The 17 Best Working Class Sitcoms of All Time
Sitcom is one of the oldest and most venerable forms of television, and the ways they tried to reflect our “working class” economic realities are just as interesting as the ways they tried to hide them.
These are broad generalizations, but in the 1960s there were waves of escapist shows (think Bewitched ) that turned into outright fantasy to avoid any talk of what was going on in the wider world; The 1970s ushered in an era of more realistic shows that were still sitcoms but dealt with real issues (for example, Bea Arthur’s Maud had an abortion in 1972). Then the pendulum swung again and the 80s gave us Strokes Differences and Alpha and other shows that ignored or covered up economic realities (this is all very different in Britain where working-class sitcoms were the more consistent norm) . .
Here are shows that track what the “working class” looked like and meant to us from the 1950s to the present day.