Show me the money: it's dollars that drive the best US drama

CULTURE SHOCK:IN THIS, THE GOLDEN AGE of American TV drama, there is one infallible way of separating the wheat from the chaff: show me the money.

The other evening I was watching one of the slicker and more original cop shows currently on offer, Dexter. It is dark and clever and distinguished by its rather startling premise: the hero is a serial killer. But as it settles down into a long run it is becoming increasingly bland. Something about it seemed particularly irritating, and it took me a little while to realise what it is: the absence of money.

Dexter, as fans will know, works as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department. The basic salary for Miami cops is about $50,000 (€37,000) a year. I’m sure the salary for a crime-scene investigator is somewhat higher, but he’s still on public-service pay grades. Yet Dexter is maintaining a very nice condo apartment, a large suburban house, a lovely motorboat, a big car, a full-time nanny – perhaps more than full time: she seems to work half the night as well – and all the many tools of his trade as a serial killer. So far as we know, he has no other source of income.

This isn’t just a particular instance of sloppy plotting, though. It seems to point to a general principle: realism about money is what separates the good from the great in American TV drama. Just as ignoring the money question is the mark of mediocrity, the converse is also true: the dramas that are driven by money tend to be the really good ones.

Money was the sea on which The Sopranosfloated. A constant image throughout the series was the bundles of large-denomination notes that Tony hid in a barrel by the pool. Carmela, his wife, was always nagging him about financial security for herself and the kids if Tony was killed or went to jail. The mechanics of getting and spending were threaded through the interactions of the mobsters: who got what cut, who paid for what. Sheer, naked greed was never far beneath the surface: remember the shocking scene in which Paulie murders an old woman for the cash under her bed?

Likewise, in The Wire, practically every plot was driven by money: drug money, money to buy groceries, money to survive, money to be stolen, hustled, hidden, flashed, haggled over. When Kima makes Bubbles a paid informer, he doesn't just take some cash, like he would in the movies. He objects that Kima's offer of $30 a day is less than the minimum wage, to which she replies, "But there's no withholding, Bubs, it's tax free." When Tommy Carcetti is running for office, there's a long and brilliant scene of him trying to avoid the awful but inevitable task of making begging phone calls to donors.

In the under-rated but brilliant Brotherhood(which, incidentally, has the best Irish TV performance in recent years in Fionnula Flanagan's terrifying ubermammy), there's a relentless realism about cash. For the ambitious politician Tommy, there's a constant undertow of panic at the fact that he and his family can't live on his lousy state-legislator's salary. Daily concerns like fixing up his grubby house shape his actions all the time. A dollar sign hovers over every aspect of the drama: crime, politics, family life.

And the same is true of the best current series, Breaking Bad. Ordinary financial concerns have driven the plot from the start: when we meet him, Walter is working two jobs, as a teacher and a car-wash attendant. The brutal realities of middle-class life in the United States – struggling with the mortgage, paying for healthcare, keeping the car going, getting by on a public salary – are the context for everything that happens. Physical cash – hidden in the air-conditioning ducts or hauled around in holdalls – is never far from the action.

It is hard, in this, to tell the chicken from the egg. Good writers want to be convincingly realistic and will therefore deal honestly with the centrality of cash in American life. But it also works the other way around: once you’ve started to follow the money it becomes an organising principle, a touchstone. If as a rule you have to explain how people are making ends meet, you can’t suddenly float in a character who has no visible means of support. And this keeps the drama honest and grounded. It gives it an engine: the relentless need to get enough money and, if you’ve got enough, to get more.

What's interesting about this is that it places the best of recent American TV drama in a direct line with the best American theatre. For money is also one of the great themes of American stage plays. Consider arguably the two quintessential plays of US drama: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesmanand Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.

Miller’s Willy Loman exists in a society where “the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell”. O’Neill’s James Tyrone has allowed his relationship with his son to be blighted by his refusal to pay for expensive medical treatment. His pathological (utterly Irish) relationship with money is such that he has also done the same to his wife.

The great American drama isn't sex or politics; it's the dollar. Much of what we see on TV is designed to occlude this raw reality. Especially in comedies (think Friendsor Will & Grace), young people live in inexplicably beautiful apartments and wear inexplicably lovely clothes without ever telling us how they pay for them. Showing the money is thus, in itself, a breach of convention. It's the most transgressive thing you can do, much more hard-edged than sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. The golden age of US TV drama is thus also the age of nickels and dimes, of the hard, relentless struggle for cash. In money lies truth.