Fourth in a series on how the economic crisis is affecting the Industry.
What with the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers, ad executives, jingle writers and police showing up on your TV set, you would hardly believe that more than 14 million Americans are out of work.
Finally, that tide seems to be shifting.
On Fox's "Raising Hope," the unabashedly downtrodden Chance family struggles with finances while rearing an infant borne out of a one-night stand.
CBS's new comedy "2 Broke Girls," about a down-and-out Brooklyn waitress and a newly impoverished former rich girl, became one of the first series this fall to receive a full-season order.
And Roseanne Barr, the queen of blue-collar TV, has sold a new sitcom, "Downwardly Mobile," about a family living in a trailer park, to NBC.
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Television, it seems, is finally ready to settle down into the economic rut with the rest of the country. It's happened before.
In the 1970s, when the misery index was sky-high and America stewed in its own malaise, series featuring characters from the lower classes such as "Good Times," "Sanford and Son" and "All in the Family" flourished.
And in the '90s, as the country suffered the economic hangover from the go-go '80s, Americans reached for the remote and tuned in to "Roseanne" and "Married ... With Children" in search of comfort and laughs.
"Married's" family patriarch, Al Bundy, was a shoe salesman with a barely-running car; Barr's blue collar mom worked at a factory. "Roseanne" was consistently in the top three-rated series on television, and was the most-watched series from 1989 to 1990, when that recession first began to take serious hold.
So why has it taken so long for television to adjust to economic reality this time around?
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For one thing, audiences tend to lean toward escapist fare in uncertain times -- which might go a long way in explaining the recent popularity of reality fare such as "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," with the oh-so-glamorous-but-why-are they-famous adventures of Kim Kardashian and her siblings, and the striving opulence of the "Real Housewives" franchise.
Of course, there have been a number of reality series that broach the topic of poverty and the challenges facing the lower-income spectrum -- hard luck stories on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" spring to mind.
Even Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing" morphed from a series about real-estate agents raking in big bucks from selling extravagant Malibu and Hollywood homes to a reflection on the lousy housing market; sellers are cautioned that they should expect to get a lot less than they were hoping for.
Cable outlets appear to be ahead of the networks in acknowledging the economic downturn -- perhaps ironically, since cable TV is one of the luxuries that people are increasingly finding themselves unable to afford.
