TV's callous neglect of working-class America

Has TV forgotten what it's like to struggle?

The 1950s hit Honeymooners depicted the life of a bus driver and his wife.
(Image credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

Back in the 1950s, television audiences tuned in every week to The Honeymooners, and were dropped into the small, spartan Brooklyn apartment of a bus driver and his wife. The early '60s brought a string of hard-hitting urban dramas like Naked City, The Defenders, and East Side/West Side, which showed Americans what was really going on in our mean streets and slums. The '70s saw a boom in earthiness and grime, in sitcoms like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Barney Miller, and Welcome Back, Kotter, which set stories of blue-collar families and the working poor in rooms with threadbare decor and barely functional utilities. Then in the '80s and '90s we had Roseanne, which captured the cramped clutter of an ordinary lower-middle-class home, and used sardonic humor to face — with at-times painful honesty — the hard trade-offs of work and family for people living paycheck to paycheck.

All of these shows were either critically acclaimed or popular — or both. They were part of a rich and varied television landscape, where suburban affluence and conspicuous wealth were just as widely represented as they are today, but put into context by some starker visions of American life.

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Noel Murray

Noel Murray is a freelance writer, living in Arkansas with his wife and two kids. He was one of the co-founders of the late, lamented movie/culture website The Dissolve, and his articles about film, TV, music, and comics currently appear regularly in The A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.