There’s a truism that’s been making the rounds for a while now, an idea that TV ignores working-class families. There is a sea of TV series about families whose problems skim the surface of financial reality, stories about people who are oblivious to amorphous, inescapable class anxieties in the way that only comfortably middle- and upper-middle-class families can be oblivious. And in the midst of that expanse, much of the response to the Roseanne revival, which ends its tenth season next week, has made the show seem like a singular, stand-alone boulder that’s been plunked into TV’s otherwise comfortable, wealthy waters. That truism is based on truth. There arenot enough television shows about working-class families and people with blue-collar jobs. There are not enough sitcoms that focus on retail employees, or young people with college educations and no way to pay for their own housing. There are not enough sitcoms about families with lower-level white-collar jobs who still can’t pay for health care.
“Not enough” is not the same as “none,” though. Roseanne is part of a lineage of TV-sitcom families, stretching back through a Norman Lear–centric boom in the ’70s and reaching all the way to some of the earliest TV shows with characters imported from radio serials. And just as importantly, it joins a too-small but existing cohort of TV shows about what it’s like to live on the edge of not having enough, to drive a car with plastic wrap taped over where a windshield would be, and to sneak food into a movie theater in order to save money. Inspired by this timeline of families of color on television, this list of working-class TV sitcoms is an effort to sketch out a history of how TV has depicted working-poor and lower-middle-class families since the beginning of the medium.
This timeline is not exhaustive. It doesn’t include a number of sitcoms that only appeared for a handful of episodes, and it also ignores many series that are ostensibly about working-class characters but which avoid any meaningful grounding in financial realities or class-based anxieties.