Judge Dread. Oh wait, you said UN-realistic didn’t you!?:-) Then Idiocracy, where they actually put a smart person in charge.
Real answer: Hallmark shows, which are basically porn for conservative women. City dweller comes back home for a visit for the holidays, learns the meaning of Christmas or sth and then changes their life around to be identical to everyone else in the small town.
There’s a lifetime movie called Snowed Inn Christmas where the whole premise is two big city journalists get stuck in Santa Claus, Indiana during the holidays. In the movie the town is a picture perfect Christmas village, but the real Santa Claus is basically fields in the middle of nowhere, plus the Holiday World theme park (which is a legitimate banger if anyone gets the chance to visit). It was filmed in Winnipeg. There are funny details like how their flight gets diverted to the “airport” in Santa Claus even though there isn’t an airport that is not a grass strip for like 50 miles at least.
Maybe this isn’t a USA specific thing but for me it’s always how large peoples houses and apartments are on TV. Those places are huge. My family could never afford anything like that, and it often makes no sense if the character has a relatable job.
If it’s addressed at all, its usually handwaved away as either:
- Friends Rent Control (Warning: TVTropes)
- Actually not as large as it seems on TV.
How I Met Your Mother did the latter pretty well. The whole show was a story the narrator was telling his kids, so it was all based off of how he remembered his life at the time. What we see on TV is just him remembering the NYC apartment bigger than it was.
Whats insane is we used to. My janitor dad and homemaker mom afforded a five bedroom, three bathroom house with full basement, workshop, seperate dining room, living room, breakfast nook, kitchen. it was dillapitated sure but not to an unlivable level. Massive porch.
See, that just seems comical to me. Completely unreasonable to the degree that I can’t even imagine that being true unless there was some other factor you’re failing to mention.
I am not. my dads folks died when he was young and was supporting the family before he went to high school. He never completed junior high. He was a brick layer at one point and that paid pretty well so that might be the one caveat but still we have fallen big time middle class wise. he was definately working class.
Some of that is for shooting. Like on The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, Uncle Phil can definitely afford a house that big, but its layout is bizarre. The downstairs is dominated by a living room and kitchen in a sort of L shape that does not match any exterior shot and is a frankly mediocre use of space. It’s because there’s three cameras roving around where half the walls should be. And a live studio audience! They have to see and hear what’s going on, or else it might as well be a laugh track.
Basically - it’s a stage. It’s not a set. You’re watching a briskly-edited play, with an unusually high sense of verisimilitude. So yes, if you map out Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, it’s deep and spacious and maybe doesn’t connect to the hallway right. But that’s just to give the actors somewhere to move. On-camera, it looks compressed, with very little of that floor space visible, and the back office simply left as a hand-wave for whatever you think is missing.
Dropped a word in the title?
One unrealistic movie troupe is that the single mom always lives in the HUGH house in a super nice area. Working a low paying job that could never afford said house.
Where people in small towns are accepting of everybody even if you dress differently. If you’re new in town, they’re very welcoming to you. Most small towns that is not the case.
That poor people live here. According to Zillow, the average price for a home is $760,877. For fuck sake, Travis Barker of Blink-182 used to live here.
There was a thread going around on Bluesky a while back about how the reason we had so many good Grunge bands in the 80’s/90’s is because it was entirely possible to make a living off of a part-time income back then. Thirty years ago the dirtbag lifestyle was as feasible as supporting two families on one full-time income. Then rents skyrocketed with the advent of Realpage price fixing, minimum wage stagnated, jobs dried up or cut back, and suddenly everyone’s focused on surviving shit life syndrome. Is it any wonder the only artists these days who can survive long enough to get popular are the ones who already have means?
