Watching rich people on TV

By M.S.

LAST week Catherine Rampell pointed to a recent Gallup survey indicating that most upper-income people still don't realise (or, in some cases, refuse to admit) they're upper-income. The poll found that just 6 per cent of those in households earning over $250,000 thought their taxes were "too low", but 30 per cent thought the taxes of "upper-income people" were too low. Obviously, a household taking in $250,000 is earning almost 5 times the median (even in Manhattan, Andrew Gelman notes, median household income is $68,000) and is clearly upper-income by any reasonable standard. This isn't particularly surprising; as Ms Rampell writes,

Everyone thinks they're middle-class partly because of cultural reasons, and also partly because of the way the income distribution is skewed. The greatest income inequality is at the very top. As a result, people who are rich but not the richest — in the $250,000 zone, say — see they have more than lots of poor people, but also much less than a few very visibly rich people. Then they conclude they're in the middle, so they must be middle class.

Mr Gelman adds that most people are just not very statistically adept, on this or many other subjects. I would add an additional source of pernicious distortion: the median household depicted on popular TV dramas is outrageously wealthy, compared to the median American household in real life. (The median household depicted in popular video games seems to be a single earner inhabiting a medieval fortress or a hyperlight spacecraft, or a self-employed entrepreneur engaged in coke-dealing and serial murder, so I'll leave video games out of the current discussion.)

For example, I am (don't laugh; it's really good) a huge fan of the hour drama "Parenthood". The series is produced by Jason Katims, who had a big hand in the much-beloved series "Friday Night Lights". One of the triumphs of FNL was its depiction of the domestic spaces inhabited by average kids on a mid-sized Texas town's high-school football team. Characters lived in small, single-story houses with run-down front porches; characters on public assistance or with service-industry jobs lived in multi-level apartments around parking lots. Characters who lived in large McMansions were frankly depicted as rich. The verisimilitude of the living space was a huge boost to the show's effort to present Texan society and ethics in a way that felt affirming and universally sympathetic.

"Parenthood" seems in some ways to be trying to present the ethos and life space of young Northern California families in the same affirming, universally sympathetic fashion. And there are a lot of efforts to bring in a wide range of socioeconomic situations. We've got the divorced mother in her late 30s who moves back in with her parents, the slacker artist guy getting by on minimal income on a houseboat, a kid from the Oakland projects, and so on. But in terms of lived space, the show mostly falls prey to the familiar Hollywood syndrome of unrealistically gorgeous bourgeois set design. And that spills over into the economic underpinnings of plot lines. An interaction early in the first season drove the point home: when the central "everyman" family has to confront their child's autism and is told about a highly sought-after special-needs school with high tuition, they respond: "We don't care what it costs. We'll pay whatever it takes." The viewer thinks: how nice for you, that you can demonstrate your commitment to your child in that fashion! You must be part of the small percentage of American households that can afford to say things like that.

It's hardly news that most popular culture concentrates on the economic elite. The characters in 19th-century English novels chiefly comprise two social classes: aristocrats, and impoverished aristocrats. Still, it's a great breath of fresh air when a show comes along that's willing to show the America most Americans actually inhabit. And if there were more shows along the lines of "Friday Night Lights", we might have more accurate instinctive reference points when people use terms like "average American households" or "upper-income people".

(Photo credit: AFP)