It is a truism that the characters we see on TV tend to be far more affluent than the overall audience--the "First World," "middle-class" viewers of the shows only able to fantasize about having such homes and clothes and disposable income as those they see on the screen.
Those characters also tend to have much more disposable time on their hands.
Of course, this can seem a narrative convenience. People who don't have so much time are less likely to be able to have a wacky adventure or piece of melodrama every week.
Still, it can get ridiculous, with one case that has always seemed to me especially glaring Friday Night Lights--what I saw of it in reruns, anyway. This was in part because the "sell" here was so strongly based on its "realism," which such devices as the "shaky cam" were supposed to consider.
Think, for a moment, about the football players. In real life an intelligent, dedicated and energetic high school student has their hands quite full just keeping up decent grades while putting the hours into their sport. But we were constantly given the impression that this "realistic" show's football players were all, or if they weren't could be if they cared to be, honors students and state champions, all while putting in long hours on part-time jobs, and coping with levels of family melodrama that drive adults to nervous breakdown, while having immense amounts of time for hobbies, girlfriends, and "hanging with their buds" for endless hours in a bar (guess they don't "card" in this time), all without anyone ever apparently suffering from exhaustion.
Yet no one has ever remarked all this in the slightest.
Some grasp of reality, that, on the part of those who called it "realistic."
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