Having lived thru that era, and having been a poor starving student around the time of Married with Children, my experience was they bolted on the poverty but never internalized it to the show. The characters clothing budget exceeded mine by a factor of perhaps 100, their house and possessions were fancier than my parents by a large factor (and my parents were pretty well off, wealthier than I'll ever be) and when they were not directly discussing finances their financial issues were laughed off at a level that would mean I'd end up homeless if it happened to me as a starving student.

Basically they were a rich family like the Cosby show but they loved to LARP that they were poor. A cheap cut-and-paste job where Bill isn't an OB/GYN or whatever he was, but cut and paste him as a retail show salesman without changing anything.

There's a good analogy with how soft sci fi is made, aka the bad stuff. Take a story from another genre and have a computer mechanically cut and paste it into "sci fi" without changing any aspect of the story beyond the crude cut and paste. Superficially shiny and signally, but the slightest attention shows it makes no sense.

From memory the pull the show had was crude language and motivations, in a non comedic manner. It was an appeal to the 80-90 IQ cohort, roughly. Its appeal wasn't the socioeconomic class they lived in, it was appealing to the fart joke demographic, and the producers figured they'd have to bolt on a shoe salesman job instead of OB/GYN because OB/GYNs don't talk like high school dropouts.

Why would your parents be wealthier than you'll ever be (unless of course they're extremely wealthy)? That seems like a very pessimistic attitude to have towards money and income.

I grew up in a lower middle class family and I'm wealthier than my parents ever were, just because I worked hard and improved myself, and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary.

Why would you want to resign yourself to being poor your whole life?

> and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary.

Not everybody can do that, in fact, most of America can't.

Bullshit - technology skills can be learned like any trade. Writing code does not require a 4 year CS degree.

But we are still bound to supply and demand. If everyone was a coder, price would plummet. Programmers are only currently able to do reasonably well because they are relatively limited in numbers compared to the demand for them.

It is very much impossible for most Americans to be coders while maintaining high incomes. The industry isn't anywhere near that big, currently employing less than 1% of the population. Even if it could grow by an order of magnitude, it still wouldn't absorb any meaningful portion of the population.

Even when I was 12 I found the show unbearably low-brow and condescending.

They were basically low class, not lower class.

They had crass, not class.

I think it was a similar situation as the Simpsons being neighbors to the Flanders. As I recall from that show, Ned Flanders actually earned less annual income than Homer Simpson, but had a nicer home and more wealth, because he spent it more prudently.

The implicit assumption in MWC is that no matter how much Al Bundy might earn, Peg and the kids would always spend 101% of it, leaving him with -1% to spend on himself. That makes Al, specifically, the poor guy in a lower-middle household; working all the time with nothing to show for it personally.

Isn't it simple ? most working class jobs are boring. But law, police, medicine, a tv show(rock 30), or just changing jobs and random situation puts you in a lot of variety and that makes comedy easier.

And the expectations of comedy today are far bigger than the 80's. So something had to give.

You can have blue-collar characters without showing them at the jobs; I don't remember ever seeing Archie Bunker at work, for example.

>Isn't it simple ? most working class jobs are boring.

That wasn't a problem in the past. Besides, nothing more boring than being a regular cop, lawyer, doctor etc.

It's the treatment that makes it look exciting, not the patrolling around for 8 hours and eating doughnuts reality of being a cop.

And you wouldn't believe how tedious being a doctor is, either in a private practice or at a hospital.

Nothing like ER or House at all -- it's the social interactions and plot scripts that make it all interesting, not the actual real life jobs.

Tedious but mostly not boring.

Tedious for reasons other than why it makes good TV.

No, I mean tedious of the boring variety.

There's nothing very exciting about a day at the hospital or a day on patrol.

Yeah, you get to have some nice interactions now and then, but if you filmed the actual day to day life it would be like watching paint dry.

And this is from your personal experience as a physician? I disagree.

But that wouldn't seem to explain the many years of success Roseanne had. Also, as to the comedy, viewed in its time-period, it was a very funny show.

Do you consider it(Roseanne) a classic ? would you rewatch it today, like i watched blackadder(just an old example) ? or like i rewatched 30 rock ?

Roseanne was fantastic. No it didn't have a brand new comedy line for every episode, in fact it was largely the same problems over and over again (money, relationship, bitchy daughters, etc.) but I still love it and watch what little I can on Netflix because while the problems weren't always shiny and new, they were identifiable and made the characters more real. I can't stand most sitcoms because their problems have to be built out of literally nothing that would even tip my proverbial Problem Scale a little bit, and it comes off as cheap, and the characters just look weak and stupid.

Maybe it's a thing that only people who grow up in that kind of area get (I'm about 250 miles from Landford's fictional location) but seriously most sitcoms just make me cringe with disgust. "THAT's your biggest problem today? I'll trade you any day of the week and you can find out what a REAL problem is."

The problem scale of Roseanne is within a believable distance from my own. I have had to dismantle washing machines and clothes dryers to repair them. A show like Seinfeld would make the appliance repairman a character and the repair would be the secondary theme of the episode. A show like Friends would either not acknowledge the existence of laundry machines, or pretend they do not ever break. The only show currently on broadcast television in which I would believe a broken washing machine as a plot element is The Middle.

Here's a potential middle-class The Middle plot line for you: the Glaussners wash the mud off of their off-road 4-wheelers in the street using the Heck household's hose. They do not turn the water off. It runs all week, straight into the gutter, before someone notices and turns it off. The Hecks get an unexpected $300 water bill, which passes unnoticed in their huge monthly stack of bills, as they pay the usual, average monthly amount. Then one day, their water is shut off, and they can't get it turned back on until after Mike's next paycheck.

That's a believable middle class problem. Can you guess why it's believable? Because it's based on a true story.

Maybe it's growing up in that area. I'm from Israel, so i wouldn't know.

Personally i don't find any strong relation between identifying with characters and laughing from their jokes. It may add another dimension to the experience in comic dramas, but if i'm watching a pure comedy/sitcom, i don't think it's a big deal.

But i guess people are different.

Yes! It's a fantastic show. In fact I had rewatched several episodes of Rosanne a few months ago and plan to rewatch more.

>most working class jobs are boring.

Seinfeld proved mundane everyday life can be funny and entertaining for audiences.

The other thing is you can have someone living with the challenges and lifestyle of the working class without showing their actual work.

I think The Office was a huge success without any the characteristics you point out. I don't think it's about the setting per se, but whether the material connects with the viewer in a particular way.

Huh? There wasn't anything remotely middle class about Dan and Roseanne in my memory. They were proudly working class.

To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.

That time when the Conners started a sandwich business was sort of middle class. Even though it failed, entrepreneurship is mostly out of reach for working class. They might get one chance to try it, from an inheritance, insurance, personal injury settlement, or lottery windfall.

Middle class Americans don't get two foreign holidays a year. They get two foreign holidays per lifetime. One if they also decide to visit Hawaii. I consider myself lucky if I can spend an entire 40 hours of PTO at once on one 9-day vacation at a U.S. beach town or national park. It isn't just the money. The U.S. is huge, and much of it is undeveloped land. Getting anywhere more interesting than where you already are takes an inconveniently large investment in time and travel aggravation, and that time could have been spent relaxing instead.

And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross household [edit] income. If two working parents have 2 kids, they are likely taking one week every year, to somewhere cheap and close, and maybe visiting a theme park cluster city such as Orlando, Florida, only once per decade. If you are upper-middle class, you also get to visit Europe once, and Hawaii once. Anybody who needs their passport more often than that is likely going to countries having less infrastructure with their religious group, to proselytize by example.

>And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross individual income

Actually that number is median -household- income, not individual income.

This is a difference between British and American English. In the UK, "middle class" basically means rich. In the US, it means that maybe you own a house.

Traditionally at least, classes in the UK were based on social status, not the amount of money you have.

For example, I've known impoverished upper middle class people, people who self identified as working class (e.g. drinking in the miners welfare) even though they had millions in the bank and not particularly well off upper-class people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United...

Edit: As might be expected, nothing about the class system in the UK is clear cut, consistent or particularly logical.

In the US middle class has always meant middle - not at top in income/wealth (mostly income) but not at the bottom.

How they obtain the money (education, job) or how they spend it (house, holiday) is not important by definition - however there is some social expectations of the American middle class.

Many Americans don't have the time off work for two holidays a year, even if they have plenty of money, which is another difference, which changes the American social expectations of the US "middle class."

A family with nurse and a teacher for example (two professionals) would bring in somewhere around $100,000/yr and be upper class.

There's a lot of variations by geography (cost of living) and stuff too, but I simplified it.

In reality the amount of financial security a family has is often a function of how well they manage it (as long as you are making above a certain amount where it becomes possible for financial security). If the above mentioned family over spent on a big house, two cars, a motorcycle, and other luxuries they consider normal, or even needed, then they can surely feel like they are living without much financial security, which doesn't "feel" upper class.

Unfortunately, middle class is a totally useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class, I guess because they are somewhat out of touch with their spending and don't feel rich (previously mentioned family) or they are towards the bottom they don't want to feel poor. People who have a household income of $200,000 describe themselves as middle class. One of my coworkers, with a straight face, described me as middle class. I couldn't believe it - with a household income more than 3x the median household income in the US I can't with a straight face say I am middle class.

That's why politicians pander to "the middle class," because the majority of Americans identify with the middle class - even poor ones who don't consider themselves middle class but feel they will be there soon.

On the other side of the coin I have a friend who makes a middle class income, spends lavishly on consumer goods, and is always complaining about how poor she is.

Like I said, totally useless term.

"middle class is a useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class"

It might actually be simpler in the UK - nobody describes themselves as working class anymore and there are very real upper class people so everyone from the PM down is middle class.

http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-...

NB I like that quiz - if you enjoy drinking to excess and fighting you are working class or upper class but definitely not middle class (by UK standards).

Edit: I guess another way of defining "middle class" by UK standards is "someone worried about social status" - traditionally neither the upper classes or the working classes cared about social status.

As America is an automobile culture, you could break down the class boundaries like this:

  destitute - checks discarded transit cards for remaining balances
  poor - buys monthly transit passes
  lower - buys used car with predatory/dealer "pay here" financing
  lower-middle - buys used car with bank/CU financing
  upper-middle - buys used car with cash, or new car with bank/CU financing
  upper - buys new car with cash
  rich - drives company car leased by an owned business, but uses taxis and Ubers in the city
  ultra-rich - never drives; has on-call professional driver/pilot employees

You'd describe a nurse, a teacher, and yourself as upper class? You'd put them in the same social strata as the Queen of the UK or the Prince of Monaco? That's absolutely crazy.

To me upper class means the literally Queen, or at least something like her cousin's son's uncle or something like that.

If you don't own a country estate or have any staff then you aren't upper class.

You're using words differently. Are you British? The person you're responding to was American.

I wouldn't call the Queen or Prince "upper class", I'd call them the nobility. You still have remnants of an actual feudal class system whereas we do not. Our classes go solely by income. Roughly speaking, the lowest 25% is poor, anything between 25-90% is middle class (a term which has expanded over the years), 90-99% is upper middle class, and the top 1% is upper class. Of course there is no hard and fast agreement on it, and others will disagree about the exact demarcation lines on those ranges, but it's the same gist.

So I personally wouldn't call a nurse and a teacher upper class, but they could easily be upper middle class.

Reread what I said, I was talking about the American definition "middle class," and the bastardisation of the word, not the British definition. I also said a nurse and teacher couple (household), not each of them individually.

As an American I wouldn't call the queen upper class, I'd call her nobility or royality, a different class altogether and not really compatible to the American "class system" (so to speak).

American super rich have their own category too, I should have mentioned. Don't think there's a real concrete word for them but they are called stuff like "trust fund baby"(if they are rich because their parents are and don't have to work), the 1%, millionaires, and the super rich. There is a growing divide between the rich and the super rich in the US in the last several decades, which plays into it.

I think you are using the traditional UK definition of "upper class" while nommm-nommm is using the US definition - they are completely different things.

Correct. I started with "in the US" and was replying to ". In the US, it means that maybe you own a house."

So you'd day you were "upper class"?

What I don't understand is why you'd turn class into a proxy for personal wealth, there are already lots of ways to refer to that - wages, household income, net worth - whereas class [in the UK] is a far more nuanced measure of ancestry, culture, occupation and attitudes to all of those things.

Probably because our history and collective cultural values are very different in that regard. And we don't have, like, actual royality.

The US has a very "anyone can get rich" kind of cultural ethos so it makes sense our definitions would be very different.

There's also a distinction between upper class and the "frigging filthy rich" (salary in the millions) in the US. Lately they've been called "the 1%."

Would you say that the "1%" is above "upper class" or an upper-upper-class? Why not just say "he earns $200k" or "he inherited $10M" rather than "he's a part of the upper class"? The former examples seems to provide much more info.

[Answer is probably "language isn't logical" but I'd settle for your reason not to use the more informative approach.]

The "1%" starts at $193K, which would easily include a household with two 30-year old software developers (or similar professionals).

http://whatsmypercent.com/

That is for individual income, not household income - household income the 1% seems to start at $450,000 a year.

http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/

> In the US, it means that maybe you own a house.

Geography plays into this quite a bit, too. The cost of living is lower in the Midwest so it's possible to live a larger lifestyle on more of a working-class salary.

Yes, as a British person I'd say an example of a middle class sitcom is something like Frasier, not Roseanne.

Frasier is very upper-middle IMO. Not because of the wealth per se but because of the professions, attitudes and cultural mores.

Frasier was funny in America because everyone on the show but the dad was so hoity-toity upper class.

This comparison made me smile. In the UK, we are rapidly reaching the point where owning a house === rich

Well, yeah, British usage has some hangovers from pre-capitalist class structures wherein the nobility constitute the upper class, and what became the capitalist upper class is part of the middle class between the nobility and the peasantry.

Whereas American English mostly, when it adopted class language, got it from traditional discussions of capitalist class structure, but its since evolved to where frequently "middle class" is used to mean "middle income" (solidly in the working class in the classical divide of classes in capitalist society), and the traditional capitalist middle class is "upper middle class" (or sometimes even "upper class"), and the capitalist upper class -- the owners of capital who rent labor -- are mostly just not discussed at all as a class of people, but as abstract institutions if at all.

Are you from the UK, would you call David Beckham (say) Upper Class?

He's as wealthy as they come but pretty clearly working class IMO.

That's because the British think of class as some BS blue-blooded royal thing.

Beckham is by no means "working class" -- though he might have been born as such.

He is just not royalty and hadn't grown up from families owing castles and being members in the house of lords.

It's not snobbery, no one is looking down [well few are] on Beckham saying "oh he's only working class". Football is a working class game, it's players are primarily working class; that's a great source of pride for many.

I'm (lower) middle class, earn less than a lot of working class people; there are different cultural circles that follow different lines to financial worth. That's how the class system is seen here.

Being royalty wouldn't make him any better, just different, probably make him far worse in many people's eyes but if he were royal he'd be part of the peerage whether he lived in a council flat or a palace.

>It's not snobbery, no one is looking down [well few are] on Beckham saying "oh he's only working class"

On Beckham no. On working class people but not Beckham-rich, many.

I've had some experience with BBC people.

All the technicians and lower level staff were working class.

All the journalists were public school people (in UK, "public school" actually means: expensive prestigious school).

They didn't seem to have any social connection, didn't even eat all together at the same table at the end of work -- each group had their own table. And I'm not talking famous journalists and tv-stars snubbing mere mortals: it was just actual run of the mill reporters and journalists.

You don't get this behavior in where I come from.

I was also surprised to find out that from Monty Python to Mr. Bean (R.A), and Hugh Laurie, Fry, etc, almost all famous TV comedians (at least up to the 90s) in Britain were public school people -- and all of these were specifically Cambridge and Oxford. Which shows what it took to be on TV back in the day. You don't get that in the US either.

>Which shows what it took to be on TV back in the day. You don't get that in the US either.

Not to the same degree certainly. But historically, the eastern journalism establishment (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the network news operations) drew very heavily from the Ivy League and related schools

Class represents how income is accrued.

The working class, as the name implies, earn their money by working. The upper class make their money through investments. The middle class fall in between. They make part of their income by working and part of their income through investments.

The practical implications are that if the working class stop working, they can no longer make ends meet. The middle class have the opportunity to stop working for periods of time, but not indefinitely. The upper class can survive without ever lifting a finger.

The US has "class inflation" and middle class means what you and I call working class.

One of my favorite quotes from Roseanne (paraphrasing):

"We'll send the electric bill to the water company, and the water bill to the electric company. Then forget to sign the check for the phone bill."

The working man used to be middle class in America.

That's mostly because expectations for what it takes to be middle class have gone up. Houses are bigger (much bigger). People have more cars. People expect to eat out more and have more entertainment options.

It's also because the job market has changed. I can no longer get a job for life like my grandfather did and have a fully paid off house and car in my 20s.

The permanence of employment has changed yes. But not, in general, the amount of money you can make. If you feel like you can't buy things your grandfather could it's probably because they aren't the same things and because you're spending money on things he never did.

See what I said about houses being much bigger today than they used to be.

Roseane was very much Working Class / Blue Collar

King of Queens is another

That one never made sense to me.. she was way too hot for him.