How come when I was a kid, every house I saw on TV had two stories?
…
I both do and don’t mean this as a serious question.
I mean, on one hand, the answer is obvious: “Because television”.
TV is never particularly realistic. In the grand scheme of things, portraying suburban families living in two story houses is probably about as close to “truth in television” as the entertainment industry gets.
And besides, two story houses work well for television. Staircases add a touch of action—going up or down a flight of stairs, while unremarkable, is still more climactic than walking down a short hallway. The setup lends itself well to grand reveals, and makeover scenes, and stumbles that can be used for the desired effect. Stairs make it easier to cut between scenes; they make the lack of floorplan continuity less obvious. They help disguise the fact that everything is being filmed on a studio set.
But also, two story houses often look a little nicer.
They often have slightly better curb appeal.
They can easily turn into a shorthand for plenty—for the idea that a household, even of modest means, has enough of everything. A reassurance that in TV Land, all is well. That no matter the economy, no matter the hands of fate, no matter the choices anybody makes, TV Family is still going to have plenty of money to buy all of the things advertised during the commercial breaks, with no need to stock up on 5 lb. bags of Cereal O’s and the soda that just says “Cola” on the front.
The two-story house is a reassurance that TV Family will not have to cancel the planned two-episode trip to Disney on account of the Suburban dying and the roof starting to leak. A reassurance that there will always be plenty of resources for wacky hijinks, and that the car through the living room will be a teachable moment; not the kind of stress that takes a decade off of Dad’s life.
A reassurance that nobody will ever have to do without in any meaningful way.
And this is where I become less comfortable with the two story ubiquity.
…
When I was a kid, watching TV was like staring into a parallel universe.
The houses and families shown were clearly supposed to be similar to mine.
And, they basically were: Unless explicitly stated otherwise, most of the families on TV were coded as middle class and suburban. The neighborhoods often looked kind of like my neighborhood. The schools looked kind of like my school, with about the same demographic makeup. The parents appeared to shop at the same stores as my parents, and often worked at similarly non-descript white collar jobs.
But also, the houses on TV were cleaner.
The furniture was nicer—not way nicer, but just enough nicer. Just enough nicer to make it kind of uncanny, like “Well, I guess this is what our living room would look like if we all started making waaaay better life choices, and things went wrong like, 30% less often…”
It always looked as though things had been picked out with that particular room in mind—like the Mom and Dad had specifically gone out to the furniture store and said “This is the right sofa for our family room”.
Which, in theory sounds super reasonable, but also, it’s been 35 years, and I’ve never once lived in a house where somebody did that.
Similarly, nobody on TV ever looked as exhausted as my parents, and my friends’ parents.
People on TV would come back from their white collar jobs looking refreshed and ready to take on the world of domestic leisure. The people I knew would come home looking 20 years older, and might or might not chug between one and five beers alone in the garage before facing the gauntlet of fighting kids and a spouse who was angry about a stain on the good tea towel.
The adults on TV were clearly getting more rest; they were clearly getting enough fruits and vegetables.
And crucially, money didn’t seem to come up a lot; not in the day to day sense.
There would be episodes about money—there would be episodes where a parent was worried about losing a job, or a conversation about paying for college, or so on, but day in and day out, money didn’t seem to be a major source of concern. It didn’t work its way into every dinner conversation. It didn’t cast a shadow over every decision.
The only families on TV who had to worry about money were the ones who were explicitly struggling—Dan and Roseanne Conner, Al and Peggy Bundy, Hal and Lois of Malcolm in the Middle.
For the non-descript white collar families in comfortable neighborhoods, concerns about money were always a passing thing.
And all taken together, this would leave me with a vague sense of shame; a sense that my family and those around me had failed in some crucial way.
I knew that our lives didn’t look quite like the families on TV, and I worried what that said about us.
The majority of the houses I’ve lived in over the years have been ranches.
When I was a kid, there were always dirty dishes piled in the sink, and jackets strewn about the living room, and stacks of papers covering the dining room table. Sometimes a maid or cleaning lady would come by, and that would help, but within a few hours, the messes would start to accumulate again. My parents would try assigning chores, they’d try giving us kids an allowance for tidying up, but for all of the attempts at cleanliness, we were always living in a tornado of half-finished cans of Coke and dirty laundry.
And fortunately/unfortunately, the ACT prep books and discarded Abercrombie pullovers weren’t detracting from any masterful home decor.
In the grand tradition of average people everywhere, “decorating” mostly meant going into the local discount furniture store, grabbing a new sofa based on what was available/on sale, and then beginning the great sofa shuffle, wherein the former “good” sofa would be moved to the basement, and the old basement sofa would be offered up to whichever relative needed a free sofa. If we moved, we were moving two miles down the road, and the Big Lots sofa would come with; looking just as artful in the new living room as it did in the old one.
Mom or Dad would swap out the wall art occasionally. Once in a while, one $20 tchotchke from Pier One would be swapped for another $20 tchotchke from T.J. Maxx. We replaced our coffee table once, after my cousin spilled nail polish remover on the wood veneer. But…that was about it.
It was an efficient, cost-effective solution.
Pretty much every house in town looked like that.
Similarly, money was always being talked about.
Financial worries were just a part of the atmosphere.
Grass is green, the sky is blue, carbon is the building block of life, and nobody I knew ever had enough money for the things they wanted.
Some families might have had more money than 99.8% of all human beings on this planet, but that still wasn’t going to be enough to pay for the new lake house and the new boat and the winter ski trip. And so, they were all right back in the same boat as everybody else; complaining about prices at the grocery store and panicking at the thought of having to buy a new hot water heater.
Moreover, while these problems were sometimes overblown (“Oh no! We might have to dip into the savings account that is specifically for home maintenance in order to do some scheduled maintenance!”), other times, the problems were real. As in, “We can’t pay the mortgage this month, and also, I hope nobody in this family plans to get hungry until my next pay period”-real.
To see all of this missing from regular television shows was like noticing that the people lived in a world without trees, or without roads. It was clear that a normal part of daily life was just…missing.
I bring this up because I both do and don’t think this is a serious issue.
Again, to state the obvious, TV isn’t real life.
Nobody ever turned on The Disney Channel and said to themselves “I wonder how many of these sitcoms are based on a true story…”
Nobody ever mistook The Transformers for a documentary film.
But also, TV and movies do convey broader social norms. They do shape expectations, and provide a window into other worlds. They do both mirror and shape reality, if only in a tiny way.
Moreover, most people’s lives are pretty small—for all of the advances in technology, I don’t actually have all of the world’s knowledge at my fingertips.
Nobody does.
Learning what sound a platypus makes might only be a Google search away, but if I want to learn what day-to-day life actually looks like for other people, I’ve got a pretty limited sample to work with.
I…could probably arrange to stay with a friend for a week, if I really wanted to.
I could go visit either of my parents. I could visit my sister.
But…that’s about it.
At any given time, I could maybe name off 15 or 20 people who I know well enough to understand the basic contours of their lives—who I know well enough to have a general idea of what their daily routine looks like, and what they have for dinner on a normal Tuesday, and what they bicker about with their spouses.
But beyond that?
It’s honestly all guesswork. The best I can do is extrapolate based on the things I do know, and that isn’t much. Moreover, I’m almost certainly throwing some inaccurate data into that formula: Since I only have a 20 person sample to begin with, and that sample is based on the 20 people I’ve spent the most time around, I’m hardly basing things on a representative population. Trying to extrapolate what the entire universe looks like based on my own family and a handful of my closest friends is like trying to predict the outcome of an election based on a QAnon rally, and the opinions of the woman at the coffee shop who identifies as a cat.
The media helps fill in those gaps.
Movies and TV shows and magazines all provide glimpses into what other people do; how other people live. How the world works outside of one’s own tiny little corner of the universe.
A person knows that what they’re seeing is fiction; that it isn’t an entirely accurate peek. But…that same media also provides some of the only peeks a person has into the world beyond his or her own.
And because of this, I can’t help but think there’s something pernicious about this perpetual upsell; this constant airbrushing of reality.
Shows that are explicitly about the affluent are one thing. Beyond extremes such as Gossip Girl or Keeping Up With the Khardashians, I’m fine with the idea that some families don’t have to worry too much. I’ve known those families. I’ve met those people. They don’t have magical unicorn dust; they simply have high incomes and live below their means. The surgeon next door was less frazzled than my parents: He drove a Corolla and was living in a house that’s total purchase price was 1/3 of his annual income. Bro had some wiggle room.
But when every house is two-stories, when every room is decorated just-so, when everybody just magically has the time and energy to maintain a spotless house and put out a full spread for breakfast every morning, I want some answers.
I want to know what those people are doing. I want to know where they find the time and money. I want to know what other things they’re sacrificing to make that possible. And moreover, I want an acknowledgement that they aren’t “average”.
I want an acknowledgement that even within universe, they are probably at least slight outliers to always have full checking accounts, a recently updated contemporary colonial, tastefully coordinating furniture, freshly squeezed orange juice every morning, enough free time to scrub the baseboards every afternoon, and plenty of money for family vacations to Hawaii each summer.
I mean, it doesn’t have to be anything grand.
It doesn’t have to be a primary plot point.
Just…something.
Something to establish that they are the minority; not the family next door who has a stack of bills on the counter and a pleather sofa in the basement from Bargain City, circa 2002.
Something to establish that the rest of us aren’t the problem; that the dirty dishes and dented Camry aren’t a moral failing.
Something to remind everyone that TV isn’t real life. That this isn’t a family in crisis just because the car is making some weird sounds, somebody skipped breakfast, and I have a pile of unfolded laundry sitting on the couch.
Something to remind me that I’m the normal one; not the lady cheerfully humming while she packs lunches in her perfect, airy kitchen.
….
Bonus: For anybody needing either a dose of weird nostalgia, or a reminder that TV families are not the norm, I present this piece from University of California TV. It is quite literally about UCLA anthropologists going into regular, messy, middle class houses, circa the early aughts.
Nobody Marie Kondos anything. There is no “before and after”. It’s just regular overworked people living in a state with high housing prices, a 300 pack of paper towels, 27 frozen pizzas, a mountain of Legos, and enough crap from J.C. Penney’s to clothe the entire continent of Africa. And anthropologists discussing their findings.
Cluttered Life: Middle Class Abundance