Perhaps it comes as no surprise that since the 2008 economic
crisis, television comedies have often been as interested in the economic ups
and downs of its characters as their romantic vicissitudes. One of the most vivid examples of this shift is
2 Broke Girls (2011) now in its third season, which, for all
its predictable humor, signals an attempt by networks to dramatize a search for
happiness in the midst of diminished economic opportunity. Max Black (Kat Dennings) and Caroline
Channing (Beth
Behrs) wait tables at a Brooklyn restaurant while aspiring to open a
cupcake shop. When these budding
entrepreneurs finally start their small business in the second season, it quickly
fails. This hapless odd couple, it seems, is caught
within the uncertain limbo of economic crisis.
In fact, the first season begins with Caroline newly penniless after her
father, Martin, is arrested for operating a Ponzi scheme in a thinly veiled
allusion to the Bernie Madoff scandal. In
a way that’s not unlike the show’s viewers, Caroline is a child of the Great
Recession.
Other post-Recession comedies abound. Netflix’s updated version of Arrested
Development (2013) converts
the post-9/11 Bluth family and their “treason” with Saddam Hussein (so
brilliantly executed in seasons 1-3, 2003-2006) into a narrative of economic
collapse. In the post-Recession Arrested Development, the oldest son of the Bluth family,
Michael (Jason
Bateman), is forced to move into the college dorm of his son, George
Michael (Michael
Cera). Michael Bluth finally
completes the Sudden Valley housing development that featured prominently in
seasons 1-3, but these plans go belly-up when the 2007 housing bubble
bursts. Or, transporting this delayed
socio-economic maturity into the halls of American higher education, Community (first airing 2009) follows a group of students
at fictional Greendale Community College in Colorado. Jeff Winger (Joel
McHale), a lawyer suspended for falsely claiming to have a degree from
Columbia University, is as reluctant to complete his course work (or to learn
Spanish), as he is to exit his now-adopted community of underachievers. Many other contemporary comedies similarly
feature protagonists trying to navigate an otherwise harsh and uncaring world (Raising
Hope) or are career underachievers who retreat into an economically
restricted domestic space (Ben and Kate).
My favorite post-Recession comedy, New
Girl, follows Jessica Day (Zooey
Deschanel) after she moves into a Los Angeles loft with three strangers. Jess
is a middle school teacher, who is at one point fired and piddles around until
she finds another low-paying position teaching something vaguely like an
English or Art class. While Jess has a
difficult time paying her bills in LA, her roommate Nick Miller (Jake Johnson) is a
curmudgeonly bartender who dropped out of law school and is the exemplar of the
post-Recession flaneur. The only
exception to the economic morass of New
Girl is Schmidt (Max
Greenfield), a sort of Claudio figure
who really steals the show in his pursuit of Cece (Hannah Simone). Yet even Schmidt, a Junior Associate at a
marketing corporation, is as much stuck within the loft as the rest of his
friends. It’s hard to imagine anyone of
them permanently leaving this space of economic limbo.
Those who have been around the TV block might protest that
the post-Recession comedy, with its dramatization of frustrated adult life under
limited finances, doesn’t really seem all that new. In an earlier generation of comedies, such as
Friends (1994-2004),
characters live together and struggle to survive in pricey Manhattan. Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) holds down her
first job as a waitress early in the opening episodes, and she’s astounded to
find that she’s being nickel-and-dimed. But the difference between Rachel Green and
Jessica Day is that Friends imagines
a world with economic mobility. If
Rachel’s a waitress and moves into an apartment with Monica at the beginning of
the series, by the end of season 8 she’s a buyer for Ralph Lauren. Even Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), who quits an
executive position with a multi-national corporation, rejoins the corporate
world at an advertising agency in season 9.
The economic ladder is not only accessible but also easily ascendable,
and such mobility is entwined with the ideas about happiness underlying the pre-Recession comedy.
In contrast, for all its wit, even New Girl can’t seem to imagine its characters outside an arrested economic
space. The loft is the horizon of their
world, and the viewers are invited to see how they find happiness under such
meager circumstances. Maybe that’s the
best we can hope for, the post-Recession comedy seems to suggest. In fact, what’s so troubling is not that the
post-Recession comedy accurately depicts the growing
income inequality in America, especially after the 2008
crisis. Rather, what’s unsettling is
that, in its imagination of a happy but financially unequal world, this
generation of comedy may show us our
horizons. Satisfaction is available, it seems to say, but you’ll have to find
it despite dwindling wages and sparse resources.
[Next series starts Monday! In the meantime, check out Ethos for more great posts, including a
recent one on Grapes of Wrath at 75
from friend of the blog Heidi Kim!
PS. What do you think?]
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