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Daria is where I first heard you could be well off and still be mortgaged to your eyeballs (as Daria's dad described it). So while they were comfortable you got an undercurrent of 'holy poo poo how am I going to pay for this.'
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Oct 14, 2018 18:36
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Krispy Wafer posted:Daria is where I first heard you could be well off and still be mortgaged to your eyeballs (as Daria's dad described it). That's been an undercurrent in America for a while. There was a lot of subtle digs on how America is right now in the show. Daria's parents are very successful but endlessly stressed as they buried themselves in debt to look successful. So much of that show revolved around keeping up appearances while Daria was one of the few people who saw through the whole facade. Everything was a lie and Daria just cynically refused to participate. Even though she said stuff that amounted to "this is all really loving stupid" right to peoples' faces they ignored it as they were too busy obsessing over how they and everybody else looked on the surface. That whole show was a genius critique of America.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:06
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's been an undercurrent in America for a while. There was a lot of subtle digs on how America is right now in the show. Daria's parents are very successful but endlessly stressed as they buried themselves in debt to look successful. So much of that show revolved around keeping up appearances while Daria was one of the few people who saw through the whole facade. Everything was a lie and Daria just cynically refused to participate. Even though she said stuff that amounted to "this is all really loving stupid" right to peoples' faces they ignored it as they were too busy obsessing over how they and everybody else looked on the surface. Its' head writer ended up being Colbert Report's head writer (Glenn Eichler). So he kept it up, really.
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Oct 14, 2018 20:12
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One scene I like from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's first season has a couple of the characters sitting around having a conversation at the protagonist's house in West Covina, a two-story home with a large living room, contrasted with said protagonist's former colleagues laughing about her back in New York City, standing up together in a crowded kitchenette.
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Oct 14, 2018 20:16
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Sarcopenia posted:Yeah that was some really good set work. It really felt like a real house that this kind of family would live in. Which is weird since most of Rosanne was filmed on a multi camera sitcom set with a live audience, so the house was furnished for all the action to face the audience.
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Oct 14, 2018 21:36
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Krispy Wafer posted:Rosanne did it pretty well. Their house was depressingly real and was in an area where you could totally have that size house on their income. The reboot even made a joke about how everything still looked the same from 20 years ago because no one could afford new stuff. The Bunkers' house in All in the Family was pretty worn down, too.
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Oct 14, 2018 23:24
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Mister Kingdom posted:The Bunkers' house in All in the Family was pretty worn down, too. That's what the entirety of the 70s looked like didn't it?
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Oct 15, 2018 00:34
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Milo and POTUS posted:That's what the entirety of the 70s looked like didn't it? For the lower middle-class, yes.
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Oct 15, 2018 01:33
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Wood paneling and appliances that were grungy looking out of the box
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Oct 15, 2018 02:33
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Frasier is considered a masterpiece of set design, and works mostly because a lot of the premise is the main character and his brother are rich. (and yet still aspire to get in with the in crowd)ToxicSlurpee posted:That's been an undercurrent in America for a while. There was a lot of subtle digs on how America is right now in the show. Daria's parents are very successful but endlessly stressed as they buried themselves in debt to look successful. So much of that show revolved around keeping up appearances while Daria was one of the few people who saw through the whole facade. Everything was a lie and Daria just cynically refused to participate. Even though she said stuff that amounted to "this is all really loving stupid" right to peoples' faces they ignored it as they were too busy obsessing over how they and everybody else looked on the surface. Yyyep. And funny thing is when Tom's family, who are genuinely old money and much wealthier, show up they clearly don't buy into conspicuous consumption either; Tom's car might actually be worse than Trent's, and the family vacations are just to their grandma's place every time, but Tom's set for what's clearly a Harvard equivalent. Jake was apparently based on the endless parade of clueless consultants MTV had hovering around all the time. Surprisingly sympathetic portrayal all things considered. The episode where he briefly works for a tech startup (at the height of the dotcom bubble) has aged all too well.
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Oct 15, 2018 02:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Frasier is considered a masterpiece of set design, and works mostly because a lot of the premise is the main character and his brother are rich. (and yet still aspire to get in with the in crowd) Doesn't he get addicted to some kind of browser game and burn out his laptop and his psyche?
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Oct 15, 2018 03:58
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MariusLecter posted:Doesn't he get addicted to some kind of browser game and burn out his laptop and his psyche? He's hosed up on coffee and hyper-multitasking all night until his computer explodes. To be honest I thought he was doing pretty well for his age. Dude could be scary with a smartphone. Funny thing is everyone else in the startup is riding high off stock options, I'm pretty sure they'd all be broke and/or in jail within a year.
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Oct 15, 2018 04:13
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Ottermotive Insanity posted:Which is weird since most of Rosanne was filmed on a multi camera sitcom set with a live audience, so the house was furnished for all the action to face the audience. Yes, and?
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Oct 15, 2018 04:13
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Ottermotive Insanity posted:Which is weird since most of Rosanne was filmed on a multi camera sitcom set with a live audience, so the house was furnished for all the action to face the audience. Except that the furnishings are all pointed toward the TV like most houses. The audience essentially has a TV-eye view of a TV family.
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Oct 15, 2018 04:57
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Marks flat in Peep Show and Roys flat in IT Crowd are bang on for realism.
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Oct 15, 2018 05:36
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Re: Poor and Working Class homes on TV. I think a bit of it is that, especially in America, poor and working class people really REALLY do not want to be seen as poor, nor do they see themselves as poor but instead "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" or "middle class". And so they do not want to see their pokey little houses, and depressing levels of debt shown on screen. They want aspirational poo poo, they want to see beautiful rich people doing beautiful rich people things. This is also why in a lot of shows set in beautiful rich people land, the main character is a token "poor", or less advantaged character or family that is an outsider moving tinto this enclave of wealth and privilege. (I am thinking Fresh Prince, and also 90210 where the Walshes were not half as wealthy as the others). This way you get to see all the beautiful people doing their dirty, sinful, lavish, beautiful rich people stuff, but there is a not-as rich person there that the viewers, who are almost certainly not rich or beautiful, can identify with and/or hope taht they will also one day move to the rich place.
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Oct 15, 2018 06:26
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See also Martin and Daphne.
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Oct 15, 2018 06:29
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Calaveron posted:Wood paneling and appliances that were grungy looking out of the box My grandparents house was covered in wood paneled everything that I still remember and I was born in the late 80s. They even had burnt orange carpeting in their living room, and pea green electric blankets. There's pictures and videos of it and I think eventually my parents and aunts just banded together and forced them to change it They had an electric organ with some cheesy owl clock hanging over it until I was at least 10. I loved it
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Oct 15, 2018 10:01
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Daria as well comes to mind, with sometimes subtle but distinct class distinctions between characters, and class often played a big part in some plots. (It is implied Lawndale is pretty upscale in general, at least the area the characters go to school in, but when they interact with old money the different is stark. Daria's mom's family seems to be pretty rich) And a lot of that is lifestyle as much as anything. I was a bit young for Daria when it first came out so a lot of this went over my head, because Daria's house and lifestyle didn't seem appreciably different than most of those vague TV family lifestyles on other shows. It didn't register with me until later that Daria was deliberately describing something specific and real.
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Oct 15, 2018 15:58
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Most popular live-action entertainment isn't really any more appreciably mature than cartoons outside from being slightly more up front about sex and death.
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Oct 15, 2018 16:22
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I tried to get into Modern Family when it first came out. I gave up when the plot line was that Claire Dunphy had a more succesful friend visit and she felt like an unglamourous failure in comparison. This was in an immaculate house the size of a Mariott Inn, with two new executive cars and a face/figure like this:  Gosh, what a dumpy, frumpy failure she looks like.
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Oct 15, 2018 16:25
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spog posted:I tried to get into Modern Family when it first came out. I watched some Modern Family for a while, I missed an early season or two, but then after a few seasons I just stopped. It was one of those shows that was just there to watch and I just have no desire to go back to it.
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Oct 15, 2018 16:30
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spog posted:I tried to get into Modern Family when it first came out. To be fair that’s paid for by her husband’s income so I think it’s understandable that she wouldn’t factor that in when comparing her own personal success against the other person.
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Oct 15, 2018 18:05
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spog posted:I tried to get into Modern Family when it first came out. She could swap out that drab top and look way less failure in about a minute. layering, girlfriend
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Oct 15, 2018 18:10
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BrigadierSensible posted:Re: Poor and Working Class homes on TV. British TV shows a lot of working class households, especially sitcoms. Probably because America is a plutocracy and Britain is an aristocracy. Only Fools and Horses, Steptoe and Son*, the Royle Family, Two Pints of Lager, Still Game, Porridge etc. Keeping up Appearances was all about laughing at Hyacinth having ideas above her station and being embarrassed by her working class family. * I've never seen Sandford and Son, but assume they didn't live in luxury?
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Oct 15, 2018 19:55
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bitterandtwisted posted:* I've never seen Sandford and Son, but assume they didn't live in luxury? Fred Sanford was a junk dealer, so no - their house was quite cluttered and run down.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:00
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Full house had up to 4 working adults in one house with seemingly good jobs yet one lived in a basement and the others in the attic.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:02
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But I guess if they moved out the house wouldn’t be as full.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:02
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But fuller house actually has less people in the house then when the house was full so how is it a fuller house when it’s less than when it was a full house
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Oct 15, 2018 20:03
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WescottF1 posted:Fred Sanford was a junk dealer, so no - their house was quite cluttered and run down. I haven't seen a lot of Sanford and Son but I have somehow seen the episode where they assume that Lamont stole a brand new radio because of how poor they are three times.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:05
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oldpainless posted:But I guess if they moved out the house wouldn’t be as full. It was also in San Francisco and they were entertainers of various stripes but not big and famous so it wasn't that much of a stretch. Danny has steady employment as a news anchor while Joey and Jesse do various things while doing comedy and music. The portrayal is that the three are completely inseparable and pull together whenever poo poo goes down. I don't think money issues ever come up that often. The original premise was actually three comedians living together to take care of the children but was shifted to what it ultimately aired as. The idea was three guys that just kind of ended up living together taking care of kids. But yeah that was one of the things that was questionable about the show. I never liked it all that much (I basically watched the entire show by proxy given that several people I knew were huge fans of it) and everybody started abandoning the show when Jesse and Rebecca got married but then moved into the attic. Otherwise the show deals with how cramped the house was getting and how close everybody was when they refit the garage into a bedroom and moved Joey into it. I mean really it wouldn't be a sitcom if there was no friction, ever, but the "lets move this couple of successful people who can probably afford way better into the attic because lol why not?" was pretty stupid.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:11
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Sitcoms actually began depicting working-class families like in The Honeymooners, but postwar white prosperity caused advertisers to want to target suburban wealth with what we now think of as the typical sitcom family. In the 70s there was a push to present a greater degree of social realism, mostly from Norman Lear and a few other guys, then in the 80s the soulless boomers who grew up with Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver built a lunatic, fever-dream cargo-cult version of that fantasy world for the Seavers, Huxtables, Tanner-Katzopolis-Gladstones, Keatons, and Tanners (ALF ones) to inhabit. Partially it comes down to what kind of fantasy you want: one where a loving family can defeat the real problems of the American family, or one where there are no real problems in the first place.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:18
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oldpainless posted:But fuller house actually has less people in the house then when the house was full so how is it a fuller house when it’s less than when it was a full house Sounds like a fool house to me. Edit: Fuller House should have just been a house run by Kieran Culkin's character in Home Alone.
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Oct 15, 2018 22:20
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Given San Francisco pricing all of those people including the kids working jobs could not afford that place
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Oct 15, 2018 23:27
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Does anyone else remember Kate & Allie? I loved that show as a kid and always thought they had a cool rear end house (the staircase is what sticks out in my mind). I just looked it up to refresh my memory --- they were two divorced, single moms, one working as a travel agent, the other staying at home to raise their daughters. Yeah, you can totally afford a massive 2 floor NYC brownstone and raise kids on one paycheck. I dunno, maybe they were making mad alimony (Allie-money  ) or something.
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Oct 16, 2018 00:36
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Does anyone else remember Kate & Allie? I loved that show as a kid and always thought they had a cool rear end house (the staircase is what sticks out in my mind). I just looked it up to refresh my memory --- they were two divorced, single moms, one working as a travel agent, the other staying at home to raise their daughters. Yeah, you can totally afford a massive 2 floor NYC brownstone and raise kids on one paycheck. If I'm correct, travel agents are paid on commission, so that might not be that unrealistic if she's a successful one.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:05
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Does anyone else remember Kate & Allie? I loved that show as a kid and always thought they had a cool rear end house (the staircase is what sticks out in my mind). I just looked it up to refresh my memory --- they were two divorced, single moms, one working as a travel agent, the other staying at home to raise their daughters. Yeah, you can totally afford a massive 2 floor NYC brownstone and raise kids on one paycheck. holy poo poo! I hadn't thought about that show in a long time. Also popped something loose and I now remember Scorch, so you all have to too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itJxTEih0dk
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Oct 16, 2018 02:13
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As far as 70s living arrangements go, Three's Company might be fairly realistic as far as several people sharing an apartment goes. The rent was $300/month according to one episode. Minimum wage when the show started in 1976 was $2.30/hr. I can't imagine Janet made much more at the florist, Chrissy as a secretary, or Jack doing odd jobs in restaurants while in school.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:16
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Does anyone else remember Kate & Allie? I loved that show as a kid and always thought they had a cool rear end house (the staircase is what sticks out in my mind). I just looked it up to refresh my memory --- they were two divorced, single moms, one working as a travel agent, the other staying at home to raise their daughters. Yeah, you can totally afford a massive 2 floor NYC brownstone and raise kids on one paycheck. I haven't thought of that show in a million years and gently caress if I still remember that staircase.
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Oct 16, 2018 02:43
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Friends at least tries to explainn how these 20somethings can afford to live where they do. Monica is illegally renting under her grandma's (or was ir aunt's) name so she's probably paying 70s rent rates and Chandler has a really high paying job so he pays for everything for Joey.
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Oct 16, 2018 03:02
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