Works that show the rich as hardworking and in a positive light

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Freudian_Slit

…let’s not forget this is the show that brought us the (admittedly awesome) line “What is a weekend?”

Heh. That quotation was on my Downton Abbey page-a-day calendar yesterday!

Joe Haldeman’s short story “To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal” (in the collection Infinite Dreams) is a Cold War fable about a secretive billionaire (not Hughes, but it could be) who decides to very illegally - but every adroitly - save the world from the threat of nuclear weapons.

Billionaire genius Adrian Veidt did sorta kinda the same thing in Watchmen, but at a much, much greater cost.

The protagonist in John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation is already very rich, but is willing to give up the chance to be obscenely rich by helping an endangered alien race which would otherwise be exploited and possibly exterminated.

The boss in Robert Heinlein’s short story “—We Also Walk Dogs,” and the visionary financier D.D. Harriman of “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem,” are both shown as hardworking good guys.

[iamthewalrus_3]

Aaron Sorkin’s two tech biopics The Social Network and Steve Jobs both portray many negative qualities of their subjects, but definitely show them to be hardworking (and show their success to be a result of their hard work).

[Evil_Captor]

@Your_Great_Darsh_Face

The aristocracy in The Mote In God’s Eye are titled and independently rich, but also devoted servants of humanity, by no means restricted to Roderick, Lord Blaine.

In the Ramage naval series, Lord Ramage, his father the Earl, and a good many other nobles, are hard-working naval officers or otherwise servants of His Majesty, and the occasional exiled French nobleman generally shows up in a good light too. Earl Ramage is also shown to be a good and responsible landlord and land-owner who takes care of his tenants. While there are titled villains in the series, they are more usually social climbers jealous of their more elevated associates, or nouveaux riches unsure of their station and compensating by throwing their weight about.

Yes, soldiers like to imagine their masters are noble. Mostly, they’re wrong.

[Defensive_Indifference]

I didn’t read or see “Moneyball”, but didn’t both the book and movie portray Billy Beane as a smart, hardworking guy who made millions as a GM?

[Dewey_Finn]

How about the couple played by Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers in Hart to Hart? For those who don’t remember, this was a fluffy mystery series from the 1980s in which a wealthy couple travel the world and solve mysteries that occur along the way.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Evil_Captor

Yes, soldiers like to imagine their masters are noble. Mostly, they’re wrong.

From a Letterman Top Ten List of least-inspiring battle cries: “Let’s win one for our swishy, inbred monarch!”

[Your_Great_Darsh_Face]

@Evil_Captor

Yes, soldiers like to imagine their masters are noble. Mostly, they’re wrong.

I haven’t a clue what that has to do with what I posted, given that the books in question are giving a reader’s eye view (not an underlings’) of the titled characters. In other words, what “soldiers like to imagine” doesn’t enter into it.

[Meurglys]

Doctor Zhivago is an orphan adopted into a rich upper class Russian family and is caring and diligent as a young doctor, both before and during WW1. Then he loses everything during the revolution but continues running a hospital or tending the sick and the wounded throughout most of the civil war and afterwards until he dies.
Of course, by that time he’s poor, but everyone knows he used to be rich…