Poor people on US telly? Too implausible

SMALL PRINT:WHEN THE Irish watched Dallas in the 1980s, we thought this was what average Americans were like: fabulous, oil-rich cowboys and their massive-shouldered ladies. Blue-collar life did manage to make an appearance in shows such as Cagney and Lacey and Roseanne, but in subsequent years homes on US television have veered almost exclusively towards the upper middle-class.

When working-class people are represented at all it’s either as criminals or as plot-generating anomalies in a world of wealth. So we’ve had troubled foster-child Ryan in the wealthtastic OC, Betty Suarez moving from quirky blue collar to fabulous white collar in Ugly Betty, and formerly impoverished jailbird Emily Thorne upturning the lives of the swells in the very Dallas-like Revenge.

The root of the problem is dramatically represented in another new show, Lena Dunham’s excellent Girls (coming to Sky Atlantic in October). This features a cast of privileged characters funded by their wealthy parents to live creatively in New York, mirroring real demographic trends.

If poverty on American telly is only ever seen as a double act with wealth, it’s because those producing US television cannot conceive of programmes that don’t reflect their own privileged experience. The end result: unfunny sitcoms such as Two Broke Girls, in which one of the girls has to be a former heiress. I predict that this series will end with the two broke girls becoming rich. US television makers can no longer imagine things any other way.

The new series of Dallas begins on TV3 tonight at 10pm