Reading Response 3 (Week 5)

One of the recurring tensions in Lynn Spiegel's Make Room For TV is the relationship between lived and mediated experiences of class. She explains that the television's "rapid dissemination to the middle and even lower classes after 1948 transformed it into a poor person's luxury" (49-50). In these early stages, then, television was incorporated into the fairly stable class structure of 1930s and 1940s America. As the medium's influence spread and the economic boom of the 1950s offered many a suburban lifestyle, however, television took on a more active role in shaping the ways Americans thought about and experienced class. As she writes on page 84: "The television producer could educate the housewife beyond her means, but only through mixing upper-class fantasies with tropes of averageness." Already here, Spiegel identifies a way in which television – to borrow an idea from Umberto Eco – opens a window between working-class and upper-class households.


Suddenly, although the archetypal nuclear family model of the period lives in a private suburban home, the television opens these enclosed households up to the fictionalized private home on the studio set. More often than not – both in Spiegel's examples and in more recent television – the fictional television show home presents the working-class viewer with a fantasy home. Television's relationship to America's class-coded household architecture presents a fascinating example of the manner in which the mediated spaces of televisual homes can impact the lived experience, construction and decoration of lower- and middle-class homes (and later vice-versa as programs set in working-class milieus developed their own consumable class-coded iconography).

With television, the three-walled, big-budgeted soundstage home of the prime-time family becomes the model home for millions of viewers, peering every week into a mediated upper-class fantasy through their televisual windows. Television, then, doesn't simply offer the vicarious experience of living in a more comfortable class position, it opens the upper-class home up to consumption by the lower- and middle-income families. Perhaps the larger home represented in prime-time family programming isn't affordable to working-class viewers, but its design, decoration, layout and modes of use are suddenly closer at hand. Television doesn't just offer a vision of another class, it offers an adaptable version of class experience. In this way, the opening of windows onto all manner of class-coded homes – including the palatial Los Angeles mansion of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the elegant condo in Frasier (pictured above) and the comfortable apartment on Seinfeld, but also the working class homes of Roseanne and The Drew Carey Show – blurs distinctions between architectural styles.

The iconography of the wealthy household, once ensconced in the private residence, is now available for plundering every evening at 8pm. Likewise, the charms of the working-class home – however faithfully represented – offer a readily available architectural fantasy. The American home, since the spread of television, has become a field of class-coded signifiers increasingly detached from an identifiable class experience, available for consumption in, and assimilation through the home.