There is a particular type of scene that isn’t shown on TV anymore. There is clutter in the kitchen. The door of the refrigerator has a dent from someone opening it too quickly. With a bill in her hand, the mother is on the phone with the electrical provider, stating something like “I know what date it is” in a tone that betrays years of aggravation. Dad enters at the back door wearing his work clothes. The children quarrel over something unimportant, which escalates into something more important. This season’s purchases are not being worn by anyone in the home. There is mention of the mortgage. The episode ends in a way that is comforting but not very cozy.
Scenes like that served as the foundation for Roseanne’s ten-year television run. During its run in the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Conner home in Lanford, Illinois, which featured a factory worker and a lady who switched occupations since that’s what you did when you needed money, was one of the most watched sitcoms in America. The show’s troubles were the kind that took more than 22 minutes to address. By the end of the show, the money was gone. Roseanne’s employment led to another position with its own set of challenges. occasionally the children did well, and occasionally they did not. A distinct and sizable audience that hardly ever saw financial anxiety on television found resonance in the way it influenced every domestic decision.
With far less hoopla, The Middle, which aired on ABC from 2009 to 2018, continued that legacy into the twenty-first century. The Hecks of fictional Orson, Indiana, were a working-class family whose financial precariousness was ingrained in every episode’s premise without being specifically addressed. They had three children with varying degrees of dysfunction, Frankie working at a car dealership, Mike working at a quarry, and a house that appeared to be actively rebelling against its occupants. The gap between what this family wanted and what was really accessible to them—a divide that most American families recognize and which media has continuously underrepresented—was where the writers discovered humor. Despite running for nine seasons and 215 episodes, the show never produced the kind of cultural discourse that prestige dramas half its duration typically did.
The audience did not alter. According to recent Gallup polls, about 54% of American citizens still identify as working-class or lower-middle class. What television chose to produce for them was what altered things. Roseanne and The Middle were a type of show that was purposefully disadvantaged by the way the streaming era changed the economics of the medium. Conventional broadcast sitcoms were designed with syndication in mind. The plan was to create a hundred episodes, package them, and sell them to regional stations and cable networks so they could air them for years during the day and at nite. Networks had an incentive to keep domestic comedies on the air long enough to hit that milestone because the true profit was found in the syndication money. Streaming services don’t use syndication. They track subscriber acquisition and engagement hours. Ten-episode prestige miniseries with film-quality photography directly compete with a slow-moving, emotionally familiar domestic comedy about people you know from your own neighborhood, and the metric used to judge it was created for the latter.
Additionally, the economics of fictitious household income underwent a change that merits greater consideration than it typically receives. The average fictional household income nearly doubled in real terms between 1990 and 2020, according to researchers examining primetime TV family depictions, but the real American median household income expanded far more slowly. The most often mentioned example is the Friends apartments problem, in which a chef and a coffee shop waitress share a spacious apartment in New York City that would actually cost much over $4,000 per month. However, the trend is far more widespread than Friends. The type of apartment found in aspirational real estate photographs progressively supplanted the working-class household environment, such as the messy kitchen and the dented refrigerator door. There is no mention of a mortgage. The electric provider has no one on hold.
The most recent proof that there is still a need for something realistic and financially viable is Abbott Elementary, which debuted on ABC in 2021 and has since grown to be the highest-rated broadcast comedy in its timeslot. The characters in Quinta Brunson’s piece, which takes place in an underfunded public school in Philadelphia, are devoted to their careers, compassionate toward one another, and constantly negotiating structural limitations that no one can resolve. Instead than ignoring the conditions it portrays, the show is humorous in a way that recognizes them. Its popularity—it was renewed for a fifth season and won accolades that network comedies haven’t been able to—indicates that the demand for recognizable economic reality in television humor hasn’t vanished along with the programs that offered it. Simply said, the pipeline for producing more of them is much more constrained than it ever was.
