I used to have basically the same job as Carrie Bradshaw, and she was making maybe $20,000/year *tops *if she only wrote that one column. I had to scramble to write for as many newspapers and magazines as I could. Which explains her wardrobe–she was supplementing her income by working as a sex clown.
When they were making La Boheme in 1926, MGM proudly presented Lillian Gish with her “starving seamstress garret” and she pitched a fit, it looked like a mansion. They did shabby it up for her, but in the movie it’s so beautifully lit and art-directed it’s not distracting.
I think Raising Hope has one of the best, most realistic depictions of American poverty I’ve seen. And they do it without seeming preachy or overly fixated on it. It’s just the reality they inhabit.
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When they were making La Boheme in 1926, MGM proudly presented Lillian Gish with her “starving seamstress garret” and she pitched a fit, it looked like a mansion. They did shabby it up for her, but in the movie it’s so beautifully lit and art-directed it’s not distracting.
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Hijack: Lillian Gish starred in a silent opera? Does it still exist?
I love how a little coat of paint will turn a drab one room slum into a chic Danish modern loft in the course of one afternoon, the paint apparently also fixing bad plaster and dripping pipes and everything else. And the fact it’s a bad neighborhood is used for laughs sometimes but nothing actually associated with a bad neighborhood actually happens (high crime, drug use, etc.).
Actually, I wouldn’t count Marshall’s standard of living while in law school as a mark against HIMYM’s realism. I went to law school in DC, and lived off student loans, as did most of my classmates. I rented a house with three other people; other folks did the same, or shared apartments (as Ted and Marshall did). It wasn’t luxurious, but as a single guy in his early twenties, I was living in a decent house in the (very prosperous) Van Ness/Upper Cleveland Park neighborhood, and I still had enough money to go out for (cheap) drinks with friends, eat too much pizza, etc. Between loans and summer jobs, I still doubt I had more than $30K on hand in any given year.
Of course, DC isn’t NYC - but Grad Plus loans scale up to accomodate projected living expenses, and NYC isn’t that much more expensive.
Short version: Assuming a law student has friends, or can at least tolerate housemates, and is willing to take on the normal law student debtload, he/she will probably be living a recognizably middle-class lifestyle.
No, dear, the opera came much later: this was based on Henri Murger’s wonderful book Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Many of the chapters are actually hi-larious; the Rodolph and Mimi story is only one chapter.
Tyler Perry isn’t really part of “Hollywood.” He produces his films in Atlanta.
I haven’t seen the film you’re talking about, and I’m definitely not defending Tyler Perry generally (what I’ve seen of his work seems pretty insipid to me), but the guy should have a very good idea what poverty is like, having been there himself not that long ago.
“LOL” is a cliché, but I really did laugh out loud.
In the first Sex and the City movie, the least believable scene was when Carrie gave her assistant a purse that was, without a doubt, the ugliest purse I have ever seen. It really did look like it had been stolen off a dead clown.
It was near the beach in the sense that it was in a smallish community on the shore. There are poor people who live in towns with beaches - I’ve met a few.
Sure, but are they homeowners? New homeowners, as opposed to homeowners who inherited from their parents or grandparents?
There may be small, well-maintained and attractive houses affordable for genuinely poor people in upper-middle-class Southern California beach towns. But I wouldn’t expect that to be common.
Concur. Some people might look at the apparently large acreages some of those people lived on and think they must be quite land-rich, but truth is, that land is probably next to worthless.
I don’t think we’re ever even supposed to see the characters as poor, except for Marshall’s brief stint of unemployment and Lily’s attempt at living alone. Barney is explicitly rich, Robin was a teen pop star (granted, a Canadian teen pop star), an anchor for a NYC new station and while I don’t think they ever explicitly say it, flashbacks to her childhood make it look like she comes from money.
And Ted is a lead architect on a skyscaper and a prof at NYU. If anything, he’s probably more wealthy then his lifestyle suggests.
Even Marshall and Lily are relatively well off outside their stints of unemployment. Marshall worked at Barney’s firm making large amounts of money for a while, they sold their crappy apartment to a developer for more then it was worth and inherited a house in Long Island. If you assume Ted helped them out financially when they were in trouble, I think the show is actually pretty realistic regarding their characters living arrangements.
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Here’s a nice article that talks about real estate in TV shows.
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If that article is right, the NYC rents really surprised me: it estimates the Jefferson’s apartment (3 BR/3 ba IIRC with a nice terrace) would rent for $3,600 per month and Liz Lemon’s apartment for $2,000 (before she added the one upstairs). I would have thought both would go for much, much more (at least $5,000). At the same time the Huxtable townhouse was worth in the $700,000-$900,000 in the '80s but is worth 10x that today, which also seems insane but in the other direction.
Craziest though is the Golden Girls house, which it estimates would have sold for $90,000 in the early '80s and $2 million today. Has Miami really had that big of a real estate boom in the past 25 years?
One of the guys rented. The other owned a house he bought when he was a police detective, and he still owned it after he was fired from the force; you could say he inherited it from himself. Remember, poor people who started out middle class are still poor people.
Plus, California has a *lot *of shoreline. Are all of the towns on it upper-middle-class or better?
I lived in a beach slum in Norfolk VA - 13th Bay St was sort of in the middle of a several mile long strip that was between 2 military bases, and hence was ‘white slums’. At the time it was slowly being gentrified, but hadn’t made it too far along before we moved out. I lived between bikers, strip clubs, strip shopping areas with convenience stores, laundromats, pawn shops … we had street walkers and muggers, and in the building pf apartments that our duplex backed on there was a murder. My house was on the inland block of 13th Bay, all of 3 minutes walk to the actual beach. Rent was great, $300 a month, electricity in the summer with AC going was $10 a month, gas for cooking, hot water and heat was $5 a month. Really, other than the outsiders looking for hookers bothering me, it wasn’t a bad place to live. The bikers were actually pretty nice people other than their hobby of shooting out the transformers every now and again.:smack:
I think The Middle does a good job with lower-middle-class. Two working parents but their jobs are unpredictable (quarry and car sales). The kids never seem to have anything fancy, the two boys share a bedroom, they only have one car, they had a running joke about a broken dishwasher for a few episodes, nothing in their house looks new or nice, they miss bills from time to time.
That’s exactly how I remember my lower-middle-class suburban upbringing. Except they have an above-ground-pool that no one ever plays in. I suspect it’s dirty and cold.
In fact, I’d say Malcolm in the Middle was pretty close to this, too. Except they had enough for a kid in military school…