FROM THE WHITE LOTUS TO SIRENS, WHY EVERYONE ON TV IS RICH: ‘You’re sold this American dream.’
Bob Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture, told The Post that part of the appeal of these shows is, “just the fun of seeing this stuff we don’t have.”
“A lot of people used to go in the back of the New York Times Magazine and look at these ridiculously huge houses that were for sale,” he observed.
“I find it much more interesting to watch a series about an organized crime family, ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘The Godfather,’ than I would watching a series about somebody who lived the life I live on a daily basis.”
Thompson said that it’s also “easier” to have shows “in settings of the very rich and the very privileged, because it’s kind of an easy source of drama and spectacle.”
The professor and TV expert pointed out that one big reason for the explosion of wealth on TV is that, “in the last 25 years, since around the turn of the century, we’ve become comfortable with our principal characters being bad people.”
He explained that the trend is “relatively new,” because in the history of American TV, shows were usually, “about heroes, good guys. There were antagonists, but the [show] was about the protagonists getting the best of them.”
This trend began to change with the “golden age of TV” in the 2000s” with shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “The Shield.”
“Oftentimes rich folks in at least a supposedly democratic culture, can be hard to portray sympathetically – because they’ve got all this stuff, they’re so privileged,” he said.
Television is escapism after all, and this isn’t all that new a development. In the 1980s, Miami Vice leaning hard on asset forfeiture laws meant that Sonny Crockett could simultaneously fight drug trafficking while posing as a small or medium-sized drug dealer, complete with a (seized) yacht, Ferrari, speedboat, and a seemingly endless supply of Armani and Hugo Boss sports jackets. The Cosby Show’s cast were always immaculately dressed while living in a million dollar Brooklyn brownstone. In England, David Suchet’s Poirot investigated murders that took place in incredibly stylish 1930s Le Corbusier-inspired modernist mansions.