9 ms·

I remember growing up as a lower-middle class midwestern kid, Roseanne was a show I loved, because I identified with it so much. Dan and Roseanne were my parent

by pionar 10y ago

I remember growing up as a lower-middle class midwestern kid, Roseanne was a show I loved, because I identified with it so much. Dan and Roseanne were my parents, and my friends were just like Darlene and Becky. Another similar show from that era is "Grace Under Fire". As a 35-yo upper-middle class guy still in the midwest, I look at what's on TV (both broadcast and Netflix/Amazon/etc.) and see none of that representation of middle class America. Besides "The Middle", which I still identify with, there are no successful middle-class sitcoms on TV.

brightball 10y ago
King of Queens is another
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  That one never made sense to me.. she was way too hot for him.
herbet_gayson 10y ago
Huh? There wasn't anything remotely middle class about Dan and Roseanne in my memory. They were proudly working class. To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.
- TillE 10y ago
  This is a difference between British and American English. In the UK, "middle class" basically means rich. In the US, it means that maybe you own a house.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    In the US middle class has always meant middle - not at top in income/wealth (mostly income) but not at the bottom. How they obtain the money (education, job) or how they spend it (house, holiday) is not important by definition - however there is some social expectations of the American middle class. Many Americans don't have the time off work for two holidays a year, even if they have plenty of money, which is another difference, which changes the American social expectations of the US "middle class." A family with nurse and a teacher for example (two professionals) would bring in somewhere around $100,000/yr and be upper class. There's a lot of variations by geography (cost of living) and stuff too, but I simplified it. In reality the amount of financial security a family has is often a function of how well they manage it (as long as you are making above a certain amount where it becomes possible for financial security). If the above mentioned family over spent on a big house, two cars, a motorcycle, and other luxuries they consider normal, or even needed, then they can surely feel like they are living without much financial security, which doesn't "feel" upper class. Unfortunately, middle class is a totally useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class, I guess because they are somewhat out of touch with their spending and don't feel rich (previously mentioned family) or they are towards the bottom they don't want to feel poor. People who have a household income of $200,000 describe themselves as middle class. One of my coworkers, with a straight face, described me as middle class. I couldn't believe it - with a household income more than 3x the median household income in the US I can't with a straight face say I am middle class. That's why politicians pander to "the middle class," because the majority of Americans identify with the middle class - even poor ones who don't consider themselves middle class but feel they will be there soon. On the other side of the coin I have a friend who makes a middle class income, spends lavishly on consumer goods, and is always complaining about how poor she is. Like I said, totally useless term.
    - arethuza 10y ago
      "middle class is a useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class" It might actually be simpler in the UK - nobody describes themselves as working class anymore and there are very real upper class people so everyone from the PM down is middle class. http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-are-you-take-the-david-cameron-test/ http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-... NB I like that quiz - if you enjoy drinking to excess and fighting you are working class or upper class but definitely not middle class (by UK standards). Edit: I guess another way of defining "middle class" by UK standards is "someone worried about social status" - traditionally neither the upper classes or the working classes cared about social status.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      So you'd day you were "upper class"? What I don't understand is why you'd turn class into a proxy for personal wealth, there are already lots of ways to refer to that - wages, household income, net worth - whereas class [in the UK] is a far more nuanced measure of ancestry, culture, occupation and attitudes to all of those things.
      - nommm-nommm 10y ago
        Probably because our history and collective cultural values are very different in that regard. And we don't have, like, actual royality. The US has a very "anyone can get rich" kind of cultural ethos so it makes sense our definitions would be very different. There's also a distinction between upper class and the "frigging filthy rich" (salary in the millions) in the US. Lately they've been called "the 1%."
        StevePerkins 10y ago
        The "1%" starts at $193K, which would easily include a household with two 30-year old software developers (or similar professionals). http://whatsmypercent.com/ http://whatsmypercent.com/
        10y ago
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Are you from the UK, would you call David Beckham (say) Upper Class? He's as wealthy as they come but pretty clearly working class IMO.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      That's because the British think of class as some BS blue-blooded royal thing. Beckham is by no means "working class" -- though he might have been born as such. He is just not royalty and hadn't grown up from families owing castles and being members in the house of lords.
      - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        It's not snobbery, no one is looking down [well few are] on Beckham saying "oh he's only working class". Football is a working class game, it's players are primarily working class; that's a great source of pride for many. I'm (lower) middle class, earn less than a lot of working class people; there are different cultural circles that follow different lines to financial worth. That's how the class system is seen here. Being royalty wouldn't make him any better, just different, probably make him far worse in many people's eyes but if he were royal he'd be part of the peerage whether he lived in a council flat or a palace.
        coldtea 10y ago
        >It's not snobbery, no one is looking down [well few are] on Beckham saying "oh he's only working class" On Beckham no. On working class people but not Beckham-rich, many. I've had some experience with BBC people. All the technicians and lower level staff were working class. All the journalists were public school people (in UK, "public school" actually means: expensive prestigious school). They didn't seem to have any social connection, didn't even eat all together at the same table at the end of work -- each group had their own table. And I'm not talking famous journalists and tv-stars snubbing mere mortals: it was just actual run of the mill reporters and journalists. You don't get this behavior in where I come from. I was also surprised to find out that from Monty Python to Mr. Bean (R.A), and Hugh Laurie, Fry, etc, almost all famous TV comedians (at least up to the 90s) in Britain were public school people -- and all of these were specifically Cambridge and Oxford. Which shows what it took to be on TV back in the day. You don't get that in the US either.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Traditionally at least, classes in the UK were based on social status, not the amount of money you have. For example, I've known impoverished upper middle class people, people who self identified as working class (e.g. drinking in the miners welfare) even though they had millions in the bank and not particularly well off upper-class people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United... Edit: As might be expected, nothing about the class system in the UK is clear cut, consistent or particularly logical.
  - csixty4 10y ago
    > In the US, it means that maybe you own a house. Geography plays into this quite a bit, too. The cost of living is lower in the Midwest so it's possible to live a larger lifestyle on more of a working-class salary.
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    Yes, as a British person I'd say an example of a middle class sitcom is something like Frasier, not Roseanne.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Frasier is very upper-middle IMO. Not because of the wealth per se but because of the professions, attitudes and cultural mores.
    - coev 10y ago
      Frasier was funny in America because everyone on the show but the dad was so hoity-toity upper class.
  - J-dawg 10y ago
    This comparison made me smile. In the UK, we are rapidly reaching the point where owning a house === rich
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Well, yeah, British usage has some hangovers from pre-capitalist class structures wherein the nobility constitute the upper class, and what became the capitalist upper class is part of the middle class between the nobility and the peasantry. Whereas American English mostly, when it adopted class language, got it from traditional discussions of capitalist class structure, but its since evolved to where frequently "middle class" is used to mean "middle income" (solidly in the working class in the classical divide of classes in capitalist society), and the traditional capitalist middle class is "upper middle class" (or sometimes even "upper class"), and the capitalist upper class -- the owners of capital who rent labor -- are mostly just not discussed at all as a class of people, but as abstract institutions if at all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tosseraccount 10y ago
  The working man used to be middle class in America.
  - harryh 10y ago
    That's mostly because expectations for what it takes to be middle class have gone up. Houses are bigger (much bigger). People have more cars. People expect to eat out more and have more entertainment options.
    - thedaemon 10y ago
      It's also because the job market has changed. I can no longer get a job for life like my grandfather did and have a fully paid off house and car in my 20s.
      - harryh 10y ago
        The permanence of employment has changed yes. But not, in general, the amount of money you can make. If you feel like you can't buy things your grandfather could it's probably because they aren't the same things and because you're spending money on things he never did. See what I said about houses being much bigger today than they used to be.
- dboreham 10y ago
  The US has "class inflation" and middle class means what you and I call working class.
- staticint 10y ago
  Class represents how income is accrued. The working class, as the name implies, earn their money by working. The upper class make their money through investments. The middle class fall in between. They make part of their income by working and part of their income through investments. The practical implications are that if the working class stop working, they can no longer make ends meet. The middle class have the opportunity to stop working for periods of time, but not indefinitely. The upper class can survive without ever lifting a finger.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  That time when the Conners started a sandwich business was sort of middle class. Even though it failed, entrepreneurship is mostly out of reach for working class. They might get one chance to try it, from an inheritance, insurance, personal injury settlement, or lottery windfall. Middle class Americans don't get two foreign holidays a year. They get two foreign holidays per lifetime. One if they also decide to visit Hawaii. I consider myself lucky if I can spend an entire 40 hours of PTO at once on one 9-day vacation at a U.S. beach town or national park. It isn't just the money. The U.S. is huge, and much of it is undeveloped land. Getting anywhere more interesting than where you already are takes an inconveniently large investment in time and travel aggravation, and that time could have been spent relaxing instead. And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross household [edit] income. If two working parents have 2 kids, they are likely taking one week every year, to somewhere cheap and close, and maybe visiting a theme park cluster city such as Orlando, Florida, only once per decade. If you are upper-middle class, you also get to visit Europe once, and Hawaii once. Anybody who needs their passport more often than that is likely going to countries having less infrastructure with their religious group, to proselytize by example.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    >And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross individual income Actually that number is median -household- income, not individual income.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  One of my favorite quotes from Roseanne (paraphrasing): "We'll send the electric bill to the water company, and the water bill to the electric company. Then forget to sign the check for the phone bill."
spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
Roseane was very much Working Class / Blue Collar
VLM 10y ago
Having lived thru that era, and having been a poor starving student around the time of Married with Children, my experience was they bolted on the poverty but never internalized it to the show. The characters clothing budget exceeded mine by a factor of perhaps 100, their house and possessions were fancier than my parents by a large factor (and my parents were pretty well off, wealthier than I'll ever be) and when they were not directly discussing finances their financial issues were laughed off at a level that would mean I'd end up homeless if it happened to me as a starving student. Basically they were a rich family like the Cosby show but they loved to LARP that they were poor. A cheap cut-and-paste job where Bill isn't an OB/GYN or whatever he was, but cut and paste him as a retail show salesman without changing anything. There's a good analogy with how soft sci fi is made, aka the bad stuff. Take a story from another genre and have a computer mechanically cut and paste it into "sci fi" without changing any aspect of the story beyond the crude cut and paste. Superficially shiny and signally, but the slightest attention shows it makes no sense. From memory the pull the show had was crude language and motivations, in a non comedic manner. It was an appeal to the 80-90 IQ cohort, roughly. Its appeal wasn't the socioeconomic class they lived in, it was appealing to the fart joke demographic, and the producers figured they'd have to bolt on a shoe salesman job instead of OB/GYN because OB/GYNs don't talk like high school dropouts.
- illumin8 10y ago
  Why would your parents be wealthier than you'll ever be (unless of course they're extremely wealthy)? That seems like a very pessimistic attitude to have towards money and income. I grew up in a lower middle class family and I'm wealthier than my parents ever were, just because I worked hard and improved myself, and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Why would you want to resign yourself to being poor your whole life?
  - madgar 10y ago
    > and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Not everybody can do that, in fact, most of America can't.
petra 10y ago
Isn't it simple ? most working class jobs are boring. But law, police, medicine, a tv show(rock 30), or just changing jobs and random situation puts you in a lot of variety and that makes comedy easier. And the expectations of comedy today are far bigger than the 80's. So something had to give.
- icebraining 10y ago
  You can have blue-collar characters without showing them at the jobs; I don't remember ever seeing Archie Bunker at work, for example.
- gypsy_boots 10y ago
  But that wouldn't seem to explain the many years of success Roseanne had. Also, as to the comedy, viewed in its time-period, it was a very funny show.
  - petra 10y ago
    Do you consider it(Roseanne) a classic ? would you rewatch it today, like i watched blackadder(just an old example) ? or like i rewatched 30 rock ?
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      Roseanne was fantastic. No it didn't have a brand new comedy line for every episode, in fact it was largely the same problems over and over again (money, relationship, bitchy daughters, etc.) but I still love it and watch what little I can on Netflix because while the problems weren't always shiny and new, they were identifiable and made the characters more real. I can't stand most sitcoms because their problems have to be built out of literally nothing that would even tip my proverbial Problem Scale a little bit, and it comes off as cheap, and the characters just look weak and stupid. Maybe it's a thing that only people who grow up in that kind of area get (I'm about 250 miles from Landford's fictional location) but seriously most sitcoms just make me cringe with disgust. "THAT's your biggest problem today? I'll trade you any day of the week and you can find out what a REAL problem is."

by pionar 10y ago

brightball 10y ago

King of Queens is another

caseysoftware 10y ago
That one never made sense to me.. she was way too hot for him.

herbet_gayson 10y ago

Huh? There wasn't anything remotely middle class about Dan and Roseanne in my memory. They were proudly working class. To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.

TillE 10y ago
This is a difference between British and American English. In the UK, "middle class" basically means rich. In the US, it means that maybe you own a house.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  In the US middle class has always meant middle - not at top in income/wealth (mostly income) but not at the bottom. How they obtain the money (education, job) or how they spend it (house, holiday) is not important by definition - however there is some social expectations of the American middle class. Many Americans don't have the time off work for two holidays a year, even if they have plenty of money, which is another difference, which changes the American social expectations of the US "middle class." A family with nurse and a teacher for example (two professionals) would bring in somewhere around $100,000/yr and be upper class. There's a lot of variations by geography (cost of living) and stuff too, but I simplified it. In reality the amount of financial security a family has is often a function of how well they manage it (as long as you are making above a certain amount where it becomes possible for financial security). If the above mentioned family over spent on a big house, two cars, a motorcycle, and other luxuries they consider normal, or even needed, then they can surely feel like they are living without much financial security, which doesn't "feel" upper class. Unfortunately, middle class is a totally useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class, I guess because they are somewhat out of touch with their spending and don't feel rich (previously mentioned family) or they are towards the bottom they don't want to feel poor. People who have a household income of $200,000 describe themselves as middle class. One of my coworkers, with a straight face, described me as middle class. I couldn't believe it - with a household income more than 3x the median household income in the US I can't with a straight face say I am middle class. That's why politicians pander to "the middle class," because the majority of Americans identify with the middle class - even poor ones who don't consider themselves middle class but feel they will be there soon. On the other side of the coin I have a friend who makes a middle class income, spends lavishly on consumer goods, and is always complaining about how poor she is. Like I said, totally useless term.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    "middle class is a useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class" It might actually be simpler in the UK - nobody describes themselves as working class anymore and there are very real upper class people so everyone from the PM down is middle class. http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-are-you-take-the-david-cameron-test/ http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-... NB I like that quiz - if you enjoy drinking to excess and fighting you are working class or upper class but definitely not middle class (by UK standards). Edit: I guess another way of defining "middle class" by UK standards is "someone worried about social status" - traditionally neither the upper classes or the working classes cared about social status.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    So you'd day you were "upper class"? What I don't understand is why you'd turn class into a proxy for personal wealth, there are already lots of ways to refer to that - wages, household income, net worth - whereas class [in the UK] is a far more nuanced measure of ancestry, culture, occupation and attitudes to all of those things.
    - nommm-nommm 10y ago
      Probably because our history and collective cultural values are very different in that regard. And we don't have, like, actual royality. The US has a very "anyone can get rich" kind of cultural ethos so it makes sense our definitions would be very different. There's also a distinction between upper class and the "frigging filthy rich" (salary in the millions) in the US. Lately they've been called "the 1%."
      - StevePerkins 10y ago
        The "1%" starts at $193K, which would easily include a household with two 30-year old software developers (or similar professionals). http://whatsmypercent.com/ http://whatsmypercent.com/
        10y ago
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Are you from the UK, would you call David Beckham (say) Upper Class? He's as wealthy as they come but pretty clearly working class IMO.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    That's because the British think of class as some BS blue-blooded royal thing. Beckham is by no means "working class" -- though he might have been born as such. He is just not royalty and hadn't grown up from families owing castles and being members in the house of lords.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      It's not snobbery, no one is looking down [well few are] on Beckham saying "oh he's only working class". Football is a working class game, it's players are primarily working class; that's a great source of pride for many. I'm (lower) middle class, earn less than a lot of working class people; there are different cultural circles that follow different lines to financial worth. That's how the class system is seen here. Being royalty wouldn't make him any better, just different, probably make him far worse in many people's eyes but if he were royal he'd be part of the peerage whether he lived in a council flat or a palace.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >It's not snobbery, no one is looking down [well few are] on Beckham saying "oh he's only working class" On Beckham no. On working class people but not Beckham-rich, many. I've had some experience with BBC people. All the technicians and lower level staff were working class. All the journalists were public school people (in UK, "public school" actually means: expensive prestigious school). They didn't seem to have any social connection, didn't even eat all together at the same table at the end of work -- each group had their own table. And I'm not talking famous journalists and tv-stars snubbing mere mortals: it was just actual run of the mill reporters and journalists. You don't get this behavior in where I come from. I was also surprised to find out that from Monty Python to Mr. Bean (R.A), and Hugh Laurie, Fry, etc, almost all famous TV comedians (at least up to the 90s) in Britain were public school people -- and all of these were specifically Cambridge and Oxford. Which shows what it took to be on TV back in the day. You don't get that in the US either.
- arethuza 10y ago
  Traditionally at least, classes in the UK were based on social status, not the amount of money you have. For example, I've known impoverished upper middle class people, people who self identified as working class (e.g. drinking in the miners welfare) even though they had millions in the bank and not particularly well off upper-class people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United... Edit: As might be expected, nothing about the class system in the UK is clear cut, consistent or particularly logical.
- csixty4 10y ago
  > In the US, it means that maybe you own a house. Geography plays into this quite a bit, too. The cost of living is lower in the Midwest so it's possible to live a larger lifestyle on more of a working-class salary.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  Yes, as a British person I'd say an example of a middle class sitcom is something like Frasier, not Roseanne.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Frasier is very upper-middle IMO. Not because of the wealth per se but because of the professions, attitudes and cultural mores.
  - coev 10y ago
    Frasier was funny in America because everyone on the show but the dad was so hoity-toity upper class.
- J-dawg 10y ago
  This comparison made me smile. In the UK, we are rapidly reaching the point where owning a house === rich
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Well, yeah, British usage has some hangovers from pre-capitalist class structures wherein the nobility constitute the upper class, and what became the capitalist upper class is part of the middle class between the nobility and the peasantry. Whereas American English mostly, when it adopted class language, got it from traditional discussions of capitalist class structure, but its since evolved to where frequently "middle class" is used to mean "middle income" (solidly in the working class in the classical divide of classes in capitalist society), and the traditional capitalist middle class is "upper middle class" (or sometimes even "upper class"), and the capitalist upper class -- the owners of capital who rent labor -- are mostly just not discussed at all as a class of people, but as abstract institutions if at all.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tosseraccount 10y ago
The working man used to be middle class in America.
- harryh 10y ago
  That's mostly because expectations for what it takes to be middle class have gone up. Houses are bigger (much bigger). People have more cars. People expect to eat out more and have more entertainment options.
  - thedaemon 10y ago
    It's also because the job market has changed. I can no longer get a job for life like my grandfather did and have a fully paid off house and car in my 20s.
    - harryh 10y ago
      The permanence of employment has changed yes. But not, in general, the amount of money you can make. If you feel like you can't buy things your grandfather could it's probably because they aren't the same things and because you're spending money on things he never did. See what I said about houses being much bigger today than they used to be.
dboreham 10y ago
The US has "class inflation" and middle class means what you and I call working class.
staticint 10y ago
Class represents how income is accrued. The working class, as the name implies, earn their money by working. The upper class make their money through investments. The middle class fall in between. They make part of their income by working and part of their income through investments. The practical implications are that if the working class stop working, they can no longer make ends meet. The middle class have the opportunity to stop working for periods of time, but not indefinitely. The upper class can survive without ever lifting a finger.
logfromblammo 10y ago
That time when the Conners started a sandwich business was sort of middle class. Even though it failed, entrepreneurship is mostly out of reach for working class. They might get one chance to try it, from an inheritance, insurance, personal injury settlement, or lottery windfall. Middle class Americans don't get two foreign holidays a year. They get two foreign holidays per lifetime. One if they also decide to visit Hawaii. I consider myself lucky if I can spend an entire 40 hours of PTO at once on one 9-day vacation at a U.S. beach town or national park. It isn't just the money. The U.S. is huge, and much of it is undeveloped land. Getting anywhere more interesting than where you already are takes an inconveniently large investment in time and travel aggravation, and that time could have been spent relaxing instead. And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross household [edit] income. If two working parents have 2 kids, they are likely taking one week every year, to somewhere cheap and close, and maybe visiting a theme park cluster city such as Orlando, Florida, only once per decade. If you are upper-middle class, you also get to visit Europe once, and Hawaii once. Anybody who needs their passport more often than that is likely going to countries having less infrastructure with their religious group, to proselytize by example.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  >And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross individual income Actually that number is median -household- income, not individual income.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
One of my favorite quotes from Roseanne (paraphrasing): "We'll send the electric bill to the water company, and the water bill to the electric company. Then forget to sign the check for the phone bill."

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago

Roseane was very much Working Class / Blue Collar

VLM 10y ago

Having lived thru that era, and having been a poor starving student around the time of Married with Children, my experience was they bolted on the poverty but never internalized it to the show. The characters clothing budget exceeded mine by a factor of perhaps 100, their house and possessions were fancier than my parents by a large factor (and my parents were pretty well off, wealthier than I'll ever be) and when they were not directly discussing finances their financial issues were laughed off at a level that would mean I'd end up homeless if it happened to me as a starving student. Basically they were a rich family like the Cosby show but they loved to LARP that they were poor. A cheap cut-and-paste job where Bill isn't an OB/GYN or whatever he was, but cut and paste him as a retail show salesman without changing anything. There's a good analogy with how soft sci fi is made, aka the bad stuff. Take a story from another genre and have a computer mechanically cut and paste it into "sci fi" without changing any aspect of the story beyond the crude cut and paste. Superficially shiny and signally, but the slightest attention shows it makes no sense. From memory the pull the show had was crude language and motivations, in a non comedic manner. It was an appeal to the 80-90 IQ cohort, roughly. Its appeal wasn't the socioeconomic class they lived in, it was appealing to the fart joke demographic, and the producers figured they'd have to bolt on a shoe salesman job instead of OB/GYN because OB/GYNs don't talk like high school dropouts.

illumin8 10y ago
Why would your parents be wealthier than you'll ever be (unless of course they're extremely wealthy)? That seems like a very pessimistic attitude to have towards money and income. I grew up in a lower middle class family and I'm wealthier than my parents ever were, just because I worked hard and improved myself, and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Why would you want to resign yourself to being poor your whole life?
- madgar 10y ago
  > and went into technology where I could make an upper middle class salary. Not everybody can do that, in fact, most of America can't.

petra 10y ago

Isn't it simple ? most working class jobs are boring. But law, police, medicine, a tv show(rock 30), or just changing jobs and random situation puts you in a lot of variety and that makes comedy easier. And the expectations of comedy today are far bigger than the 80's. So something had to give.

icebraining 10y ago
You can have blue-collar characters without showing them at the jobs; I don't remember ever seeing Archie Bunker at work, for example.
gypsy_boots 10y ago
But that wouldn't seem to explain the many years of success Roseanne had. Also, as to the comedy, viewed in its time-period, it was a very funny show.
- petra 10y ago
  Do you consider it(Roseanne) a classic ? would you rewatch it today, like i watched blackadder(just an old example) ? or like i rewatched 30 rock ?
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    Roseanne was fantastic. No it didn't have a brand new comedy line for every episode, in fact it was largely the same problems over and over again (money, relationship, bitchy daughters, etc.) but I still love it and watch what little I can on Netflix because while the problems weren't always shiny and new, they were identifiable and made the characters more real. I can't stand most sitcoms because their problems have to be built out of literally nothing that would even tip my proverbial Problem Scale a little bit, and it comes off as cheap, and the characters just look weak and stupid. Maybe it's a thing that only people who grow up in that kind of area get (I'm about 250 miles from Landford's fictional location) but seriously most sitcoms just make me cringe with disgust. "THAT's your biggest problem today? I'll trade you any day of the week and you can find out what a REAL problem is."