TV’s Dwindling Middle Class
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”
Why would you go into any of these shows expecting anything resembling reality. They are all clearly entertainment in the form of light drama and inconsequential, whitewashed sexual tension. To expect anything else is to set yourself up for failure.
Deeper shows exist - The Wire, Breaking Bad, House of Cards - but headlining TV shows are not created to address issues anymore. The shows reflect the main demographics of TV watchers, because that's what keeps them watching, and that's what generates ad revenue. So I'm not too concerned with the state of TV - it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
There's an "Independent Lens" about the breaking down of this effect in Romania under the Ceuchescau regime - "Chuck Norris vs. Communism."
TV grew up under the Silent Generation. I recall distinctly when my parents stopped watching "The Smothers Brothers" because it got "too political".
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-o...
It's not demographics in the traditional sense, but make no mistake - Netflix and the like do not create unique pieces of art just because they feel like it. They are also making a show to fit a market, just with better data.
> it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
I'm not so sure about that. One of the best shows I saw last year, Mr. Robot, was made by the USA Network, of all people.
And this is what they've done without much budget, credibility, or star power. I'm pleasantly surprised and sincerely impressed.
I would add Royal Pains to that list. Cover Affairs was another one I enjoyed (I love spy shows and books) but is now off the air.
I would say that I do take it a bit less seriously than other conspiracy shows such as Rubicon.
Mr Robot is a little better, but itself is no "Wire" (or any other really great show).
It doesn't surprise me that Netflix is already crushing it in terms of creating their own series; the data that the big studios operate on is collected via ancient means and there's only a market for it because they agree to all pretend it's still relevant.
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's point?
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.
No, they are middle class roles (either independent business owners dependent on their own labor rather than primarily renting other's labor to apply to their capital -- the classic petit bourgeoisie -- or elite educated workers with likely some personal capital but still dependent on wage labor for support, but not as immediately at risk as the working class without reserves are.)
The upper class in a capitalist society are the owners of capital who primarily rent labor to apply to that capital, they are occasionally major characters on TV shows, but I can't think of many shows with more than one as a significant protagonist. Generally, most of the protagonists are middle class, or notionally working class but somehow living a middle class lifestyle.
Because even light drama and entertainment can reflect society and middle class -- and the article gives many examples of that in the past.
Besides, the "deeper shows" you mention are equally disconnected from what's under discussion. Neither "House of Cards" nor "Breaking Bad" reflect American middle class life -- Heisenberg might be someone who can't afford health care, but the base of the plot and its concerns afterwards is entirely different.
Another similar show from that era is "Grace Under Fire".
As a 35-yo upper-middle class guy still in the midwest, I look at what's on TV (both broadcast and Netflix/Amazon/etc.) and see none of that representation of middle class America. Besides "The Middle", which I still identify with, there are no successful middle-class sitcoms on TV.
To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.
For example, I've known impoverished upper middle class people, people who self identified as working class (e.g. drinking in the miners welfare) even though they had millions in the bank and not particularly well off upper-class people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United...
Edit: As might be expected, nothing about the class system in the UK is clear cut, consistent or particularly logical.
Geography plays into this quite a bit, too. The cost of living is lower in the Midwest so it's possible to live a larger lifestyle on more of a working-class salary.
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 another difference, which changes the American social expectations of the US "middle class."
A family with nurse and a teacher for example (two professionals) would bring in somewhere around $100,000/yr and be upper class.
There's a lot of variations by geography (cost of living) and stuff too, but I simplified it.
In reality the amount of financial security a family has is often a function of how well they manage it (as long as you are making above a certain amount where it becomes possible for financial security). If the above mentioned family over spent on a big house, two cars, a motorcycle, and other luxuries they consider normal, or even needed, then they can surely feel like they are living without much financial security, which doesn't "feel" upper class.
Unfortunately, middle class is a totally useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class, I guess because they are somewhat out of touch with their spending and don't feel rich (previously mentioned family) or they are towards the bottom they don't want to feel poor. People who have a household income of $200,000 describe themselves as middle class. One of my coworkers, with a straight face, described me as middle class. I couldn't believe it - with a household income more than 3x the median household income in the US I can't with a straight face say I am middle class.
That's why politicians pander to "the middle class," because the majority of Americans identify with the middle class - even poor ones who don't consider themselves middle class but feel they will be there soon.
On the other side of the coin I have a friend who makes a middle class income, spends lavishly on consumer goods, and is always complaining about how poor she is.
Like I said, totally useless term.
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.
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%."
[Answer is probably "language isn't logical" but I'd settle for your reason not to use the more informative approach.]
It might actually be simpler in the UK - nobody describes themselves as working class anymore and there are very real upper class people so everyone from the PM down is middle class.
http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-...
NB I like that quiz - if you enjoy drinking to excess and fighting you are working class or upper class but definitely not middle class (by UK standards).
Edit: I guess another way of defining "middle class" by UK standards is "someone worried about social status" - traditionally neither the upper classes or the working classes cared about social status.
To me upper class means the literally Queen, or at least something like her cousin's son's uncle or something like that.
If you don't own a country estate or have any staff then you aren't upper class.
I wouldn't call the Queen or Prince "upper class", I'd call them the nobility. You still have remnants of an actual feudal class system whereas we do not. Our classes go solely by income. Roughly speaking, the lowest 25% is poor, anything between 25-90% is middle class (a term which has expanded over the years), 90-99% is upper middle class, and the top 1% is upper class. Of course there is no hard and fast agreement on it, and others will disagree about the exact demarcation lines on those ranges, but it's the same gist.
So I personally wouldn't call a nurse and a teacher upper class, but they could easily be upper middle class.
As an American I wouldn't call the queen upper class, I'd call her nobility or royality, a different class altogether and not really compatible to the American "class system" (so to speak).
American super rich have their own category too, I should have mentioned. Don't think there's a real concrete word for them but they are called stuff like "trust fund baby"(if they are rich because their parents are and don't have to work), the 1%, millionaires, and the super rich. There is a growing divide between the rich and the super rich in the US in the last several decades, which plays into it.
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 employeesHe's as wealthy as they come but pretty clearly working class IMO.
Beckham is by no means "working class" -- though he might have been born as such.
He is just not royalty and hadn't grown up from families owing castles and being members in the house of lords.
I'm (lower) middle class, earn less than a lot of working class people; there are different cultural circles that follow different lines to financial worth. That's how the class system is seen here.
Being royalty wouldn't make him any better, just different, probably make him far worse in many people's eyes but if he were royal he'd be part of the peerage whether he lived in a council flat or a palace.
On Beckham no. On working class people but not Beckham-rich, many.
I've had some experience with BBC people.
All the technicians and lower level staff were working class.
All the journalists were public school people (in UK, "public school" actually means: expensive prestigious school).
They didn't seem to have any social connection, didn't even eat all together at the same table at the end of work -- each group had their own table. And I'm not talking famous journalists and tv-stars snubbing mere mortals: it was just actual run of the mill reporters and journalists.
You don't get this behavior in where I come from.
I was also surprised to find out that from Monty Python to Mr. Bean (R.A), and Hugh Laurie, Fry, etc, almost all famous TV comedians (at least up to the 90s) in Britain were public school people -- and all of these were specifically Cambridge and Oxford. Which shows what it took to be on TV back in the day. You don't get that in the US either.
Not to the same degree certainly. But historically, the eastern journalism establishment (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the network news operations) drew very heavily from the Ivy League and related schools
Whereas American English mostly, when it adopted class language, got it from traditional discussions of capitalist class structure, but its since evolved to where frequently "middle class" is used to mean "middle income" (solidly in the working class in the classical divide of classes in capitalist society), and the traditional capitalist middle class is "upper middle class" (or sometimes even "upper class"), and the capitalist upper class -- the owners of capital who rent labor -- are mostly just not discussed at all as a class of people, but as abstract institutions if at all.
See what I said about houses being much bigger today than they used to be.
The working class, as the name implies, earn their money by working. The upper class make their money through investments. The middle class fall in between. They make part of their income by working and part of their income through investments.
The practical implications are that if the working class stop working, they can no longer make ends meet. The middle class have the opportunity to stop working for periods of time, but not indefinitely. The upper class can survive without ever lifting a finger.
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 Hawaii. I consider myself lucky if I can spend an entire 40 hours of PTO at once on one 9-day vacation at a U.S. beach town or national park. It isn't just the money. The U.S. is huge, and much of it is undeveloped land. Getting anywhere more interesting than where you already are takes an inconveniently large investment in time and travel aggravation, and that time could have been spent relaxing instead.
And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross household [edit] income. If two working parents have 2 kids, they are likely taking one week every year, to somewhere cheap and close, and maybe visiting a theme park cluster city such as Orlando, Florida, only once per decade. If you are upper-middle class, you also get to visit Europe once, and Hawaii once. Anybody who needs their passport more often than that is likely going to countries having less infrastructure with their religious group, to proselytize by example.
Actually that number is median -household- income, not individual income.
"We'll send the electric bill to the water company, and the water bill to the electric company. Then forget to sign the check for the phone bill."
Basically they were a rich family like the Cosby show but they loved to LARP that they were poor. A cheap cut-and-paste job where Bill isn't an OB/GYN or whatever he was, but cut and paste him as a retail show salesman without changing anything.
There's a good analogy with how soft sci fi is made, aka the bad stuff. Take a story from another genre and have a computer mechanically cut and paste it into "sci fi" without changing any aspect of the story beyond the crude cut and paste. Superficially shiny and signally, but the slightest attention shows it makes no sense.
From memory the pull the show had was crude language and motivations, in a non comedic manner. It was an appeal to the 80-90 IQ cohort, roughly. Its appeal wasn't the socioeconomic class they lived in, it was appealing to the fart joke demographic, and the producers figured they'd have to bolt on a shoe salesman job instead of OB/GYN because OB/GYNs don't talk like high school dropouts.
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 yourself to being poor your whole life?
Not everybody can do that, in fact, most of America can't.
It is very much impossible for most Americans to be coders while maintaining high incomes. The industry isn't anywhere near that big, currently employing less than 1% of the population. Even if it could grow by an order of magnitude, it still wouldn't absorb any meaningful portion of the population.
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.
And the expectations of comedy today are far bigger than the 80's. So something had to give.
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."
Personally i don't find any strong relation between identifying with characters and laughing from their jokes. It may add another dimension to the experience in comic dramas, but if i'm watching a pure comedy/sitcom, i don't think it's a big deal.
But i guess people are different.
Here's a potential middle-class The Middle plot line for you: the Glaussners wash the mud off of their off-road 4-wheelers in the street using the Heck household's hose. They do not turn the water off. It runs all week, straight into the gutter, before someone notices and turns it off. The Hecks get an unexpected $300 water bill, which passes unnoticed in their huge monthly stack of bills, as they pay the usual, average monthly amount. Then one day, their water is shut off, and they can't get it turned back on until after Mike's next paycheck.
That's a believable middle class problem. Can you guess why it's believable? Because it's based on a true story.
Seinfeld proved mundane everyday life can be funny and entertaining for audiences.
The other thing is you can have someone living with the challenges and lifestyle of the working class without showing their actual work.
That wasn't a problem in the past. Besides, nothing more boring than being a regular cop, lawyer, doctor etc.
It's the treatment that makes it look exciting, not the patrolling around for 8 hours and eating doughnuts reality of being a cop.
And you wouldn't believe how tedious being a doctor is, either in a private practice or at a hospital.
Nothing like ER or House at all -- it's the social interactions and plot scripts that make it all interesting, not the actual real life jobs.
Tedious for reasons other than why it makes good TV.
There's nothing very exciting about a day at the hospital or a day on patrol.
Yeah, you get to have some nice interactions now and then, but if you filmed the actual day to day life it would be like watching paint dry.
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 extraordinary.
An interesting counter-example would be Friends, where one of the characters worked a blue-collar job, and none were explicitly "excellent".
Perhaps what pbh101 means is whether you're good at your job or not is unrelated to whether you're blue-collared or not. With that interpretation, you and he are in agreement.
Yep :)
Not sure how this relates to my original comment. For clarity, do see my clarification under sibling comment at [1].
My (now unnecessary) point was that whilst tool-and-die makers are blue collar, I consider that profession to be full of practitioners of excellence (at least the ones I have encountered).
In literature its quite a bit different. "Class" by Paul Fussell goes over the cultural differences while glossing over mere employment. I enjoyed that book, it was fun reading it and seeing how accurately he called out various class behavior I observed growing up, he's pretty accurate top to bottom, from what I've observed. The book is about 25 years old and it would be interesting to see a more modern book. Seen in a Fussell point of view from 25 years ago, the whole social media fad sounds extremely middle class by his definitions of pathological desire for signalling and likes, for example, and has no appeal to what Fussell would describe as the extremes, although where I live twitter users seem exclusively the absolute lowest classes, which is strange. From a Fussell point of view TV has gone from mostly middle class culturally in terms of interests and attitudes in the 70s to exclusively prole feed. Its very unusual now to see anything on TV that isn't prole in attitudes and desires and outlook and values as defined by Fussell.
By what they do and the motivation to do it (teachers, nurses, doctors that see it as a calling, versus those that see it as a job). By constraining their lives (same examples, nurses with 12 hour shifts 3 days a week, severely constrained and stressed, but then 4 days to decompress gives them some greater freedom to pursue other interests than a typical 9-to-5 employee, but the stress may be too much anyways). By defining who they're in contact with (constant contact with coworkers, do they become friends, enemies, merely people you work with). By defining how much time you can spend on holidays (1 week, 2 weeks, a month?), which determines what you can do with leisure time. Income levels, again defining what you can do with leisure time, or at least constraining it if income is too low.
Unless someone's going to the bathroom frequently or painfully due to a medical condition (IBS, kidney stones, bladder infection, etc.), they likely aren't finding their lives terribly constrained or defined by that element of their existence. So in a drama it has little value, perhaps more in a comedy depending on the sort of humor they're going for (see Family Guy).
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 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.
Even in shows where the career is not a big part of the plot it's still pervasive. On Modern Family everyone has upper middle class white collared jobs; small business owners, real estate agent, lawyers. On How I Met Your Mother; architect, news anchor, etc.
Interestingly I don't think upward mobility is a big part of it. It's career achievement for the sake of career achievement. You hardly every see characters' lifestyle changing when they get big promotions.
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.
Last weekend I watched amazon original 'catastrophe' and 'lilyhammer' a netflix original. Both of these revolved around ordinary people doing everyday stuff.
(I do, however, very highly recommend the series. I've only seen Season 1, but it was fantastic, and the character's slow immersion into the local language and culture was very well done.)
The Office went through all of its kooky manager plotlines because Steve Carell's career trajectory outpaced the show's initial popularity. The second he got too big for the show, everyone knew it, and much ink was spilled in the writers' room trying to anticipate and/or compensate for his eventual departure.
Jim was given some upward mobility because he's the protagonist, and the audience was rooting for him (and Pam) in a personal way. Nine seasons of Jim's being stuck in a dead-end paper sales job, with no hope of escape, would have been extremely depressing. I realize that's how the UK version chose to play things, but it would have been too bleak by half for the US market.
By modern, I also mean they follow a continuing story arc episode-to-episode, so while you could watch any episode in isolation, you get a lot more if you know backstory and the characters. They're also all "single camera" shows (no laugh track) which IMHO is a much better style, and allows them to be more creative, have a continuing story, and frankly, be funnier than the (pause for laughter) lines in a show like Big Bang Theory.
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%.
Overall though, I do agree with the article. It does seem like everyone has it really easy on American TV.
I haven't seen The Simpsons in about 15 years, so I won't comment on it—except to note that it debuted only a year after Roseanne, and the two overlapped for about eight years.
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 mediums with paper thin walls. But nothing has changed, shows have always been a reflection of their creators/runners and the networks fund people who've had hits.. Family Guy was a hit on DVD/[adult swim]? Ok! Order two more joke delivery vehicles from Seth MacFarlane!
James L. Brooks had a string of hits with a strong emotional core. So after he helped get The Simpsons on the air it made sense that he essentially forced the 20-something writers to build the show around an emotional/sentimental core instead of letting it to devolve into a gag factory out of the gate.
The Big Bang Theory has two characters who worked as waitresses. One a struggling actress, the other putting herself through school.
The Silicon Valley guys were broke. Jared lived in a shed.
Two of them are great shows, you should watch 'em!
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 tech/nerd toys, though.
Silicon Valley starts with a guy in an "incubator" who is clearly struggling, and then hits it big. It at least starts about a guy without money.
This also applies to the science and the social issues in BBT. It's not exactly a very heavy show.
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
The article mentions Dirty Jobs and Undercover Boss, but it's not clear to me the bountiful reality shows don't undermine the entire thesis of the article.
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...
Our creator was once a prominent writer and performer on a comedy sketch show, which aired live every Saturday night from an NBC studio in New York. It ran for 90 minutes. After their time on the show came to an end, our creator decided to pitch a sitcom based on their experiences there. The lead character is the head writer on a comedy show, similarly produced in New York. They must balance their work in the writers' room and their personal life, though this turns out to be difficult. A pilot is made, and our creator plays the lead.
Modern viewers may recognize this as 30 Rock, but it is in fact The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is based not on SNL but on a direct ancestor, Your Show of Shows. Carl Reiner's performance in the pilot may have dissuaded executives from casting him in the commissioned series (hence Dick Van Dyke), while Tina Fey remained the lead in her own version. But otherwise the parallel rings a sight near perfect.
The author stumbles over himself insisting, however, that while The Dick Van Dyke Show did not give vent to working and lower-middle class concerns, it did at least feature characters who "had careers" and were definitely of a class. As if the same were not true of shows like 30 Rock (which is at times obsessed with class difference), or of Parks and Recreation and The Office. These do not depict realistic workspaces, but why place that demand on a sitcom? And why not place the same demand on, yes, The Honeymooners, Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and on and on. In all cases the demands of the form—and in almost all cases the demands of overly long tenures—stretched the premises and the rare attempts at realism very thin.
I think you can make an argument that the most popular comedies available right now—whether on TV or at the movie theaters—are unflinchingly escapist. (Though, as the article notes in its discussion of an episode each of Horace and Pete and Girls, this has not gone unnoticed or unremarked by all of the shows' writers. Still, these two are not the most popular things around by any stretch.) Similarly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were seen to traipse across exclusive resorts, high-class stages, ballroom floors, and Venice, in elaborate dresses and a "top hat, white tie, and tails"—all during the Great Depression. Sometimes hard circumstances produce a public clamoring for comment; sometimes the public just wants a reprieve.
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?