I looked and couldn't find a topic that dealt with this exclusively, and I've brought The Race Card: Ethnicity on TV close to being off-topic, so I thought I'd start a thread about class.

What do you think about the cast of Friends living in enormous apartments, their minds unsullied by poor people existing? Does it bother you that on Degrassi, the Sesame Street Posse, as well as their counterparts elsewhere, seems to always be made up from kids who aren't well off? Do you think it's weird that the snotty popular girl's big secret on practically every show ever is that her parents work in the service industry? What shows handled class issues realistically?

I know that in the US, we all think we're average, whether we are living on the cusp of poverty or in a $750,000 McMansion. But TV shows us other things, so I'd like to know what you think.

Great topic!

I know I'm always amazed at the amount of disposable income the 'poor' kids on TV have.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander's father was supposed to be constantly unemployed, but Xander always had money to buy snacks and never seemed to wear the same outfit twice. He went on to spend most of S4 getting fired from one lousy minimum wage job after another, and yet mere weeks after getting into a construction job on the bottom rung in S5, he can afford a giant apartment that's bigger than some houses I've seen.

Veronica Mars is always lamenting her poverty, and yet she can afford to send her mother into rehab, and always seems to have seed money to offer rewards, buy untraceable cell phones, get plane ticket, pay for hotel rooms...I swear the girl must be either catching bail jumpers or dealing heavy duty drugs on the side <JK>.

At least sometimes you see her wear a piece of clothing a second time.

(edited because I really, honestly can spell)

This is something that has always bothered me. I always hated how the "poor kids" on tv shows had better and more expansive wardrobes than the "rich kids" at my high school. Even the kid who got a helicopter for his birthday (yes, really) wore his clothes more than once. I don't think I ever saw "poor" Joey Potter in the same thing twice. She seemed to have piles of little tank tops and jeans that constantly threatened to show her butt crack.

One show that seems to handle this relatively well is Joan of Arcadia. None of the kids got a car for their 16th birthday because their parents can't afford it (with the possible exception of Grace's parents, but she's gone on record stating she doesn't want a car) and you constantly see the kids (and the parents) in the same clothes. And not everyone got a brand new wardrobe with the new season like they do on so many shows - you still see them wearing stuff from last season.

Veronica Mars does a fairly decent job, but it does seem like Veronica has a lot of seed money to fund her investigations, but I always figured she dipped into the Mars Investigations spending accounts and replaced it once she got paid. I mean, she is her dad's secretary/assistant afterall, so I figured she might have access to the accounts or did the books for him. Of course, Keith probably knows all about it but hasn't said anything.

The financial inconsistencies on BtVS boggle the mind, which is why it was so silly for them to introduce the whole "Buffy has money troubles" late in the series, after we'd already accepted the oxymoronic nature of all the characters' wealth. The cost of repairing all the damage done at the Summers home and Giles' apartment every week would've been huge. And, was Buffy'd dad paying child support all along, or wasn't he? If he wasn't, how could Joyce afford to keep the house, with her gallery job? Anya had a nice apartment full of expensive-looking antiques. Presumably she had acquired valuables over her years as a demon, but how did she manage when she became human? Did she have to get a Social Security card in order to get a bank account? Where did Willow get money to live off of after high school? She never had to get a real job, so she must've gotten from her family -- were both her parents doctors? Why wasn't she paying rent to Buffy? And on and on and on.

I only remember one episode of Friends that dealt realistically with class. They were all at dinner, and a dispute arose over the cost of the menu items and (I think) splitting the check. IIRC, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey were a little miffed that they were expected to dine at this rather pricey restaurant and then split the check evenly with the Friends who were making more money. Other than that, they were all constantly living beyond their theoretical means. The only thing that was ever explained was Monica affording that apartment because she'd subleased it from her grandmother.

I actually didn't mind the apartment thing, because that was at least plausible. There was no explanation for how they could afford all the clothes and accessories. Especially Phoebe — she was a massage therapist, for chrissakes. And she would be wearing a new coat every damn episode. A coat isn't an impulse purchase for someone on a budget. Most people have to make 1 or 2 coats last a few years.

IIRC VM had money for rehab because she had saved up her money from her investigations for the kids at school. That still doesn't explain the fact that her apartment has stainless steel appliances. If your apartment has that, then it costing a pretty penny so they can't be poor. Maybe poor in Neptune is making only $65K/year.

I think Girlfriends handles wealth pretty well. I think all the characters represent the economic status they are supposed to have. I don't pay much attention to whether or not they have worn an outfit only once.

Smallville kills me when it comes to wealth. The Kents own a farm that always seems on the verge of going under and yet, their lifestyle doesn't change. Clark even has a cell phone now. Lana (ick) doesn't work anymore yet she still lives above the Talon. She had money to decorate the place as if she was making that much at the Talon in the first place.

Isn't funny how anyone who owns a house on TV is it because a relative died and left it to them or subleased it to them? When was the last time somebody died and left you $20 bucks?

Hee, that's so true. Phoebe had some truly droolworthy coats, but I know I'd never be able to afford any of them.

Great topic JerseyExport!

As I read this thread my mind immediately flashed to Arrested Development which is very careful to keep the image of a rich family sliding into poverty (or at least middle class) from fraying. From Buster wearing his clothes numerous times (oh how I love his velour track suit) to Michael's suits being recognizable repeats to Lindsay's schemings to keep that red dress the audience can believe that they are a 'normal' family (of course I use normal in the sense of clothing/money not any other sense). Even Oscar the pot smoking brother only has two pairs of pants as you would expect of a poor fellow living in a trailer on his worthless lemon groved land. Lucille at the beginning, when she had money, had an endless wardrobe but now there are suits that are reappearing. Also her maid Lupe wears obvious castoffs/clearance items, i.e. the Boo! sweatshirt at Christmas.

IIRC there was also a Friends episode in which Joey, Phoebe, and Rachel were shocked that the better off three expected them to pony up the same amount as them for a birthday present. The EW episode guide said it "exploded the myth" of the show or something, but seeing as things went back to normal the next episode, not so much.

JOA had an episode where a snotty girl is ditched by her friends after they discover her mother's a waitress. Then it turns out she's really not that bad, but is just a more benign version of the chick from Single White Female, not confident enough in her own personality that she has to take on the lives of whoever she's hanging with. Apparently only rich girls can be outright jerks.

Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi was rich. The kids on that show are supposed to be from pretty average incomes.

One exception to the Friends rule was Joey always being broke and Chandler always having to loan him money.

Wasn't it explained in one of the first season eps that Monica's apartment was rent controlled?

It was explained in a season 3 episode (which flashbacked to a year before the pilot), where Monica explains to Joey that the place is her grandmother's rent-controlled apartment. A season 4 episode addressed this again, when Mr. Treeger threatened to evict Monica and Rachel, until Joey agreed to practice dancing with him.

A few times they would address the fact that Phoebe grew up in an extremely poor family (she never had a bike as a kid, and her father sold his blood to buy birthday presents), and then lived homeless for many years. They would mention that Rachel's family was extremely wealthy, buying her boats and ponies and such.

ETA: With Joey and Chandler, the DVD commentary on the "bracelet buddies" episode says that the writers were highlighting their different classes; Joey came from a background that thought flashy gold bracelets are great, while Chandler comes from a class that feels such things are tacky and embarrassing.

Yeah, Jimmy is rich, but I'm talking about Sean, Jay, and the rest of the "bad" kids. Even Spinner's initial incarnation was as a bully, and he is also from a working class family, so far as I could tell. Degrassi did do a good job with showing his jealousy of Jimmy and the bad results fairly decently, now that I think about it.

Hmm, I always thought that Roseanne was the kinda show that showed the lower-middle class as close to reality as possible. The Connors went through plenty of financial hardship, and making ends meet was a persistent theme throughout the series (of course, until the end when they won it big in the lottery). Roseanne always wore that damn chicken t-shirt to death- in fact, I think it was some sort of a running joke, b/c even Jackie started wearing it!

Soaps are notoriously screwy about class issues. Of course they have poor and/or unemployed women with endless wardobes.
But they also tend to take place in small cities/ towns, so that the child of a Donald Trump-type and a child of the blue-collar worker making $40k a year always go to the same public schools and college. I went to a suburban public school where you had kids from the projects to kids from upper-middle class homes (doctor/lawyer parents) but no one was taking the private jet to Europe or anything.
They also assume that rich people always look "rich". People hang around the house in designer dresses or suits, high heels, fancy diamond jewelry, and perfect hair and make-up.

Also they act like teens are eager to attend adult black-tie events (Yes, I'm looking at you The O.C. season 1) that have little to do with them.

Word! That is so annoying. In fact, that is one of my biggest pet peeves on any show. I like to be confortable around my house. I think that translates to any class. Who walks around their house dressed to the nines?

June Cleaver?

To continue with soaps:
The working class tend to be noble, unless it's a slutty golddigger girl trying to snag a rich guy.
When a rich guy and poor guy vie for the affections of a woman, the poor guy will always win a rich girl in the long run.
He will win a poor girl 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time he has a hidden abusive side, so she will have to be rescued by her rich prince- whose family never really accepts her.

Poor girls tend to win both rich and poor guys from rich girls.

Another Friends episode where they talked about money: one of the first ones, where Rachel first moves in with Monica. She has to cut up her credit cards because technically her dad pays for them and she told him she can take care of herself.

Of course, she spends the rest of the next few seasons having wonderful clothes/shoes/hair in spite of the fact that she is a waitress in a coffee shop.

On The Nanny (I know. I only watch when nothing else is on.) it always amazed me how everything in the Sheffield house took place in the living room even a wedding. Maybe I'm stereotyping here but don't most rich people have weddings at the country club, a hotel, the enormous backyard, or something? It seems to me that on sitcoms you would never really know the family was rich because everything takes place in like one room and the room is not that grand.

IIRC, The Sheffields, and a lot of rich NYC sitcom families live in an upper east side townhouse. It wouldn't necessarily be huge by hi-rise apt. or suburban house standards, but are in an excellent area.
Realistically the wedding would most likely have been at a hotel.

You reminded me of the other rich family accessory- the English butler. (Fresh Prince, The Nanny, Mr. Belvedere (though they seemed more middle class)).
Now I'm a little confused, I figured Max earned his money from being an Andrew Lloyd Webber- style playwright, but I guess like most Amercians I've been programmed to think that British= aristocratic old money.
You'll rarely see a working/middle-class European on American TV, it's always Sir Snottybrooke or Princess Katerina of Fictionovia

When Ross was dating Emily on Friends, we also met Emily's male friends who played rugby in the park. They seemed to be middle-class, non-snooty kind of guys. One guy on the rugby team was even missing some teeth.

Part of the premise of Frasier was the contrast between Niles and Frasier and their cop father, and the physical therapist (even though she was treated like a maid/housekeeper) Daphne, who was from Manchester I believe. Snobby values and humor often clashed with working-class values and humor.

Besides Rosanne, the only other sitcom I can think of about specifically working class people was The Honeymooners, in which money was constantly an issue. As funny as the show is, I find I can't watch too much of it at once because it's just so depressing how their lives never get any better. Although, it is pretty amusing in retrospect how much complaining Alice did over having to clean that tiny apartment. I imagine if they ever got an actual house her head would explode.

But I would say this is art imitating life. Most people I know who are always complaining about being broke and living paycheck to paycheck, or even living in the projects or a bad area...are the same ones carrying Gucci bags, driving new cars with shiny rims that they are leasing, going out to eat on a regular basis and to the club, and wearing new gear.

People live above their means, and are in extreme credit debt to do so. It's the American way. It's only right that the t.v. shows would show this as well.

What's more annoying to me is the fact that there is not really anymore representation of the regular "working class" family, like "All in the Family" or "Roseanne." We have a bunch of middle class or full-on rich folks on our sets, be it "King of Queens," "The O.C." or "The Fabulous Life Of..." showing us real celebrity wealth.

I was also going to chime in that Roseanne dealt with working class issues perfectly. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the rooster shirt did kind of become an inside joke and that everyone on the show wound up wearing it at some point.

Comedian, Louis C.K. just shot a pilot for a sitcom for HBO wherein he is a mechanic and his wife is a nurse and they live regualr working class lives with kids, bills, et al. If it gets picked up, it'll be HBO's first sit-com (complete with live studio audience). I have high hopes for it - Louis C.K. is ridiculously funny and it's HBO so there will be cursing!!

I thought thirtysomething was the best televised representation of the middle class. They had the look of being well-off, but they also experienced constant pressures and anxiety to pay for everything they had. thirtysomething and Roseanne were not too far apart in how the families would always fear that they were just 1 or 2 paycheques from losing everything.

Mr. Sheffield was a Broadway producer, but he did come from old money. I think his parents show up and they are the wealthy, aristocratic sort.

A British butler on The Nanny makes sense, but it was completely inappropriate on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Supposedly, Mr. & Mrs. Banks overcame their improverished backgrounds and worked their way to the top. They wouldn't want someone waiting on them hand and foot, because anyone from that kind of background wouldn't be comfortable being so dependent on someone else. It might be because they became deluded with new money, but Mr. Banks often called back to working his way to the top and Mrs. Banks' sister (Will's mom) was still living in the ghettos of West Philly, so they couldn't be that out of touch with their backgrounds. It just seemed like a really inappropriate choice for this family especially to have a British butler.

It also really bothered me that many of their neighbors also had their own British butlers. I highly doubt anyone in LA would hire old-world staff like this, because it's practically all new money out there. Not to get into race relations or anything, but for SoCal, a Hispanic housekeeper would be a much more realistic household staff member than a highbrow import from England.

ITA, skittl3862. I grew up in SoCal, and the higher income families that I knew all had housekeepers who were from Guatemala or El Salvador. And they weren't live-in housekeepers, either. They came for the day. It sounds strange, but the (now non-existent) Rosa on the O.C. is much more believable than some English butler type.

What do y'all make of Alice on The Brady Bunch? She was obviously of a lower class than the Brady's; her ideal man was Sam the Butcher, not Mike the Architect. As I remember, she had a bedroom just off the kitchen, maybe with her own bathroom? The implication was that she was the chief cook and bottle washer for the Brady's, and that she'd sort of become the surrogate mom for the boys after their mom died, but really, given their family's decidely middle-class milieu was it really feasible that they'd have a live-in, 24-7 caretaker? I mean, the Bradys were comfortable, but they weren't all that, if you know what I mean. Just a regular suburban family...with a live-in housekeeper?

I think the Brady Bunch was harkening back to an age that came a little bit earlier. Middle class people, all the way through the 50s, had maids. I knew several families that had one but by the mid-60s that phenomenom had pretty much passed.

JerseyExport, great idea to start this topic.

I was glad that on Roseanne money was an issue. Money is a huge issue. To me anyway. That ep when Joey, Rachel, and Phoebe recognize that "nice" is a euphamism for expensive was one of the more real things I ever saw from that show. I live in NYC and nice is never cheap. I think education is also at the very least and adjuct to class. I keep thinking of the Cosby Show. Bartlet on TWW in the eps when he remembers his time as a kid where a nice way of showing his thinking then as part of upper class America when he said they didn't talk about money in his house and the young Ms. Landingham told him that was because he had it. I think a big reason Bartlet wants to help people is because he had it so good and knows it.

Oh, the soaps. I ever watch them, but I used to live a girl who did. I'd stop by the TV when she was watching about once a week and ask if any of the cast had jobs yet. I firmly believe that those people could cut down on the drama and scheming if they had jobs, or at least hobbies. But then they wouldn't be soap operas, would they?

I never had a problem with the British butler on FPoBA. It did not seem inappropriate to have a butler because they are black and new money. I think that is a misconception about black people. I heard of black middle class and upper class families having nannies and what not since the 80s. Maybe he should not have been British though.



Why would these families have nannies in the 50s when mom was a housewife? Totally unnecessary. I could rich people doing it purely because it would be a status thing. But not middle-class people. They would want the status but could they really afford it? Would the status be worth the cost?

I'm not sure about the Brady's situation, but plenty of upper middle-class people (doctor's/ lawyer's/ etc. families) had a nanny/cook/housekeeper up until the 50's.

My grandmother as well as many other black women of the era had the domestic jobs that have been mostly taken over by immigrant women these days.
I bet the pay was a lot cheaper and you didn't worry about getting in trouble with social security.
That's why the whole (white) 50's housewife/ vs. women's movement thing bugs me. Working class women have usually had to uh, work.

Good point, jackiecarr.

My grandmother (who, like Mrs Brady, had six kids) had a live-in housekeeper until the late sixties, by which time all of her children were out of the house or in high school.

My grandmother had been born dirt poor, going to bed hungry, et cetera during the first world war, she and her mother took in laundry to eat kind of poor. Things improved, but my grandmother never felt like she fit in with other women of her then class and always got along better with her housekeepers then (I've heard) and the ones she's had again since she and my grandfather aged. That's something that I would have liked to have The Jefferson's address. Louise's past as a maid wasn't near long ago enough that we shouldn't have seen her struggling with her relationship with Florence.

Dana Girl, I love your story of your grandmother. This part just leapt out at me though, and I'm still giggling. Didn't the customers want their laundry back?

Right. That's a whole nother thread on a whole nother board.

Ok I get why upper-middle class people would have maids. But why would just plain old middle class people have maids - like the Bradys? Mom is home all day. What's the point? You don't have to answer since this thread is about class on TV and why IRL middle class people has servants.

Six school-age kids are a bit much to handle, especially when you're used to dealing with three. Maybe Mike did pretty well financially but thought it was more important to have a housekeeper than a bigger house. If you factor in free room & board maybe it wasn't all that expensive.
I never watched much of BB, did Carol work after her first husband died? I never really got the impression that she just hung around the house all day.

She did sit around drinking coffee a lot, if I recall.

I think Alice was there because shopping, cooking, laundering, and cleaning up after 8 people would've been a full-time job, and Carol didn't want it, and Mike could afford to pay for it. They paid Alice with what they would've spent on the extra bedrooms for the kids.

Did they dock her pay when they remade the attic into Greg's lurve-den? Hee!

I was under the impression that Alice had originally been hired after Mike's wife died and he needed her to care for the boys while he worked. She just stayed on after Mike and Carol got married. Hopefully they gave her a raise when she started having to look after four more people.

One of the early episodes did. When George decides they need a maid (as a status symbol), Louise argues that not only do they not need one, but the idea of someone serving her makes her uncomfortable. She even tries to sabotage the interviews, making the job sound horrendous so none of the applicants will want it. I can't remeber what made her relent for Florence. Maybe it had to do with the way Florence wouldn't take any shit from George.



Yes, in the pilot episode (the wedding one) Bobby was apprehensive about the impending wedding and said something to Mike about how he didn't need a new mom because Alice did a good job taking care of him. Alice may even have been around when the first Mrs. Brady was alive.

When my mother was a child, they had a "nurse" (now known as a nanny), a cook, a "yard man" (aka: gardener", a maid, and a laundress, all for my grandparents and their two and a half children. (The third came along late, so I'm not sure if they had that many people working for them then.) None of these people lived in, and several, like the yard man and the laundress, only came by occassionally. And though my grandfather was a doctor, he was a doctor who treated cotton mill workers for a few years, then got drafted into World War II and then was pretty stoved up with tuberculosis for the next several years after he got out of the army, so they had all these people working for them before he had established a practice and made any money whatsoever. That was not uncommon in the south of the 40s and 50s. How did they do this? They didn't pay anybody anything! Literally. Servants mostly had to get by on "found"--leftover food and hand-me-down clothes from the families they worked for. My mother still rages about the social pressure not to "disrupt the wage scale" by paying them what you thought they were worth instead of the going rate of nothing or next to it, something it sounds like my grandmother did. (People? Take my advice and never, ever be a passenger in a car that she's driving when this subject comes up. It's not safe.) Congress finally made the minimum wage apply to household help, which changed things a lot. Similar rulings about social security really--happily--did the system in.

I think "The Bernie Mac" show does (or did, back when I watched it) a good job with class. Bernie and his wife are supposed to be upper middle class, rich enough but new enough to money that there's a bit of a discussion about whether to send the kids to private school or to the very well funded public school--neither public nor private is a given. Bernie's extended family runs the gamut, with most of them being on different rungs of the middle class, all of them lower than Bernie's. When he's had extended family-themed shows, you see the subtleties of that--who's proud of what, who acts a certain way, etc. The kids' mother, Bernie's sister, is considered to have fallen down considerably because of drug use, and the contrast they go through between their pretty impoverished life with her and their much more prosperous life with Bernie was a major theme of the first season.

I didn't think it was that weird that the Bradys had a housekeeper when Carol didn't work. She seemed like the kind of garden-club, PTA president overachieving mother that spends more time on her "causes" than on her children. Kind of like the mothers in The Nanny Diaries, that's the best description I can come up with right now.

Of course the working class are noble in soap operas, because the people who watch soap operas don't think of themselves as rich.

Another good show for middle-class life is "King of the Hill." Hank has a full-time job and Peggy works part-time (much the arrangement that my parents had when I was a kid). They even did an episode in which it is revealed that the Hills have a Family Budget. (Details were sparse, but monthly entertainment comes out to about $30, if I remember correctly - all used by Bobby on CDs.)

There was an episode of Full House where Danny bought DJ a sweater. She took it off at recess and the gardener ran over it with a lawnmower. She and Stephanie went to get a replacement and it was $80. Not that Danny should have told her how much it was, but if she had known it was $80, would she have put it on the ground like that?

Which brings me to: On these shows about middle-upper/middle class fmailies, how often do the kids get lessons about money? We know that The Cosby show did it constantly. The kids could never ask for any money without getting a lecture or having to do chores around the house. What about other shows? How many middle class shows portrayed a realistic attitude about money (kids getting a summer job to save up for something, or not being allowed to get that too-expensive CD player).

Actually, all the middle class kids I know get the too-expensive CD player (got to have the 40 gig i-pod, 20 gig isn't enough!) without even being expected to help around the house, much less get an actual job. So maybe tv is more realistic than you think. Except the shows don't go into details about the parents and their eye-popping credit card debt, just to keep up with the Jones's.

Unfortunately that stupid commercial where the kid is accepted at his first day of Junior High because his mom drops him off in a Hummer is becoming more realistic. Some parents are actually buying cars to impress sixth graders rather than for more practical reasons.

It's funny how wealthy soap characters get away with alot of things that would land real working class people on Maury- getting pregnant by your husband's brother/father/friend and not knowing whom the father is.

It's interesting how many Lifetime movies (shut! up!) have the plot of a lower-class woman (stripper, con-artist, town "tramp") marrying a wealthy man and then the man turns out to be abusive (a drunk, negligent, his family doesn't accept her, etc.) and she somehow ends up in a plot to kill him.
We're usually supposed to sympathize with the woman to a degree because all she really wanted was "true love".
If it's a lower-class guy with a wealthy woman then he's just evil.
I guess it's the general Lifetime "Men are Evil" cliche.

Lucy & Ricky constantly fought over money. They lived nicely for the early 1950s, but it was a struggle. BTW, just imagine what that 1-bedroom apartment w/ fireplace would cost you in New York today.

One recent example that particularly hacked me off was when Dawson graduated from high school and his mother, separated from his father and, AFAIK, not working, bought him a huge honkin' Ford SUV for his graduation. AFAIK, where the money for this came from was never explained. Were we ever told what they did for a living?

It's interesting to compare The Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show. Carol didn't work; had 6 kids and a husband; yet still had a maid.

Clare Huxtable had a demanding job, 5 kids and a husband, yet no maid. In fact, the greatest hypocrisy of that show was that, with all her responsibilities, you never saw her working, either at home or at the office.

Well, you're right that you never saw her vacuuming or anything (that I remember), but you saw her cooking a fair amount. And there was a lot of her rushing to / from work. Unlike Cliff, her office wasn't just off-screen. There was the one episode where Rudy goes to work with her for a school project, and realizes that being a lawyer is boring (expecially after Claire's coworker makes a short tort joke).

All in all, I think The Cosby Show did a good job of portraying working parents, and kids taking responsibility around the house & for each other as a result.