Poor folk are making TV comeback

WITH the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers, ad executives, jingle writers and police showing up on your TV set, you would hardly believe that more than 14 million Americans are out of work, writes Tim Kenneally.
Finally, that tide seems to be shifting.
 
On Fox’s Raising Hope, the unabashedly downtrodden Chance family struggles with finances while rearing an infant borne out of a one-night stand.

CBS’s new comedy 2 Broke Girls, about a down-and-out Brooklyn waitress and a newly-impoverished former rich girl, became one of the first series this Autumn to receive a full-season order.

Meanwhile, Roseanne Barr, the queen of blue-collar TV, has sold a new sitcom, Downwardly Mobile, about a family living in a trailer park, to NBC.

Television, it seems, is finally ready to settle down into the economic rut with the rest of the country and the world. It’s happened before.

In the 1970s, when the misery index was sky-high and America stewed in its own malaise, series featuring characters from the lower classes such as Good Times, Sanford and Son and All in the Family flourished.

In the ’90s, as the country suffered the economic hangover from the go-go ’80s, Americans reached for the remote and tuned in to Roseanne and Married ... With Children in search of comfort and laughs.

Married ... With Children’s family patriarch, Al Bundy, was a disgruntled shoe salesman with a barely-running car; Barr’s blue collar mum worked at a factory. Roseanne was consistently in the top three-rated series on television, and was the most-watched series from 1989 to 1990, when that recession first began to take serious hold.

So, why has it taken so long for television to adjust to economic reality this time around?

For one thing, audiences tend to lean toward escapist fare in uncertain times – which might go a long way in explaining the recent popularity of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and the striving opulence of the Real Housewives franchise.

Of course, there have been a number of popular reality series that broach the topic of poverty and the challenges facing the lower-income spectrum – hard luck stories on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition spring to mind.

Co-creator of 2 Broke Girls Michael Patrick King hinted at the difficulties of portraying lower-income characters at this summer’s Television Critics Association press tour.

When conceiving 2 Broke Girls, he ‘really liked the scary dynamic of actually talking about money on TV, because there’s rarely any sitcoms where they actually say how much something costs, including their rent’, King told assembled press.

However, with the country’s financial difficulties becoming more and more entrenched, and the economy continuing to sputter like Al Bundy’s old rust bucket, the stigma of being broke is beginning to disappear.
It could be that economic realities have become so unavoidable that the viewers are ready to take an honest look at the situation we’re in – and maybe have a laugh or two about it. Because, really, what else is there to do while waiting for the economic clouds to clear?

Maybe there’s something good to come out of America’s current economic doldrums after all.