What Recession? Judging by TV shows, we're all filthy rich

If you were looking for a TV show that reflected today's hard economic times, perhaps a show about a struggling city bus driver, a junk dealer and his son or a hard-pressed family where both parents work -- you would have to find old episodes of The Honeymooners, Sanford & Son and Roseanne, respectively.

What you're more apt to find today are series in which the main characters fret about which designer dress they'll be wearing to the thousand-dollar ball or reality shows in which the main drama might be how many expensive options to load into a $1-million yacht purchase.

At a time of recession in the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, TV makes it look as if everyone in America is filthy rich.

Gone are the days of sitcoms reflecting middle-class lives. Every character lives in a glitzy home that would seem well beyond his or her means. Others live in homes well beyond our dreams in what otherwise would be high-school stories in Gossip Girl, 90210 or Privileged.

If you can still afford your cable bill, there are the real-life excesses of The Real Housewives of Orange County, in which Vicki Gunvalson was the one considering getting a satellite TV dish for a $1-million yacht.

This on a network, Bravo, that seems to think that the rich are the most fascinating of all in such shows as Flipping Out, The Rachel Zoe Project, Million Dollar Listing and Millionaire Matchmaker. When Fox dabbled in reality shows with "millionaire" in the title, it usually resulted in the most extreme shows, from Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire to the notorious Joe Millionaire, where, in the final reveal, there was no million dollars.

Fox was back in the millionaire business last month, with the short-term series Secret Millionaire. But even on a show where the supposed goal was to emphasize the gap between the very rich and the very poor, there were moments that could stop you dead in your tracks, as when one multimillionaire bragged about thinking nothing of dropping $4,000 to $5,000 on a dinner with friends.

At some point, in a time of recession, such opulence can make you sick.

To be sure, some of these series with the richest characters are on the way out. Cashmere Mafia didn't last a season on ABC, and the well-to-do lawyers on Boston Legal are already gone (although they had a good run).

Many still are around, though. The best examples of economic struggles can be found in the most ambitious cable shows, where Breaking Bad has a chemistry teacher doing desperate things to provide for his family in a time of cancer, or Sons of Anarchy, where a motorcycle gang traded arms for money. But more often, families are depicted living apparently above their means on such shows as Two and a Half Men and Samantha Who?

No one is doing quite so well as the teens in their spectacular apartments on Gossip Girl, where couture fashion is de rigueur. (Even the "poor" family in the series would have had to spend millions for its loft in Brooklyn, N.Y.)

Two other serials on the CW have a similar formula of the young cavorting on the playgrounds of the rich: in Beverly Hills in the remake of 90210 and in Palm Beach on Privileged.

"I think a lot of people are interested in the rich," Jeff Judah, the producer of 90210, told critics in July. "There's something interesting in seeing these big worlds and also seeing these people in a different way and on an emotional level suffer the same way that every one of us do, struggling to get through the day."

Dawn Ostroff, the entertainment president at the CW, compares it to the days of Dynasty and Dallas.

"Those shows were all very popular back in a time when there was a very similar financial climate in the country," she said. "When the country goes through times like these ... having entertainment be escapist is what our viewers look for."

"It's not that we sat down and said, ‘Oh, we just want to tell stories of rich people,'" said Stephen McPherson, the president of entertainment at ABC, the year that Dirty, Sexy Money joined its lineup, alongside the shorter-lived Big Shots. Having rich people on TV might be presented as "kind of a fantasy," he said. "And to some extent, some of that is making fun of those people."

The excesses of the fashion world in Ugly Betty for instance, are offset by the working-class family from which its character Betty Suarez emerged.

"The Suarez family, to me, is a fantastic American middle-class, if not working-class, family," McPherson said. The family at the head of Brothers & Sisters has had its struggles with the business, as well, he added.

And, "Desperate Housewives, to me," McPherson said, "is about every neighborhood in the USA."