Some like it rich

In the past 18 years the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has widened and the middle class has grown ever smaller and more squeezed.
And that’s just the teenagers. The new incarnation of Beverly Hills 90210 made its splashy two-hour debut last week adjusted for inflation. As in Gossip Girl and Privileged, the conceit of 90210 isn’t fish out of water so much as fish moving into an even bigger swimming pool.

On the first season of Beverly Hills 90210, in 1990, an average mid-western family, the Walshes, moved to California from Minnesota, and the kids had to confront—and assimilate—Beverly Hills privilege and snobbery.

The 2.0 versions of the 90210 family, the Wilsons, come from Kansas, but they are hardly outsiders. The father, Harry, is the son of a wealthy, hard-tippling former actress, Tabitha. He is a prodigal Beverly Hills prince who returns to his old high school as the new principal and moves right back into the family mansion, a Renaissance-style villa.

The wealthy on television are now really, really wealthy, and anyone who doesn’t have a beach house and a butler might as well be on welfare. When the Wilsons’ teenage daughter Annie is asked out by a handsome schoolmate, she is dazzled not by his sports car, but by the private jet he uses to whisk her to an after-school date in San Francisco. “That’s what kids here do,” Annie tells her mother. “They have planes. And they go places, and they don’t tell their parents because it’s no big deal.”

It’s quite a change from the days when the most notable young people on television belonged to a comfortable middle class. After the Reagan revolution restored Gilded Age values, plutocratic wealth became fashionable on prime-time soaps like Dynasty.

It could be that adolescents simply do not want to identify with ordinary folk. Some economists argue that many lower-income Americans vote against their own financial interests—opposing tax increases on the wealthy or a national health-insurance plan—because they identify with people who have more money and hope that some day they too will reach those lofty tax brackets.
Teenagers are known for having eating disorders. Increasingly some seem to suffer from income dysmorphia. Sex and beauty could also be to blame; sex sells, but it is oversold on prime-time television. Money has more elusive allure.
_ALESSANDRA STANLEY, NYT

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