If you are like me and enjoy watching murder mystery thrillers, and recently there have been a spate of limited-series TV shows in this genre, you can be excused for thinking that most murders occur in the homes and families of the well-to-do, either upper middle class or very wealthy. In most of them, people live in fancy homes, some even in massive quasi-castles with servants and large landscaped gardens, and drive expensive cars. Even if not that elaborate, the homes that the characters live in seem to be quite expensive and their interiors all spotless and the product of interior designers. These shows seem to be a form of real-estate porn.
I know that such programs are a form of escapism and not meant to reflect reality but I was wondering why the creators of these shows are so drawn to that kind of setting for their stories. One almost never sees these shows dealing with working or lower middle class people, except as secondary characters whose homes we never get a glimpse of except passingly.
This is also true for books in this genre. I read a lot of detective stories as a boy, such as the Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie ones, and they almost always took place in the homes of rich people, though the setting may be a small village where the homes are.
The reason may be because audiences seek vicarious pleasure from seeing how the rich and famous live. Also, with rich people, they have the resources to hide their crimes, and money is often the motive and that requires some sleuthing to unearth, whereas poor people are more limited in the ways in which they can carry out a murder and hide it. So writers may find it harder to construct a complicated story with many false trails if those involved are ordinary people living in small homes.
It may also be that viewers are attracted to seeing how very wealthy families can be venal and dysfunctional, creating an element of schadenfreude in seeing that money does not bring with it a lack of problems.
I do not watch regular broadcast TV anymore. I live in an area where the over-the-air signal is too weak to receive and I do not subscribe to cable. But back in the day when I did, there used to be weekly shows with main characters who were working class, such as All in the Family, Alice, Sanford and Son, mixed in with shows like Dallas and Dynasty that had a wealthy setting. Are there any shows like that anymore that feature working class people? Although I do not watch regular TV, I do read articles about them and I do not recall any reviews of shows like that.
I’ve also noticed that every single building and interior in shows is spotless and lavish. As if only that is good enough for their story, and will attract people to it.
It’s like everyone being beautiful: not just the leads, but also right down to all the extras in a crowd walking by in the background! I was really surprised, and rather shocked, when I first visited England and realized that there, you didn’t have to be beautiful to be on TV.
Agatha Christie was once asked about the large number of rich people in her books, and she apologetically answered that money was so often the motive for murder that often at least one character had to have some.
No, I don’t think they make shows about working-class people anymore. Or rather, none that I’ve seen.
Naah. Not in Britain. But the murder victims in Midsomer County (within the remit of Causton CID) often have relatively posh villas. To compensate, at least as many farmers and middle-class people get electrocuted guillotined or exploded.
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The American TV shows appear to appeal to wishful thinking; the invisible hand of market forces will one day make me afford that stuff.
Vera Stanhope, inspector Rebus or inspector Frost spend most of their time in rain-drenched working class places. But this is a completely different narrative universe.
A UK series my wife and I have enjoyed is Shetland, set in the northernmost archipelago of the UK, and it does have quite a social range of both victims and criminals. As far as realism is concerned, though, there are generally at least three murders per series whereas in fact, three is I think more murders than have occurred in Shetland over the past century!
Another UK series with a wide range of victims and killers is Silent Witness, in which the main characters are a team of forensic pathologists. But they are always getting closely involved in the police investigation and with relatives of the victims -- which I am absolutely sure simply doesn’t happen in reality.
Birgerjohansson@3 reminds me of A Touch of Frost, and he’s right, it did take place mostly in “rain-drenched working class places”. Its least realistic aspect was perhaps the number of women who are attracted to Frost, who is in late middle-age, short, slightly tubby, balding and unkempt!
I miss the days when the detectives were smart enough to solve the murder in one episode as opposed to needing a whole season to solve it . Also I grow tired of the detective always having a troubled backstory and being personally involved in some way with the goings-on (I hate the hardboiled noir detective femme fatale type stories).
One reason for having upper middle class is that you don’t have to show them going to work or really the way these items would intrude on real life. (I am sorry detective but my manager wont let me bunk the meeting to discuss the case since the topic “make more profit” and “get costs down” are more important or I would really like to give you the hint that will let you solve the case alas it is my childs soccer class and today is my carpool turn )
“Are there any shows like that anymore that feature working class people? ”
Young Sheldon comes to mind. Dad is a high school football coach and Mom is a part time church secretary. Memaw has some money, but it’s from a backroom gambling operation.
The show just ended after a seven year run.
The Conners is another show; Roseanne back in the 1980s was about a blue-collar working family--at various times Roseanne worked in a plastics factory, as a waitress in a department store cafe, sold magazines over the phone, and in fast food. The husband had a construction company that went belly-up, tried to run a bike shop, and several other endeavors. Their home was old and battered. In the follow-on show, the family has fallen even further--at one point the even-more-decrepit family home was inhabited by the Roseanne and her husband, the first daughter and her baby, the middle daughter and her two kids, and the son’s stepdaughter (but not the son or his wife).
Abbott Elementary is an award-winning show set in working-class Philadelphia, and the teachers who work there live basic lives. The younger ones have multiple roommates in cramped apartments. One of the more senior teachers considers a fancy date with her husband to be going to the airport to eat in one of their restaurants. Of course there’s Young Sheldon, where the title character says several times that he does the family’s taxes and knows they’re poor. There’s also the American remake of Ghosts (based on the UK series by the same name) where one of the characters has inherited the stately-but-crumbling home of a relative she had no idea she had and she and her husband are struggling to stay afloat by running the house as a B&B.
Both Vera and Shetland are based on series by Ann Cleeves, who writes about everyday, average people. Christie’s Poirot (the David Suchet early 1990s version) was about going to exotic places and seeing things the average audience wouldn’t normally see as much as it was about solving a crime.
Both ‘All in the Family’ and ‘Sanford and Son’ were Norman Lear shows, but also both were based on British shows: ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ and ‘Steptoe and Son’. I’m guessing this speaks to British acceptance of class rigidity vs. American expectations of class mobility. For this same reason, I doubt there will ever be an American remake of ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, and perhaps that explains the paucity of American shows featuring lower-class characters.
Interestingly, AITF is often held up as the archetype of the argument between the “Greatest Generation” and the “Baby Boomers”, but Norman Lear felt it typified the arguments he had with his father, even though Norman was one of the GG. I’m thinking it really typifies the argument between the well-educated and the less-educated.
I guess Mano hasn’t followed Coronation Street.
Nor Eastenders.
It’s interesting that the examples of working class shows given in the comments are from the UK.
The original post was about murder mystery thrillers and of those, things like Shetland and Prime Suspect deal with ordinary people but they are also from the UK.
Kinsey Milhone and VI Warshawsky are very popular PI detective novels are about ordinary people. I have no idea if anyone has visually dramatized them. Maybe readers don’t care about the images being super pretty but television and movie viewers do? But to me this is a wild speculation. I have a much more cynical take.
The average movie or television show has about as much information in it as a short story. Limited series allow one to tell a novel/novelette. They cost a lot of money to produce and likely have fixed costs that are high whether or not the scenery is all fancy-like. So why not pick fancy whether it is a detective story or not?
The King owns the airwaves in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Here in the United States of America, The People do. Funding is guaranteed for them but not for us. The people there making the decisions may be the elite but they are making those decisions for their sovereign’s subjects. They can risk not-making-money. The people here making the decisions are all fancy-like and only have to answer to money. People like to see themselves. They may have to justify their use of the airwaves to the FTC who acts on behalf of The People. But the FTC is amazingly lax. So they do what and whatever they want.
Isn’t the United States culture-cracking the world in that our movies and television shows are watched everywhere?
seachange @13
Perhaps refrain from commenting on the situation in the UK if you can only demonstrate your ignorance.
In the United States of America, only The Rich People own anything.
Everyone else are chattel.
Two topics to comment on.
American television families, and how they are portrayed. I agree that there are few working-class depictions on sitcoms these days, but that really depends on how you define working class. Were the characters in Steinfeld working-class or middle-class, and what is the difference? Maybe you are really thinking about people working at poverty-level wages, which is a different thing. Al Bundy in Married with Children is an example of lower middle class, he worked at a fairly low wage in a shoe store if I recall correctly. But he had a house, with a mortgage, a television, enough money to go drinking, and while his kids didn’t go to a private school one of his kids had aspirations for college and again. Working-class? Maybe, but I wouldn’t call it poverty. I don’t watch much television, so I couldn’t tell you what is popular today, but I suspect that there are a lot of shows which ostensibly show middle class people.
Now, are those middle class people realistic? No. Shows like that are few and far between. As you say, their houses are spotless, not just free of neglected clutter, but showing no wear. There are no dust bunnies, slight discolorations of paint on the door edges or around the light switches (from dirt or from cleaning dirt), bulges in the drywall from poorly placed screws, any painting done looks professional (unless there is a joke is about how bad it is), dish towels are not used as napkins, toilet paper is always on the holder, etc. The sets which are supposed to be homes do not look lived-in. Even when a show does show a mess, it’s a obviously a recent mess. It’s the instant (and temporary) muddy hand-print on a wall, not the slow buildup of grime over years.
But there may be a reason, other than laziness, or unfamiliarity with the homes of most people in the USA. It may be deliberate, because it’s hard to make things look shabby without going to far and drawing attention to them. And the writers/directors/actors/producers do not want to draw a great deal of attention to the set, they want people to pay attention to the writing/acting. Personal anecdote: a number of years ago I spent my evenings as the technical director for a Gilbert and Sullivan company. I didn’t do much in the way of set design, but for the 50th anniversary of the troupe I designed a set for Pirates of Penzance with a faux stained-glass window with had portraits of Gilbert and Sullivan in the center with scenes out of 12 of their operettas around them. I asked a local artist to draw it up because I’m not all that good at representational art, but I took his sketch and made it into a 5-foot set piece. It looked pretty good. After a couple of the performances though I overhead some comments from the patrons who said they missed a lot of the second act because they were trying to decipher which image went with which operetta. For a show like Pirates that not really a big deal, anyone who knew enough to try to decipher my set piece had probably already memorized Pirates. (End anecdote) But the point is, if a set design is so brilliant to distract the audience from paying attention to the piece, that’s not really a good thing. Although the set designers would love it.
So while the observation about working class houses may be accurate, there may be reason for it.
Finally, what would the set of Sanford and Son or All In the Family look like today? There would be a computer in the corner, everyone would have a tablet or a laptop, and a lot of the arguments between Archie and Meathead would have had both of them looking things up on their phones to find arguments to support their views. I think the television industry is still adapting to what it means to have information at your fingertips, whether that information is accurate or not. In fact, I think our entire society is still adapting to this, so it’s not unforgivable that the television industry hasn’t caught up.
But on to mysteries, one of my favorite topics.
I can’t say much about how mysteries are portrayed on television or in movies. I’ve seen a good many, but they often seem to fall short of the books and most of the mysteries I read are not recent but older. But I’m sure you know that there are sub-genres in the world of mysteries, and one of the biggest sub-genre is the “cozy” mystery.
Typical attributes of the cozy mystery include where the victim is not in the expected readers class (usually a higher class), there are few (usually only one) murders, the victim is not blameless (they may not be evil, but they are generally not nice), and there are a large number of possible suspects. So yes, they are set in posh houses, among relatively rich people who don’t have a lot of other demands on their time, and the reader can enjoy a fantasy about how the wealthy live. Other writers of cozy’s are Ellis Peters with her Brother Cadfael series, Ngaio March with her Inspector Alleyn series, G.K. Chesterton with his Father Brown series.
But if the cozy is the largest sub-genre, there are a lot of others. Inspector Frost, mentioned above, is a police procedural. Frost just keeps plugging away at the mystery, usually taking shortcuts on police procedure, and figures out the perpetrator. Some thinking is involved, but Frost is not a genius with a magnifying glass or “little grey cells”. I have a special love for the J.D. Wingfield series featuring Inspector Frost because their structure is frenetic. Frost is exposed to between 4 and 8 crimes in each book. The initial mystery may take the entire book to solve or it may be solved early in the novel, but that doesn’t matter because Frost has another bunch of mysteries on his plate. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything like it structurally before. There are plenty of authors who pile on the mysteries, but most of them use a single mystery as a plot through the entire book. Wingfield is the only author I know who allows his detective to solve the initial mystery early in the novel, not that he does this with every novel, so even that isn’t predictable. Police procedurals are usually much more gritty and filled with drugs and prostitution.
But these are not the same as the Hard-Boiled detective novels. I think their origin comes from Dashiell Hammett, but there may be an earlier example I’m not familiar with. Hammett’s novels are not really mysteries at all, even though they are classified as such. There are certainly murders, some of them even which need to be solved. Archer’s death in The Maltese Falcon is an important plot point. But much of his work, like Red Harvest is strictly a blood-bath. Red Harvest was, as best I can tell, Kurosawa’s inspiration for Yojimbo which was, as we all know, remade into, A Fistful of Dollars. (Derivative films have been around for a long time, as have sequels. There were six “Thin Man” movies.)
Another type of mystery is the forensic mystery. Popular these days with the CSI series, or is it the NCIS, but as far as I can tell it really began with R. Austin Freeman’s Thorndyke series. While Thorndyke was ostensibly a lawyer and medical doctor, his mysteries all revolved around collecting everything about a crime, including dust and hair, and making inferences from all the evidence in his possession. Freeman was one of the most popular novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of Thorndyke’s clients are middle-class, but a few are lower-middle class artisans.
Then there are some which are hard to identify. The Australian writer Arthur W. Upfield created Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, a half-aboriginal, half-European who mixes the cultures (as understood by the author) of the Australian natives and the European settlers. They are good reads, but I’m not familiar enough with Australian culture to know if they are accurate. A lot of the victim and settings of these mysteries are middle or lower class.
Arthur Gask is another Australian writer who created the detective Gilbert Larose. Larose’s gimmick was disguise. He would select a suspect and worm his way into their trust to the point where he would be able to search their belongings, or even hear a confession, and then have the evidence to arrest them. Relatively popular in their time, 1930’s and 1940’s, but I wouldn’t say they are better than average mysteries. They are more like police procedurals, but Larose doesn’t follow procedure. Most of the suspects Gilbert investigated were, unsurprisingly, wealthy.
The Josephine Tay mysteries are excellent, with her Inspector Grant in most of them, but they are not easily categorized. One novel is a fictionalization of events which surrounded an accusation of kidnapping, another is a novel asking whether King Richard II really killed his nephews in the tower. Be a little careful with The Daughter of Time, Tay makes a good case and the writing is compelling, but it isn’t quite as solid as she makes it out to be.
But for all the mysteries I love, the one which I love the most is one which, sadly, does not appear to be very well known.
Night of the Jabberwock by Frederic Brown (better known as one of the best SF short-story writers who ever lived), is just about a perfect little mystery. There are three murders, and another death, but the plot revolves around the victim of a frame-up in a small town who has to solve the murder to clear his own name. Sounds like The Fugitive? I don’t know if there is any relation, but the novel was written in 1950 while the television show came out in 1963, so if there is a relationship the novel came first. In any event, the book is well-written, well-plotted, the characters are believable (if just a touch weird), and the conclusion is incredibly satisfying because the events of the night also allow the main character to complete a goal he has had for decades.