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.
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.
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.
The only thing “Pensacola” in this pic is the water and the helicopters.
There’s a 10 or 12 story hotel, and that’s the tallest structure down there.
In the 90s show “Twin Peaks” the intro showed a sign saying “population 52,201”, but in the show itself everyone in town knew each other and the town itself was the size of a small village, with one diner, a few cops, and no infrastructure apart from the logging industry. It would have been more realistic to have the sign say the population was in the hundreds or maybe 1000 at most.
Source: I grew up in a small town with a population of about 1100 people and it was several times larger than Twin Peaks in area, and even with that small number of people it was rare to bump into more than a couple of acquaintances in a week’s time.
