The New Class Action

By James Poniewozik

In America, rich and poor, like partisan and bad driver, are terms we reserve for people besides ourselves. Ask a banker and a burger flipper, and they will both tell you that they're middle-class. So it is too on TV. Once, prime time had populist fun with the differences between rich and poor Americans (The Beverly Hillbillies, Good Times, Dallas). But by the late 1990s, both struggling workers and scheming, zillionaire J.R. types had become fewer, replaced by the characters in middle-class soaps (Dawson's Creek) and the cappuccino-quaffing likes of Frasier, Friends and Will & Grace; we were one nation under Starbucks.

That was one recession and a few corporate scandals ago. Now, faster than you can say Ken Lay--and, more to the point, faster than the feds can indict him--prime time is again daring to suggest that there are classes in America. There are sitcoms with working-class leads and teen soaps and reality shows with prince-and-pauper themes. Above all, there are wealthy folks cheating and stealing and being humiliated--no fewer than three new series have characters who are in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). And they said Martha Stewart's influence on TV was over.

The network most solidly behind this trend is Fox, which strangely--for a TV network run by archconservative Rupert Murdoch--is as obsessed with the inequities of capital as Eugene V. Debs was. At least half a dozen of its new shows have class themes. The first to premiere, and the season's first confirmed hit, is The O.C. Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie) is a smart, poor kid taken in by the Cohen family of Newport Beach, Calif., after he gets in trouble with the law. Naturally, he finds beautiful girls, brutal rich boys and conniving adults. But The O.C. (on hiatus for baseball season; moves to Thursdays, 9 p.m. E.T., beginning Oct. 30) is more complex than its root-of-all-evil premise in a way that suits an economy in which there's plenty of anxiety for everyone. The dirty secret in most rich-people soaps is corruption. In The O.C., it's insecurity--from the next-door neighbor, who has defrauded his investment clients to maintain his family's lifestyle, to the Cohens' charming but nerdy son Seth, who is proof that money doesn't equal social acceptance. Creator Josh Schwartz says the show "wasn't an attempt to cash in on the political zeitgeist," but, he adds, "there is also a sense in the country right now that all is not what it seems."

Teen soaps are a natural place to address class because teens know viscerally what adults learn to forget: that it does matter what your parents do, how much money your family has, where you come from. On the WB's One Tree Hill (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) two half brothers by the same father--one raised poor, one privileged--are rivals in their love lives and on the basketball court. It's a decent, if humorless, teen soap in the WB tradition, but TV has a harder time dealing with working-class adults. Fox's Luis (Fridays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.), starring Luis Guzman as a struggling doughnut-shop owner in Spanish Harlem, is a parade of urban stereotypes, while NBC's midseason The Tracy Morgan Show (with the Saturday Night Live vet as a garage owner of modest means) is a cliched family-comedy dud.

The exception is UPN's The Mullets (Tuesdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.), a tastily tasteless sitcom about Dwayne and Denny Mullet, whose last name--and pretty much their entire character development--comes from their "business in the front, party in the back" haircuts. The season's least likely Peabody Award candidate, it's a good-natured celebration of American cheese--wrestling, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Girls Gone Wild videos--that pits Dwayne and Denny against their stepdad, a self-important, wealthy game-show host (John O'Hurley, who was the self-important, wealthy J. Peterman on Seinfeld). Co-creator Josh Weinstein says the clash is meant to be a throwback to the populist comedy of the Clampetts and Mr. Drysdale--as well as The Simpsons, on which he and co-creator Bill Oakley were producers and writers. "Like the Beverly Hillbillies or Homer," he says, "these guys are the underdog that you root for."

In real life, of course, Dwayne and Denny would rather watch Fear Factor. But then, much reality TV is about how money affects people's image, actions and opportunities. Joe Millionaire returns with a secret new twist this October, but the water-cooler show of the fall may be Fox's hilarious The Simple Life (premiere date to be announced), which takes Paris Hilton (scioness of the Hilton hotel family) and Nicole Richie (daughter of singer Lionel) and plants them for a month on a farm in Arkansas. It's Green Acres verite, proving that any high-concept '60s sitcom not involving a genie is a reality show in the making. The two blonds are clearly no strangers to privation, having about 0.01% body fat apiece, but they soon find rural life harder than Pilates. Given $50 to buy groceries, they go over budget and plead for a break from the cashier, who tells them, "This isn't a soup kitchen." Asks Richie: "What does that mean, 'soup kitchen'?" Later, Hilton is stumped to hear of a thing called Wal-Mart. ("Is it, like, they sell wall stuff?")

The show is an equal-opportunity stereotyper, assigning the ladies such Deliverance-subtle tasks as picking up roadkill and buying pigs' feet. (The brand on the jar, inexplicably, is blurred out. When is a pigs'-feet maker ever going to get a product placement again?) There's the genius of The Simple Life: it plays with the tension between rich and poor using such extreme examples that the audience can feel superior to both.

Being both traditionally liberal and traditionally loaded, Hollywood has a strange relationship with class issues. But given that its favorite Presidents have always been dead and printed on green paper, these shows hew to a straight-down-the-middle politics: inheritance is bad if you're lazy, but not if you still work hard; poverty is bad, but no whiners allowed. Luis' and Tracy's working-class entrepreneurs are as disdainful of freeloaders as any Rotarian. Still, rich people remain Hollywood's preferred satire targets--we can laugh at them without guilt, seeing as how they can laugh all the way to the bank. Fox's midseason Cracking Up is a darkly comic sitcom about a rich family--from executive producer Mike White, who in 2001 gave us Pasadena, a darkly comic soap about a crazy rich family. And the fall's best sitcom is Fox's Arrested Development (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. E.T., starting Nov. 2), about the Bluths, a family of eccentric loafers whose patriarch, George (Jeffrey Tambor), is jailed by the SEC and whose one hardworking, white-sheep son (Jason Bateman) tries to keep the family and the business together.

"The politics of the times have set the stage for these shows and themes," says Development creator Mitch Hurwitz, who adds that the scandal at the family-owned Adelphia cable company inspired the story. "We've seen the rich getting richer by cheating and the rest of us getting $600 checks in the mail." But ironically, what works so well about Development is that it's a family story, not a political one. When the SEC comes for George, his son Gob, a self-important aspiring magician, hides him inside one of his props. "I don't have time for your magic tricks!" George cries. Gob sighs--and you can read a lifelong strained relationship into that sigh--"Illusions, Dad. You don't have time for my illusions." The rich may be getting richer, but if their foibles keep yielding comedy this--well, rich--at least something about the system still works.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles