Lifestyles on TV

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Entertainment overload is partly to blame with our infatuation for gadgets and goodies. We're surrounded by a culture that constantly wants to entertain us, whether it's with music or movies or crime dramas or even sensationalized celebrity news. All of that exposes us to a world that's both fictional and yet reproducible. We want the stuff we see! We want the cars, the perfumes, the lifestyles.

The lifestyles are the most amazing fantasies. Remember the old show Married with Children? Al Bundy worked in a shoe store and supported a stay-at-home spendthrift wife and two teenage kids. He owned his own home. True, the show portrayed the family as being strapped for cash, but Bundy could not have possibly earned enough to own a two-story home in Chicago.

Friends was another one. Apartments in Manhattan rent for four figures, and that's generally for a closet. The characters in Friends had marginal and intermittent jobs, but they managed to rent enormous Manhattan apartments. I know, I know. Friends lovers will tell me one of the shows explained that the apartments were rent controlled. But how do you explain the other apartments? Phoebe had her own place, so did Ross, and so did Joey and Chandler. So Rachel and Monica's place was rent controlled, but what about the rest? Besides, I'm pretty sure that in real life they wouldn't have been able to get away with that kind of sublet of a rent-controlled space.

The point is, we see life as it is not and we want to try to duplicate it. I think I liked the old I Love Lucy shows for their authenticity. Ricky was an entertainer and probably made some decent money, but Lucy didn't work and New York (then as now) wasn't cheap. Their apartment was little. When the baby arrived, it got crowded. When Fred and Ethel came to dinner, they had to set up some kind of makeshift table in the living room.