This was a common trope on TV shows of that era: Everyone had a cool house with a lot of space. It wasn't a reflection of reality, it was how sets were designed and shows were drawn.
The Simpsons even made fun of the fact in the famous Frank Grimes episode where they pointed out how absurd it was that Homer was a doofus who had a big house and beautiful family.
Somewhere along the line, we started confusing this TV reality with how families actually lived at the time.
You want aspirational, look to Family Guy. Somehow Peter Griffin can afford a helicopter, a jet pack, and whatever expenses are required to obtain the foot of the statue of liberty.
>maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s
I think even in 1989, when the show debuted, two income families were starting to be (or already had been) pretty typical. I think the Simpsons might have been poking fun at the 1960s and 1970s family sitcoms where the dad went to work and the wife stayed home.
Edit: But you're right that in the 80s and 90s you would have a decent chance of buying a house (on those two incomes).
It isn't - especially if you watch the original first season of the Simpsons [0] (Homer's Odyssey - the 3rd episode of the Simpsons written right as the 1990 recession was kicking off) as well as that Frank Grimes episode back in 1997 [1].
The older Simpsons episodes weren't that common on syndication from what I can remember growing up - at most you might see an episode from 1994 in the early 2000s, so I wouldn't be surprised if these episodes may have been forgotten.
Simpsons in it's original iteration during it's golden age (1989-1999) was essentially lampooning the 1960s American dream (which itself was legally unattainable for a large portion of Americans in the 1960s - there's a reason why we had a Civil Rights Movement as well as normalized anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Greek, anti-Spanish/Portuguese, and anti-Jewish sentiment until these communities assimilated into being "white" in the 1980s and even heritage Americans in vast swathes of America lacked indoor plumbing, medical care, education beyond the 5th grade, etc) being punctuated by the harsh realities of America at the time [4] (eg. $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling) from 1993).
What I've noticed from the comments on HN (as well as the viciousness of the community when I point this out) is most HNers grew up in middle and upper-middle class households in the 1980s-90s that in most cases weren't representative of the lives the median American would have lived then, and a lot of the rose tinted glasses appear to betray that upbringing.
For example, from 1989 to 1994, household incomes in the US dropped at the same rate as they did during the Great Recession and the COVID Pandemic [2] and didn't recover until 1997, but because most HN users today weren't the head of a household during that period they view the 1990s as a golden age.
It's the same with 1980s nostalgia with everyone ignoring the 1980s recession which is lampooned in Mr Mom [3] - strip the 80s humor and it's basically a story about a single earner household where the primary breadwinner is made structurally unemployed right when the Rust Belt was starting to rust due to Japanese and German automotive exports becoming more competitive than American exports.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1W8O-CKNw
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNj2nlFttCM&t=71s&pp=2AFHkAIB
[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Guilty as charged! I also do think that there’s an additional sense within those communities of the “normalcy” of homeownership both within the spaces, and reflected back via mass culture. True, nobody in New York has an apartment like they did on Friends, but the shows made to appeal to middle class America, even the ones like Married with Children still held “well there’s a house” even though the main character is a deadbeat - this isn’t played for laughs or out of irony, it’s just the default.
Even in the 50s, 60s, and 70s sitcoms and shows you rarely see people renting - homeownership rates are pretty steady around 62% back to the 60s. Among white Americans it’s like 75% or something. So I don’t think it’s entirely rose tinted glasses, even if there is a point to be made about the biases of the HN crowd.
Sure, but you have to remember only 58% of Americans today are non-Hispanic White.
For the other 42% of us, we would have been legally segregted in much of America deep into the 1970s as it took the DoJ a lot of effort to litigate against explicit and implicit attempts to sidestep the civil rights act. For us, while there may be a kernel of truth in what you described, the reality is we would have been second class citizens if we were born then.
If you want to complain about rising housing prices, complain about that. But don't perpetuate the myth that the 1970s and earlier would have been heaven when a large portion of Americans today would have been segregated back then.
It's insensitive.
> True, nobody in New York has an apartment like they did on Friends, but the shows made to appeal to middle class America, even the ones like Married with Children still held “well there’s a house” even though the main character is a deadbeat - this isn’t played for laughs or out of irony, it’s just the default
Few shows represent the bottom 50% of society irrespective of race let alone back in the 1990s or even today. The only prime time shows I can think of that showed that bottom half of society as independent individuals was Shameless.
Even "The Jeffersons" back in the 70s was basically a standard upper middle class sitcom despite being revolutionary in showing African Americans on primetime.
Heck, the HDI of much of America in 1990 [0] is comparable to Russia, Serbia, and Belarus today [1].
And even Marc Andreessen would often recount growing up in the rural Midwest without indoor plumbing and having to take a s#it in the freezing cold. He was born in 1971.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[1] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks
He and Lamont were middle and upper-middle class by African American standards as was seen in the 1970 Negro (the then term for African Americans) Census by the the US Department of Commerce.
And by overall American standards back then they would have probably been around the 50th to 60th percentile of households by income and would have been earning at least 60% than their racial peers in the South at the exact same time.
If you go through US Census data from 1970 - almost a decade after the Civil Rights Act was passed - it is harrowing. Now imagine how much worse it was before that.
[0] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1971/demographi...
Very few shows, show actually living situations (flight of the choncords is the only other I can think of).
Sadly, a lot of that authenticity fell to the wayside when the original Simpsons writers left the show to work on "Futurama" and "The Critic" and Fox retooled the show for syndication.
I'm personally more of a KOTH fan - I found it to be a much more grounded example of middle class life in the late 1990s and early 2000s while also recognizing that the Hills had it good. I find a similar strain of authenticity in Bob's Burgers (unsurprising since much of the team worked on KOTH).
> Frank Grimes is one of the best characters on TV
I remember getting enraged as an elementary schooler watching that episode because his statement hit true, but we were also a family of 4 living in a 1 bedroom apartment at the time and newly immigrated, and even then I felt similar to Grimes when watching the Simpsons.
When I reached my teens, I finally understood it was a callout by the writers trying to remind viewers that the Simpsons wasn't reality.
Interesting. This is not how I interpreted it at all in my initial viewing ( or subsequent ones for that matter ). If Grimes criticized anything, it was Homer and people like Homer. If it was a meta-commentary, it was certainly not drawing a distinction between reality of Grime's life and the imaginary one income head of the household doing surprisingly well given the circumstances. Grimes story was a story of a guy, who just had a bad luck.. over and over again, but even when the good luck did show, he failed the test and focused not on what he gained, but others have despite being, in his eyes, lesser than him.
That is the moral of the story. Don't be Grimes. He may wish he can be Homer Simpson, but he sure can't touch those high voltage signs.
That's what I meant, though it absolutely was a form of meta-commentary as well.
Anyway, they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.
You can see the number of lines drawn go up like crazy around season 10 or so, making it feel less realistic. Coincidentally, the writing also started to get worse around this time.
Computers.
I, too, liked the rawness of the earlier hand-drawn ones.
A lot of people say Family Guy copied the Simpsons, but in reality I actually found that the Simpsons tried to copy Family Guy's style of humor and did a very terrible job at it.
If you watch The Simpsons DVD commentary on the very first season DVDs, they talk about how Matt Groening's team would draw the key frames and then they would ship them to an asian animation studio to provide the animation frames. The very first time they did this, they got an animation style that was all over the place - not just the quality of drawing, but the actual animation style was jello-y and way more wobbly than they wanted. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk
The main reason that they sent it back was that the style and physics represented in the cartoon wasn't the one they were going for, and it changed how the show felt. I feel like the rapid cut references they adopted from Family Guy did a very similar thing. It changed the flow of the show, which, maybe (?) is actually more of a sign of the times and attention span than animated show style, but still, I wasn't a fan and I didn't feel like The Simpsons did it naturally or that it fit, and it takes me out of the narrative every time they do it.
Family guy debuted in 1999. It's hard to say Simpsons tried to copy family guy's style. Family Guy is really known for its cutaways (usually to some non sequitur) & somewhat crude humor. A lot of the jokes at this time hinged on Stewie not being understood by anyone but Brian, Brian himself being a dog. There were also a lot of references to musical theater. The Simpsons was different from this.
https://deadhomersociety.wordpress.com/zombiesimpsons/
Under this explanation, the early show is basically a totally different thing from what it became by somewhere around season 10. Even if it didn’t “get worse” (I think it definitely did also do that, but it’s not necessary for this explanation to work) it became something so different that it’s not surprising that a lot of people who liked the early show, don’t like what it has been since the change.
They do have a history, because in the Grimes episode he talks about things Homer did in other episodes, and the characters themselves sometimes make reference to things in the past.
But it must be a fun writing challenge to take characters that don't age but somehow seem to rack up a lifetime of experience.
It is now simply an extremely cost-efficient form of content relative to the value of the ad slots and licensing of the IP. People working on it now are technicians delivering a product to spec that is basically a perfect use case for generative AI.
"Hey claude, write me an episode of the simpsons where Homer starts investing in NFTs while Lisa and Bart goes to a comedically sinister horseback riding summer camp with a guest star that has a movie coming out this summer."
Or even:
"Write a skill that creates standard length 22 minute new simpsons episodes scripts and scene video prompts by combining a trending news topic with two or more simpsons characters. IMPORTANT: make it wacky!"
[0] "Tell me a bedtime story about a light cobblestone and a heavy cobblestone". It was already late and I was out of ideas for improvised tales.
Zombie Simpsons has been on longer than the golden and silver age of the Simpsons. They really need to let it go.