Recently, however, the audience for realistic comedies has shrunk. The entertainment comes not from the setting, but out of the rapport among the characters. One of the biggest comedies of the 21st century, The Office, follows desk jockeys at a paper company another, The Big Bang Theory, takes viewers inside the apartment of some nerdy roommates. Most traditional sitcoms take place in a living room, a white collar workplace or at the hangout of a group of friends. When Disney+ has superheroes and Netflix has The Witcher, who’s going to buy a pilot about an interfaith marriage?Ĭomedies have historically been more hospitable to such characters. Game of Thrones created a market for genre epics, and perhaps in order to stay competitive, new realistic dramas, whether they’re procedurals or soaps, spotlight characters whose daily lives are somehow extreme: billionaires, women in prison, CIA agents. With This Is Us an exception that proves the rule, dramas about middle-income families or communities-think Six Feet Under, thirtysomething, Friday Night Lights-have become vanishingly rare. But while the miniseries lingers on the disparity in lifestyles between the Sacklers and the mining family, scenes that follow these middle- and upper-middle-class characters almost always center on their work.Īs in any procedural, their personal lives remain mostly in the margins. Dopesick also has its share of white collar professionals, from Michael Keaton as a rural physician to Will Poulter as a Purdue sales rep to Rosario Dawson as a DEA agent. A network prime-time schedule stripped of shows about doctors, lawyers and cops would have more holes than the case against the West Memphis Three. It’s not that television lacks characters who are implicitly coded as middle class. Yet there’s something ominous about the prospect of the vast majority of the population-everyone who lives above the poverty line but will never own an aircraft-disappearing from our screens. Then the pandemic hit, causing huge job losses among low-income workers as the wealthy benefited from Wall Street’s quick recovery. This trend is grounded in reality: Pew Research Center reported in January 2020 that the wealth gap between the richest 5% of Americans and everyone else doubled between 19.
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Meanwhile, in Appalachia, a closeted lesbian coal miner (Kaitlyn Dever) injures herself on the job, gets prescribed a supposed miracle drug and spirals into addiction.ĭopesick throws into relief how economically polarized realistic TV-that is, TV set in the here and now rather than in stardate 76000 or Westeros-has become. In a scene straight out of Succession, one elderly Sackler brother lunges at another in the family’s eponymous wing at the Met. At one extreme is the multibillionaire Sackler family, now synonymous with the ravages of its company Purdue Pharma’s signature drug, Ox圜ontin. 13, Hulu will debut Dopesick, a docudrama on the opioid crisis that captures both ends of TV’s socioeconomic spectrum. The past few months have brought Showtime’s American Rust, a dreary Rust Belt crime drama that opens with its central family on the verge of losing their decrepit home Netflix’s Maid, about a young mom who finds herself suddenly homeless and FX’s Reservation Dogs, a dark comedy set on an Oklahoma reservation where deaths of despair have become infuriatingly normalized. If anything, CBS will more likely find ways to continue capitalizing on its popularity. Here's everything we know about the future of The Big Bang Theory.If TV these days is bent on critiquing the ultrawealthy, it’s also invested in portraying the plight of the very poor. While The Big Bang Theory is officially wrapping up, that doesn't mean that fans can't expect more content from this franchise. Related: Why The Big Bang Theory Finale Could Be A Disappointment Through the years, we've seen the gang go through ups and downs leading to The Big Bang Theory's ending.
#BIG BANG THEORY SEASON 2 EPISODE 13 SERIES#
The series began with five main characters - Sheldon (Jim Parsons), Leonard (Johnny Galecki), Penny (Kaley Cuoco), Howard (Simon Helberg), and Raj (Kunal Nayyar) - but the roster expanded by season 4 with Melissa Rauch's Bernadette and Mayim Bialik's Amy made series regulars. The Big Bang Theory is ending, but can it still have a future? With the sitcom continuously delivering high ratings for CBS, thanks to its loyal fanbase, it makes sense that it'll somehow continue through other means, even though the flagship series is over.ĭebuting in 2007, The Big Bang Theory centered on a group of intellectually-gifted but socially-inept friends in Pasadena.