working class, be prepared to find mostly criminals and ex-criminals, as on "My Name Is Earl" and "Prison Break."

I've thought about this before, how the wealthy are presented in entertainment media*. I know all of us have thought about how unrealistic the characters on Friends lived - they kinda explained away Monica and Rachel's enormous NY apt as being rent-controlled from Monica's grandmother but that does not explain the endless supply of clothes. Friends did have a good episode in the first year where the six friends go to dinner to celebrate a birthday and three of them are dirt-poor while the other three are comfortable. The latter decide to split the bill equally, not based on items ordered, which frustrates the three struggling and a good group argument comes up.

I confess that the images and people reflected in TV and movies affect me and what I think "normal" is. Which is why I think God calls me to watch less. For the first time in several years, I'm not into the new TV season and am not tivo-ing a lot of new shows. I don't want to get caught up in it all. I feel pressured to watch shows like Heroes and Grey's Anatomy that everyone watches but I don't necessarily love, just to be in the know for conversations, but I'm trying to resist. I want to have less shows that I'm addicted to. And with Arrested Development and Gilmore Girls gone and The Wire on HBO and gone for awhile anyway, maybe I can do that.

* I went through this epitome a few years ago where I could not think of a positive impression of a wealthy business person in a movie besides Schindler's List and In Good Company with Dennis Quaid. They were all jerks and stereotyped greedy devious people. Were there any honest worthwhile men and women good at business, or did being rich and successful equal an ugly character?