I thought it was about drug problems. It appears to becoming about alcoholism, or not even that, drinking too much and sometimes “at all”. I don’t view the likes of Penny from Big Bang Theory having a drink problem, I’d be drunk a lot more if those were my friends… She tends to be more the sign of normalcy from what seem to be largely tee-total lunatics.
Until recently drug problems could not be shown as acceptable on TV. Drug users needed to suffer for their crimes to send the proper moral message, or at least learn their lesson afterschool special style. Even now drinking is often used metaphorically in order to re-use the same stale plots non-controversially.
He was doing something, because in the porn movie episode, he emptied his pockets before they were arrested.
When The Big Bang Theory begins, Penny is 21. A lot of people who are that age drink a lot. I was in college then, and I didn’t drink much myself, but I still drank more than what I do (not at all) now, and I don’t think I know anyone whose drinking didn’t slow way down after college.
The viewer tends to forget that in addition to being the only non-genius, Penny is nearly 10 years younger than the rest of the cast. I think Howard is the only one who ever states his exact age, and he is 27 or 28 (I can’t remember which); Leonard at one point says how old he was when he got his PhD, and he’s in his early 20s. If you added that to the time he said he’d been Sheldon’s roommate before Penny moved in, he was 30 when Penny moved in, he had to have been at least 30 when Penny moved in, assuming he started at CalTech very shortly after being awarded his PhD.
Penny doesn’t seem to be doing things like drinking first thing in the morning, or drinking before work, and then driving to work. She also never seems to miss work because of it.
She also stops abruptly at the end of the show, when she needs to, and doesn’t appear to go into withdrawal.
Not to mention that when Penny actually does have a problem with online gaming, even while it’s played for laughs, her friends do get concerned, and intervene. Except for Howard, who tries to take advantage of the situation, but this is pre-Bernadette, when he’s still a pretty big pig.
Ironically, Johnny’s ex girlfriend and mother of his son is in rehab. When they visit her the staff assumes Johnny is there to check in, to which he replies “I’m no quitter!”
It’s never mentioned, but in the last season of Cobra Kai, I did notice that Daniel seemed to have a lot of scenes where there was a drink in his hand.
The characters in How I Met Your Mother seemed to live at that bar.
Similarly, the gals in Sex And The City drank pretty much constantly and the Cosmo martini is permanently associated with Carrie Bradshaw.
As in real life, “drug/alcohol problem” and “no one cares” is kind of a relative. People tend to hang out with others who share or at least don’t inhibit their vices - i.e. a bunch of teenage stoners in a 70s sitcom or 20/30-something Manhattanites.
Lucifer on Lucifer regularly takes large amount of recreational drugs of any type he can get his hand on, and the other characters - even the ones who don’t know he’s literally the Devil and thus immune to any negative effects of drug use - generally just roll their eyes. It’s his sex addiction that tends to bother them more, anyway.
He definitely had a problem that lead to him borrowing money for burgers than never paying it back.
It was somewhat acknowledged, but the Rock’s character on Ballers definitely had a MAJOR painkiller issue.
Marie on Breaking Bad was definitely on drugs. Early on she was revealed as a kleptomaniac but the storyline was dropped.