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(The Atlantic) The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable
- Thread starter Deleted member 431
- Start date
Ding ding ding! Exactly.
And instead of them making life better for their children (much like how their previous generation did) they instead got lazy and did little to nothing instead enabling governments to strip away workers rights, villainizing unions and amplify the empty bullshit promises of the "American Dream".
The scam (opps, I meant opportunity) that you (YES! YOU!) can be financially successful if you just kept your head down and be at every beckoning call to your employer for he will reward you generously with promotions, salary increases and bonuses that would enable you live a carefree life. /s
Someone with Homer's position should logically be well off to afford that house + a full family. Of course that would be assuming that Burns pays him like the average plant owner would.
As it's been pointed out in the early seasons the family is fairly consistently house poor, living beyond their means, which wasn't uncommon for that era.
I always kinda assumed the joke was a senile old man like Burns putting someone like Homer in charge of safety meant Homer gets paid to basically sit around and do nothing while the plant's safety goes to shit.
I always kinda assumed the joke was a senile old man like Burns putting someone like Homer in charge of safety meant Homer gets paid to basically sit around and do nothing while the plant's safety goes to shit.
I'm less concerned about the lives depicted by cartoon families that bend societal realities on a regular basis and more concerned with homeownership depicted in regular live-action television programming.
Sitcoms are quite the lost cause in this regard, they will always have palatial homes and more children that no regular person could afford to have, usually regardless of their jobs.
Soap operas, too, since there's so much inherited wealth in the small towns and suburban enclaves being depicted, but at least they tend to be a bit more honest about it (when All My Children was still on the air, if you weren't part of the rich families and needed a place to live, because there was no low-income housing in Pine Valley, you lived in the empty horse stables adjacent to a mansion, in a boarding house one of the lonely old women set up to give herself company if she liked you or in the local motel).
But drama programs also leaned in on this, as well, probably because cramped apartments and tiny condos do not make for visually-appealing sets that permit for multiple camera angles, but it still is wholly unrepresentative of what can reasonably be achieved by most of the characters and the jobs they have. Certain drama programs have moved away from this trend, albeit very slowly, with most still leaning on the "poverty or palace" dichotomy and little in between.
Meanwhile, however, still more drama programs ignore the financial realities of the world in anything beyond day-to-day "food and shelter" economics. For example, the show Manifest, where a plane full of people disappears for over five years in the blink of an eye, barely any of the script considers the financial mechanisms in play when someone is declared legally dead and hand-waves most of it away in favour of the human drama aspect, allowing most of them to step back into their lives with little to no financial friction, which is grossly unrealistic.
One of the few TV drama programs I've seen in recent years that tackles both of these problems with some degree of realism is Good Girls, covering multiple levels of financial stratification, living situations and financial complications (a well-off white housewife whose idiot husband has bankrupted their family, a 2-paycheque black family in a modest house that are unable to afford their child's medical expenses, and a poor divorcee checkout clerk in a shit apartment with partial custody of her pre-teen child), where the 3 main characters see the only solution to their immediate problems as teaming up to rob the grocery store the divorcee works at. While the premise gets pretty wild and diverges a lot from the first episode pretty quickly, the entire show deliberately centres itself in the financial realities of modern families to different degrees and the unreasonable criminal means they are constantly needing to take to maintain their respective lifestyles. In that respect, the message of "the only way out of total financial destitution in America is criminality" is probably the most brutally honest message I've seen about financial realities in modern America. And even if the unstereotypical portrayal of 3 middle-aged mothers being in a criminal enterprise and in over their heads is played for both drama and laughs, it's great to see that struggle play out instead of being hand-waved away or deus ex machina'd out of existence, and equally good to see that kind of story play out in the suburbs instead of the inner city, to remind the viewer that the message being conveyed can and does apply to both.
Sitcoms are quite the lost cause in this regard, they will always have palatial homes and more children that no regular person could afford to have, usually regardless of their jobs.
Soap operas, too, since there's so much inherited wealth in the small towns and suburban enclaves being depicted, but at least they tend to be a bit more honest about it (when All My Children was still on the air, if you weren't part of the rich families and needed a place to live, because there was no low-income housing in Pine Valley, you lived in the empty horse stables adjacent to a mansion, in a boarding house one of the lonely old women set up to give herself company if she liked you or in the local motel).
But drama programs also leaned in on this, as well, probably because cramped apartments and tiny condos do not make for visually-appealing sets that permit for multiple camera angles, but it still is wholly unrepresentative of what can reasonably be achieved by most of the characters and the jobs they have. Certain drama programs have moved away from this trend, albeit very slowly, with most still leaning on the "poverty or palace" dichotomy and little in between.
Meanwhile, however, still more drama programs ignore the financial realities of the world in anything beyond day-to-day "food and shelter" economics. For example, the show Manifest, where a plane full of people disappears for over five years in the blink of an eye, barely any of the script considers the financial mechanisms in play when someone is declared legally dead and hand-waves most of it away in favour of the human drama aspect, allowing most of them to step back into their lives with little to no financial friction, which is grossly unrealistic.
One of the few TV drama programs I've seen in recent years that tackles both of these problems with some degree of realism is Good Girls, covering multiple levels of financial stratification, living situations and financial complications (a well-off white housewife whose idiot husband has bankrupted their family, a 2-paycheque black family in a modest house that are unable to afford their child's medical expenses, and a poor divorcee checkout clerk in a shit apartment with partial custody of her pre-teen child), where the 3 main characters see the only solution to their immediate problems as teaming up to rob the grocery store the divorcee works at. While the premise gets pretty wild and diverges a lot from the first episode pretty quickly, the entire show deliberately centres itself in the financial realities of modern families to different degrees and the unreasonable criminal means they are constantly needing to take to maintain their respective lifestyles. In that respect, the message of "the only way out of total financial destitution in America is criminality" is probably the most brutally honest message I've seen about financial realities in modern America. And even if the unstereotypical portrayal of 3 middle-aged mothers being in a criminal enterprise and in over their heads is played for both drama and laughs, it's great to see that struggle play out instead of being hand-waved away or deus ex machina'd out of existence, and equally good to see that kind of story play out in the suburbs instead of the inner city, to remind the viewer that the message being conveyed can and does apply to both.
Mario's also pounding Princess Peach's peach. There's probably some good financial benefits to having a fabulously rich FwB/gf.
It used to be when I was younger I couldn't wait for football to be over so I could watch the Simpsons but now I don't want football to be over and once it does, I watch 60 Minutes.
It is more directly related to the cost side, not the pay (Union) side.
Healthcare, housing, education, childcare costs have all greatly exceeded inflation.
Because we suck at cost control. Although housing in non-NIMBY cities had generally not exceeded inflation.
Mine has 9/11, the recession, covid and we're out here fighting for scraps
World War I, Spanish Flu, Great Recession, World War II...
It was basically a non-stop pounding except for that one weird bit during the 1920s.
