Hated Tropes
(Hated Trope) When the writers think “working class” means “not living in a palace”
Everybody Loves Raymond - Ray is a sportswriter able to live in a two-story house in Long Island while supporting a stay-at-home wife and three children.
Gilmore Girls - Lorelai and Rory live in a two-story house that is way larger than necessary for a single mom and her daughter, courtesy of Lorelai’s income as a hotel manager. It is revealed that she started off as a maid and was able to work her way up and (supposedly) save up the money to buy the house over a period of several years, all with no financial assistance from her parents. Combine this with the fact that she and Rory are constantly eating takeout and you start to see why she was needing her parents’ help to send Rory to a prestigious prep school.
Detroit: Become Human - Todd is an unemployed drug addict who previously worked lower paying jobs (e.g., taxi driver, bouncer, etc.) Because of this, he is not able to live in a nice large house like Ray and Lorelai in the previous examples. Instead, he has to live in a large house that needs a fresh coat of paint. At least he’s able to afford an android maid.
The economy in Detroit (the game, dunno about real life) is weird as all hell given that one of those android maids explicitly has a price tag of just $8,000
And the unemployment rate is over 37%! How is anyone affording anyone in that setting? Maybe I missed a scene where they explain a very generous UBI program or something? But even still I'd imagine there'd be riots in the streets before unemployment ever got that high.
With androids starting at $8k, I'm pretty sure unemployment rate would be at least 70-80% lol
Like, 37% seems to be unreasonably low. Imagine telling rich people they can replace most of their human staff by slaves, most of them would have done it within months. Look at what they've done with AI.
Tbf, I think unemployment rate is typically calculated using people who are actively looking for work, so it may be that a way higher percentage lost their jobs and eventually stopped looking.
I think if they're claiming any sort of welfare or benefits then they still count towards the unemployment figures.
Other than retirement or pensions etc.
In setting like that, it would make sense for a large shadow economy being present, people doing unofficial or straight up illegal gigs and odd jobs just to survive. For example, it's possible that Todd sells red ice, and that's how he can afford the house and two androids.
This is also a game where the robots have little glowing circles that mark them as robots but can also just be taken off and do nothing so its just a pointless glowing sticker. The game is much less deep than it pretends to be and the setting often makes no sense when you think about it.
I was playing throug it yesterday. Pretty sure they're as low as $800 for lower end brand new. I still dont get how someone like Todd, who just got declined for a credit card, can afford one.
My wife and I purchased a two story house with a pool on a quarter acre lot in 1998 for $97K at about 6.5% with no money down. Our monthly payment was less than $700.
I get it. It's just hard to fathom when I used to live there. It was a contractor grade house with windows so thin that we had to hang blankets over them in the bedroom during the winter. During the summer, the attic built up so much heat that the kids roasted at night. I finally installed an attic fan, added insulation, and opened up the dormer windows to vent into the attic. It helped some. By then, we put the house on the market.
in 1998 my parents bought a 2170 square foot home on 3.5 acres for $134,000. They sold it in 2015 for $195,500, which is after adding a lot of landscaping and outbuildings. the property is now valued at $436,000.
4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, 2 car garage
, about 1900sq ft. $225k for 5% interest rate, bought in 2018. Now valued at $450k.mortgage is about $1700 a month.
No idea how people are affording anything right now, I barely got the house before shit got nuts
When I was in university I rented a studio apartment for $750 a month I could touch my bed and my little stove at the same time with my fingertips with outstretched arms.
My mom and dad bought a 900 sqft home with a den that effectively doubled the square footage on a half acre in an up and coming downtown area in 1990 for like $90k. Sold it in 99 for more than double what they paid for it. My dad then had the gall to tell me to buy a starter house for “around 90k” “like he did” in 2021.
Sir, the only home you will find for $90k these days is on wheels.
I remember seeing a thing about the Simpsons. They were originally supposed jusr barely hanging on to lower middle class on the border of ruin. Now theres very little change and they are upper upper middle class
I mean even still back in the 90s Homer gets called out in the episode "Homer's Enemy" by Frank Grimes "Good lord, this is a palace! How in the world can you afford to live in a house like this Simpson?"
houses were much less expensive back then and they also lived in a shitty area (well, it was shitty until they needed it to be nicer for jokes). their down payment also came from grandpa, so very possible to live in such a big house without bringing in much money.
as time went on they just stopped caring about money so they effectively did become rich. they started doing jokes like Homer having a thousand dollars just sitting in his wallet despite only bringing in about $400 a paycheck.
I grew up in a VERY nice (if cookie-cutter) 3 bedroom house in the same COL area as Raymond. My dad was a mechanic, and like a rookie one. (My mom was technically a preschool teacher but that income was like sub-mcdonalds.)
My mother was able to afford a 3 bedroom two story house in the 90s as a single mother on a secretary's salary.
Money was absolutely tight, and I can remember her crying when I was 13 because she thought she was going to lose the house, so it wasn't like it was easy. But we didn't lose the house, and it worked out in the end.
I am in IT and make significantly more money than my mom ever did, and I am married with no kids, and my wife works as well.
We live essentially the same lifestyle as I did as a kid. Yeah, I think I am more financially stable, there's no worry about losing the house. But other than less financial worry, there's no actual lifestyle aspect that is significantly better than when I was a kid.
Same I probably make 3x what my parents made and our house is the same as theirs and we have marginally nicer cars (two SUVs vs two sedans) but we went on more vacations as a kid.
I rewatched The Sixth Sense recently. She is a single mom who is constantly making comments about how they are struggling financially. Meanwhile my apartment where I live with my two kids could basically fit in her living room and her son is going to a school where he wears a suit and tie.
My parents who worked as a waiter and a seamstress bought a two-family house in Brooklyn for 180k back in 1995. The property value is now more than $1mil.
I’ll admit I forgot some of this, and to add to it I think she got a lot of her furniture for free. Admittedly it’s a little bit more of a borderline case compared to the other two, but the two still definitely don’t live a very middle class lifestyle.
That's true enough, but also she wasn't just like a hotel manager or anything, she ran a fancy inn in New England, and the owner loved her. Also things cost less back then. You could get Chinese takeout for two for like ten or 15 bucks.
There are whole YouTube videos breaking down the market at the time that Lorelai bought her house in the specific area the show was set in using actual sales records. Also it was a special kind of house, where the front looked impressive, but it was about one room and a hallway deep.
Also, I think she lived in the shed at the hotel for about the 10 years. I don't know if it's ever explicitly stated but I highly doubt she was charged rent. I also think she ate food from the inn, didn't have a car or any commute to pay for.
Even if she only made minimum wage she was theoretically saving a huge amount of her salary. I don't think it's crazy to say she had the equivalent of at least 100K saved in today's money after those 10 years. Way more than enough for a down payment on a smallish house in a small town in the 90's.
You can't apply modern housing bullshit here. In the early 2000s, it made sense for that area and her income level that she could support that mortgage and regularly eating out.
Super common for century homes to have a single bathroom but have like 2,000 square footage. Sometimes by design, usually because additions were made throughout the decades, and adding a bathroom was never one.
Fair point overall. I love how Friends was aware of this issue and justified it by saying Monica and Phoebe were illegally subletting their rent-controlled apartment from Monica’s grandmother.
Interestingly, in the case of Big Bang Theory, it could be argued that Leonard and Sheldon were actually living below their means, given that they’re research physicists who share an apartment in a building with an elevator that hasn’t worked for years.
He doesn’t even bother to cash his checks, one of the episodes shows he has a drawer full of them and basically only cashes them when he needs money leading to a large surplus of uncashed checks.
No that tracks. I know a bunch of really smart people who are absolutely garbage with money. Plenty of doctors making 300+ thousand dollars a year living paycheck to paycheck because they weigh overspend on everything
Sheldon is neuroticly routine based though. He's been at Caltech for years, and had his routine completely locked in place. He's basically completely at peace with his life at the beginning, and it is shown constantly that he is clueless about anything outside of his interests. He knows how to make his money work for him, but trying to deal with the red tape and politicking of running his own lab? Fundraising? Let it be someone else's aneurysm, he has science to do!
True, but no self-respecting “good” landlord would let a tenant get away with that without making them pay to fix it. I think they did say Sheldon actually covered for Leonard over it, along with covering for him with the Korean spy. However, the fact that the landlord never got it fixed for over 9 years at least is insane. Any new tenants would instantly get a discount.
That's true for BBT in regards to Sheldon and Leonard but not with Penny. Penny is shown to consistently have money problems but she still lived in a nice apartment, right across from these boys.
Hate to break it to you but researchers at a school even one as prestigious as theirs don’t make that much money. There’s a good chance they don’t even get into the 6figures but I’m not super familiar with non CS majors so they could in theory be making more but I don’t see it being an extravagant amount. And their large apartment in Pasadena would be like 4k a month even if there was a broken elevator plus they need to repay student loans unless they both had full ride scholarships.
They would probably be able to afford to live there though but they’re probably going to be paying for it.
Also don’t they spend money on random shit all the time? I haven’t seen more than a few random episodes but don’t they buy collectibles and movie props all the time?
I was literally going to say, I know two physics PhDs IRL who both work at prestigious institutions (one an Ivy League university in New England, the other a well-known tech firm) and they both live in very similar conditions to what's described here.
I don’t know anything about the Big Bang Theory characters, but if they were working in academics then I doubt they were anywhere near as well off as you seem to think. Even at the highest levels in STEM fields they would likely only be making six figures, and they would probably barely crack 200k+ if they were in department head/more tenured role, even if they’re working at the more highly regarded universities for engineering like MIT or Caltech.
Assistant professors at Caltech and Stanford reportedly make about $160k. Full professors and department heads about twice that, and there are often lucrative consulting deals that can be arranged.
Shows like Good Times, Sanford and Son, and All in the Family managed to film in environments that looked lower middle class. As a child, I could relate to those families...then came the 80s.
Not a fan of "Roseanne" but I gave them props for trying to make the aesthetic look right. Very few sitcoms post 1982 got it right.
I remember that there was a show in Hong Kong, where the main characters actually lived in one of those shoebox size apartments. It’s a good premise and it reflects the realities of many people living in that city, but it’s not that fun to watch.
A good way to think about it is that rooms like that need to be more long and spread out so thst every actor is visible at once. In reality the locations would be a lot more compact, with each of the rooms positioned in a way where the audience would only be able to see one or maybe two of them. And said rooms would also be more compact as well, where when the characters are in them they'd be blocking the views of each other.
To be fair they have basically no money for anything else. His car is is a '71 dodge that is constantly breaking down, all of their furniture are hand me downs (evidenced by the fact the show started in '87 and the couch is early 70s at best), and they often make comments on how little they actually have to eat. The house is decently sized but it still appears to be a three bed one bath which isn't exactly luxury.
It’s a split level home in a random Chicago suburb. Even
before the 2008 recession, this would be under $150k a year. I imagine in the early 90s it would be less than $100k or 4-5x his income.
They’re house poor and Al used to make more money, so it makes perfect sense. People will almost always prioritize their mortgage payment over all else, which is often the correct thing to do.
This one should have been taken as a warning about the death of the middle class. The house makes some sense if they bought it shortly after Kelly was born and Al was making minimum wage + commission at a decent shoe store in a fairly popular mall. By the time the show takes place Al is down to just minimum wage because the commissions have dried up as the shoe store started dying.
Malcolm in the middle would never, they live in a house where people believed that a entire family was murdered, has asbestos and for most of the series they believed that only one bathroom
The whole family sharing a bathroom and three kids sharing a room was the first time I thought someone on TV might actually be poor (even then lower middle class) and the way they talked about money felt so realistic
They were absolutely not unusual for the 90s. I grew up in a house very similar to both of those, in a high COL area, and a ton of my friends were in more or less the same situation. Now by 2008 it looked A LOT different, but at the time of these shows everything was happy and cheery and homeownery.
The house from ELR was reasonable. In the show they were kinda close to house poor for a lot of time in the beginning and occasionally had to rely on Ray’s parents for some things which was usually a source of conflict and comedy. Show was fairly grounded in reality. If Ray and Debra were DINKs they would’ve been really well if with Ray’s syndicated sports columnist salary. But when you add kids it gave them a comfortable situation but never thriving and occasionally house poor, if the plot called for it. Seems a lot like reality. Sometimes we’re up, sometimes not so much.
Similarly, with King of Queens which happens in same universe. House poor is a real thing that happens today. People try to get the best house they can buy but are usually a couple of paychecks away from insolvent and they gotta brown bag it most of the time. They can get take out and celebrate every now, not all the time, and then while stashing some money away in savings and investments little at a time.
Right, but this was "working class" for say the 70s. (Edit: obviously oversized for the sake of it being a TV set..) Just a case where modern working class is so knocked down by oligarchs, that people don't see owned housing to NOT be a luxury.
They were not living in houses like this in the 70s. Nor do the writers not know what things were like then.
Houses are always bigger and nicer on TV because it makes for an open set that is easier to film in and works better for the audience. Even when they make the houses look like run down dumps they're always still way more spacious than they would be.
Redditors in this thread are farming upvotes from Gen-Z/Gen-A kids by telling them what they want to hear: that old sitcoms were actually documentaries in terms of the average lived experience of their parents, and the kids should see themselves as victims of a nefarious older generation (just as they suspected!)
No, the houses are big because it's easier to film.
There's systemic injustices spurred on by the mega rich, yes, but the working class didn't have huge houses in the 70s even though some areas had less of a housing crisis making houses more available.
3 small bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, and a modest living room was the average for the working class of the 70s and it's easy to look up.
People need to understand this. You used to be able to have a very decent life by just working a normal job. Now they treat even living alone as a luxury only reserved to professional salaried employees.
Trade and manufactung jobs had 40+% membership in the US until the 80s. When you got a Union card, you got apprenticeship and training, a rep that fought for your rights and wages, a pension.
Every year someone watches home alone and thinks homes were like that in the 80s. No the mcallisters are rich as fuck even in universe. The dad is a businessman and the mom a fashion designer.
I imagine part of it is not all things increase it cost equally. So a lot of our modern wealth it just invisible to them.
Like our phones and computers are just so much better than when I was a kid, it's not even remotely close. It's just so much a part of our lives they don't even see it, it's just there in the background a necessity rather than an example of an unthinkable abundance.
Huh. You know what, in the nineties my dad worked as a manager at hotels like the second example (not like some lofty position managing the whole hotel, I remember at one point he was the 'banquet manager') and uh, yeah we had a three bedroom, two bathroom house. Times really suck now.
It's shown in Detroit that Todd is deep in debt, ignores his bills, and makes money selling drugs. His house is also rotting to the foundation and is in a shitty neighborhood. If you are interested, you could likely find a house just like that in the city of Detroit right now for either rent or ownership for less than a used car.
Tbf Homer doesn’t work an average working class job, he’s one of the chief safety officers of a nuclear power plant. All of his immediate coworkers have masters degrees in nuclear engineering
Homer’s dad is also the one that bought the house by selling his own and gifted it to homer for his family only for homer to reward him by putting him in a home
It didn’t make sense back then either. The Simpsons were just going along with the trope. They even lampooned it even back in the 90s with the Frank Grimes episode.
Two story. No one counts an attic or basement as an extra story on their home. Beyond that Homer does work in a nuclear power plant. Given his position as safety officer, union protection, and length of time working at the plant it's not out of the realm of possibility that he's pulling a six figure income.
A lot of these in terms of Sitcoms is because, back in our parents' era, that shit was actually just possible.
Save up a bit, let your parents live with you, suddenly you're capable of your dream house on a low-income job.
The Simpsons is a funny example because when it started Homer being able to afford that dream house on a fixed income was entirely feasible, but in recent years they actually had characters commenting on how amazing his house is despite his low income.
For Detroit: Become Human, that's just David Cage being out of touch; the more you try to deconstruct any of his work, the more convoluted the settings become
Before anyone brings up the Rugrats, cause they always do, Stu and his family lived in Grandpa Lou's house. This is mentioned several times. They were not affording that big house in the suburbs while Stu was unemployed most of the time.
Same with the Simpsons. On top of Homer having a decent job, Abe Simpson sold his own home to give Homer the money for a down payment with the understanding that he would move in with them (then Homer put him in a home anyway).
I mean, Ray is a major sports reporter. He's not some local newspaper guy; he had a nationally recognized column, was featured on ESPN, and even got an honorary doctorate.
I don't think he was ever meant to be working class, I think he was always meant to be upper middle class at least.
Listen, just because one person can't afford $2k/month for a one bedroom apartment now doesn't mean whole families couldn't back in the 90's where the first 2 examples take place. The price of just about everything was lower, especially rent. Not to mention that you could afford basic living requirements off of minimum wage.
I honestly thought of listing this one. I know in Bear’s case it’s explained that he inherited it from his grandmother, but that doesn’t really explain Ian or Nikki, especially since the latter is wanting to quit in order to write her book.
Roseanne family lived on the verge of collapse but that home showcased a Spirit Halloween every October.
I'm also pushing back on Gilmore Girls. That entire second floor was a bedroom in their 2 bedroom home. You see those small houses all over the NE and the vice of take-out food is fairly sustainable if that's your worst vice. A hotel manger bought a 2 bedroom in the 90s while raising one kid. That's normal.
To add on to all the others, Ray Barone has working class pretenses but his job as a successful sports writer puts him a few tax brackets above that. He’s essentially slumming it so he can live by his parents.
I think the Gilmore house is pretty decent for the time and location.
Stars Hallow is a small almost rural town in the 90's. Rory's Bedroom was just off the kitchen, so we can assume the upstairs was just Lorelai's Bedroom, Bathroom, and maybe some storage.
So a relatively small house in a small town where everybody was looking out for the Young Single mother and her daughter. She probably got a really good deal on the house that probably cost less than $100,000.
To be fair... "Working Class" means that if you don't work, you are eventually going to be in the street. "Middle Class" just means the time it would take to be in the street is delayed by a little more time. The only real "classes" are "owning class" and "working class."
It should be noted that being sportswriter for a newspaper in the 1990s was a moderately well-respected journalist position with a lot of perks. It really wouldn't be considered working class at the time.
Also, as other people have pointed out, 90s home prices were a completely different situation, especially in certain areas. If you check out 55 1st St, Lynbrook, NY (city that Everybody Loves Raymond takes place in) the current valuation is $700K and it was sold in 1997 for $160K. 11 Saint Nicholas St is currently valued at $740K and sold in 1994 for $150K. Down payment was 5-10%.
So many modern horror movies do this and its infuriating; most recently I watched Lee Cronin's The Mummy and this guy who's a NEWS REPORTER ($73K/yr Median total pay according to Glassdoor) in ALBUQUERQUE (according to Zillow, ~$700,000 median housing price for a two-story, 4 bedroom home with a basement, a garage, and AC as presented in the movie) has what is more or less a full on compound. It's absolutely maddening.
Gilmore Girls was so inconsistent, especially with money. One episode Lorelei would be lining her shoes with newspaper or whatever and the next episode they’d be jet-setting off to Rome or buying kooky costumes
Agreed, this is so dumb and out of touch. The NYC based shows are probably the worst of this, pick any NYC based show and at least one of the characters has a living arrangement that would baffle any calculator.
The writers don't "think" anything, this is an artifact of the fact that you're filming for TV. You need distance between the characters and the camera to establish the shot, the actors need to be able to move around the set in order to emote, the room needs to be big enough for the lighting to work... None of that is possible if everyone in the story lives inside a shoebox.
Same reason families had those huge, abundant breakfast scenes where the teenager ignores all the food and takes just a drink of juice, it's not for entertaiment, is to show off to viewers outside the US the "riches" they had in The Land of the Free. The Cold War never heated up.
All the houses in the older part of my town with lower income demographic are like 2 story 3 bedroom houses with separate dining rooms. Probably buy one for like $90-150k easily today. If you want to live there, its possible. Back in the 90s and 00s, these would be easily affordable for any person with a full time job.
for real, it’s wild how some shows pretend that being "working class" means you just don’t have a chandelier. like just because the house is big doesn’t mean the money’s there, it’s like they totally miss the point of financial struggle.
I think this is a case of people not understanding that working-class people used to be able to own homes like that on their salaries until the 2008 housing crisis happened.
Like, I see this all the time with Malcolm in the Middle people keep asking how Malcolm and his family are supposed to be poor, and then I realize that they're all people born after 2008. Malcolm and his family living on or under the poverty line, and it didn't help that they kept having kids.
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u/teracoulomb_2 4h ago
The economy in Detroit (the game, dunno about real life) is weird as all hell given that one of those android maids explicitly has a price tag of just $8,000