The Cupcake Revelation
Reading American sitcoms and their representation of the social world
Master Thesis presented by: Milana Kogan 10849041
Supervisor: Joke Hermes
2. Reader: Jaap Kooijman
Media Studies: Television and Cross-Media Culture (M.A.) Graduate School of Humanities
University of Amsterdam Academic year 2014/2015
Index
I Introduction
i. Sitcom as genre ii. Genre as contract
iii. Role of television in society iv. Political economic context v. TV as cultural phenomenon
II Sitcom and the understanding of the social world i. Realism in sitcom
ii. Method iii. Methodology
III Sitcom and the financial crisis of the 2010s, the case of 2 Broke Girls and Sex and the City
i. 2 Broke Girls and poverty
ii. Cupcake, the connection between two eras
iii. Impact of the financial crisis as shown on 2 Broke Girls
iv. Sex and the City and financial issues that never become a real problem
v. Sitcom’s representation of finances as dependent on the historical era in which the sitcom is made: Before and after the financial crisis
vi. “Emotional realism” in sitcom and in the representation of society
IV Sitcom and US politics in the 90s and early 2000s, social political values on screen. The case of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Dharma & Greg
i. Reagan, Bush, their values and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air ii. A new president, changing values and Dharma and Gregg
iii. Political values in sitcom: it is not just economical upheaval, it is also political change that can be taken up in sitcom
V Conclusion VI Appendix VII Notes VIII Bibliography List of Readings List of Literature
List of Internet References IX Declaration
I
Introduction
The relation between television and society has been a matter of debate since the emergence of television in the 1950s. Its impact on social change, social behavior, attitudes and values and the learning from the images it conveys has always proposed questions. Television is considered to be the leading medium of society (Koch 2010: 17). The TV screen is seen as a window to the world. It opens peoples’ minds to things that might have remained unseen. It challenges the audience’s view of the world by showing them otherwise concealed societies and norms. Thus, TV is able to gather and organize world knowledge and make it consumable (Schmitz 2012: 134). It presents a world and understanding of society that might differ from what is considered realistic but it can also represent the zeitgeist, showing society as it is perceived by the majority of the audience. In this way, television sends out social-cultural messages and gives meaning to the social world. These messages and the underlying meaning-creation vary in and among the variety of genres that television offers.
According to Connolly, “television does not represent the manifest actuality of our society but rather reflects symbolically the structure of values and relationships beneath the surface” (Connolly 2014: 24). This implies that even unrealistic, distorted representation of social facts represent the social values and esteem in which these values are regarded. In fact this shows a verisimilitude, a representation of something on TV that is likely to happen in the same way in real life in society. David Marc explains the effects of television on social orders and states that social norms, orders and values, such as topics revolving around career, relationships, and independence, can be re-configured through TV. In this case, the term ‘yuppie’ (young urban professional) and how it is understood had been predicted and partially created in television of the 70s that thematized new ideas and norms, such as career-driven and independent women in The Mary Tyler Moore
Show and its offsets (David Marc 1999: 143f.). These shows, commonly belonging to the genre
sitcom, as will be explained in a further paragraph, shifted the depiction of a domestic environment to a more open, public environment and changed its general topics and settings. Turner suggests that television constructs a culture that could be consumed and read by its viewers, who will differ from nation to nation. British and American TV each create a culture that they understand as the norm. It depends on the culture of the audience whether the produced norm is scrutinized (Turner, 2005: 416). In the case of sitcom, especially the sitcoms from the 80s were aiming to give the audience advice and ideas about social issues that Berman describes as an advice on “how to run our lives” (Berman, 1987: 5) and “an attitude towards things and towards ourselves” (ibid.).
The genre that I will further analyze is the sitcom, short for situation comedy that has developed as a from of comedy. According to the theory by Henri Bergson, “comedy is human, one laughs about traces of humanism” (Bergson, 1956: 62) and Sypher adds that “the ambivalence of comedy reappears in its social meanings, for comedy is both hatred and reveal, rebellion and defense, attack and escape. It is revolutionary and conservative. Socially, it is both sympathy and persecution.” (Sypher in Bergson, 1956: 242) But mostly, as defined by Neale and Krutnik, comedy can represent everyday life with a happy ending and filled with laughter (Neale and Krutnik 1999:
1). In relation to Sypher, it is notable that comedy is celebrating truth, which Sypher marks as “philosophical and psychologic compensation” (Sypher in Bergson, 1956: 246). Only if society is capable of laughing at the imperfections of the world, it can set itself free from the limitations of things. Therefore the comedic narrative has to represent the social world. When a work has verisimilitude, that is, it is represented close to the relations of the social world, or to what the viewer believes to be true, respectively the public opinion, it “has implications for conventional notions of realism” (Chandler 1997a: 47) and in turn can be truly understood and compensated. Krijnen et al. however argue that it is the realism that keeps viewer on a distant level of a narrative while fiction establishes as sense of shared experience (Krijnen et al. 2005: 357). Sitcom can be then seen as a representation of the general situation of the world and the society, and it can address current social events and problems that arise from social change. By its representation, sitcom helps understand the social world and social changes.
Three top economists agree1 that the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 has been the biggest crisis since the Great Depression in 1929. It caused the increasing widening between the rich and the poor and therefor unemployment, evictions and foreclosures among the populations. Large financial institutions collapsed, stock markets dropped and thus the economic activity decreased, leading to a global recession between 2008 and 2012.
During this time, particularly in 2011, the American TV comedy series 2 Broke Girls was first broadcasted on national American television, showing the life of two waitresses in their mid-twenties, who can barely afford to live. They discuss their poverty openly. One of the 2 Broke Girls is Max Black who is used to saving the little money she has and living in poor conditions. She lives and works in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York that is known for low rents that attract artists and young people who dream of starting their own businesses, for an ethnic melting pot, where different cultures and ethnicities come together, but also for a broad hipster culture that fosters a rapid gentrification.2 The other Broke Girl is Caroline Channing, a socialite and former rich girl from Manhattan whose father lost all their money in a Ponzi scheme, a fraudulent investment operation in which the operator doesn't pay back investors with earned profit, but uses new investments instead and thus generates high profit for himself. Her father is arrested for the fraud and thrown in jail, so Caroline has to start over as she is left without one cent. She begins working at the diner in which Max works, and becomes Max's co-worker, roommate and eventually best friend. She also comes up with the idea of starting a cupcake business with Max, when she finds out that the latter is a good baker. The sitcom thematizes poverty and the obtaining of money at first and wealth in general, and how two different characters, on the one hand a person that has always been poor and on the other hand a girl that is adjusted to wealth, deal with the effects of constant or sudden poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor is represented on the one side between the two different characters who show a different approach in dealing with poverty, wealth and the stigma that comes with each of the problems. On the other side the show represents the issues for both characters that are concomitant with the financial crisis, such as the problem of being in debt and paying it back.
In the thesis, I argue that sitcoms, in particularly the sitcom 2 Broke Girls, are not just shows for entertainment purposes but can be used to understand the social world, in this case the financial crisis and its effects on both rich and poor and how people deal with poverty. My research question will answer, how the sitcom 2 Broke Girls deals with the financial crisis, in order to show that earlier sitcoms also made contemporary social events a subject of discussion. The following questions are center of my analysis.
• Is it specific for the TV series 2 Broke Girls to deal with a contemporary social event or crisis like the financial crisis or does the genre of sitcom to which the series belongs do this more often?
• Can more contemporary themes be found in other series of the same genre?
• Is the interrelation between the social event of the financial crisis and the television show 2
Broke Girls a fluke or can an interrelation be detected between social events and problems in
earlier decades?
In order to answer these questions I will analyze the narrative, dialogues of specific episodes and the setting of 2 Broke Girls and relate it to the financial crisis. In a second step I will take the cupcake, the main symbol and subject of the business that Max and Caroline attempt to start, as a connection to an earlier TV series, namely Sex and the City which was broadcasted between the years 1998 and 2004. Although the cupcake only had a short performance on that show, it gained popularity and high revenue for its businesses in society and is, as I argue, until now a symbol for wealth and success as well as an extravagant lifestyle. The cupcake per se is just another type of sweets, a simple thing, but it constitutes people’s ability to spend money on extravagancies, on a dessert that has popular value. Thus, the cupcake represents a cultural, popular good that is not simple candy. And indeed, a cupcake has so much value and relevance that in popular media a Reality TV show was dedicated to it.3
Based on the link to the cupcake, the series Sex and the City and its representation of wealth, poverty and consumption will be analyzed and referred to 2 Broke Girls which will hopefully show that in the earlier decade these topics were addressed differently, if they were addressed at all. While for the 2 Broke Girls the issue of their poverty, the problem of paying back bills and debts and the consumption and concomitant buying process presents a continuous struggle and is therefore the center of the comedy, the women from Sex and the City rarely address these issues, but instead revolve their lives around the consumption of high end goods and even compare their dates and sex exploits to forms of consumption. This juxtaposition of the two series of two different decades will show the specificity of each sitcom to address certain problems and thus the current social state.
While the analysis of 2 Broke Girls and Sex and the City is specific for the financial crisis, I argue that sitcom represents the social world in many different aspects and thus is a representation of the real world in general. In order to argue more broadly, I will show that the logics of social representation don’t just apply to the above mentioned sitcoms but can be replicated for another era
within this genre. I will analyze two earlier sitcoms that deal with their contemporary social and political era, that primarily represent the presidency and its implied social values by its choice of narrative. The sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was broadcasted between the years 1990 and 1996 and takes place during the presidency of George Bush and right after the Reagan era and deals with the question of Black representation in a mainly White society and surrounding and the change of Republican values. Dharma and Greg which was on TV from 1997 to 2002, is the last sitcom used to exemplify the interrelation between the sitcom’s narrative and its characters with Bill Clinton’s presidency and the consequential Democratic values. All sitcoms discussed in this paper will show that it is a specificity of the genre sitcom to deal with a contemporary social, economic or political reality and represent it verisimilar and thus reflect on the social order, or even reconfigure society’s understanding of the status quo.
Therefore, it is crucial to clarify how sitcom can be understood and how it reflects society. As part of the broader system television, sitcom has its own way of dealing with specific events and representing the social world, which is reasoned in the fact that different genres have its own way of representation and build different expectations among their viewers. Further, television constructs in general a social reality. What is the broad role of television in constructing the social world? The underlying claim is that TV is needed to understand the social world.
Sitcom as genre
Sitcom as fictional narrative series has an ongoing storyline and recurring characters, whose lives are composed of comedic sequences, set within a family, workplace, or among a group of friends. An episode may feature a disruption of the usual situation and the character interactions, but this will usually be settled by the episode's end and the situation returned to how it was prior to the disruption. These episodes are then linked by the overarching storyline, driving the show forward. According to Marc, “sitcoms depend on familiarity, identification and redemption. The sitcom insists on a portrayal of reality. Since the seventies there has been a significant expansion of subject matter” (Marc, 1997: 20). For a long time, sitcoms have been criticized for its representations and therefore implicit failure to engage with social and political developments which excluded these representation from a larger social context (Mills, 2004: 64). The criticism also involved the representation of different aspects of society, such s class, rase and gender conflict as too simplistic and thus unrealistic (ibid.).
But while other genres may rely on a “realist aesthetic”, sitcoms effectiveness depends in part on artificial elements which are best displayed by the laughter track, a device that produces fake laughs and sounds and has been used in sitcoms since their inception. This device mimics a live audience and thus a theatrical atmosphere. But rather importantly the laughter track implies the basic aim of this genre, namely to make people laugh. It reminds the audience of what has to be understood in a comedic sense. It doesn’t evoke negative emotions. Therefore it also implies a certain “distance from standard form of realism” (Mills 2004: 68) which is founded in that fact that it is pure entertainment and thus creates a feeling of harmony by resolving every problem in the
narrative (Mills 2004: 67ff). The narrative is constructed under the scheme of three basic phases: equilibrium, disruption and closure (Krijnen 2005: 357). During an episode the protagonists are presented in their usual setting. They have to face a problem, a so-called disruption that thematizes topics such as racism, sexism, generational conflict, war and peace, and psychological and behavioral disorder. Within the timeframe of the episode the problem has to be solved in order for the characters to find closure.
Genre as contract
Sitcom presents a plot in a genre-specific setting. Feuer notes that genre per se is “an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world (Feuer 1992: 144). The term ‘genre’ originated from the Latin word for ‘class’ or ‘kind’ and is broadly referred to “distinctive type of text” (Chandler 1997a: 1). Further, Chandler’s definition involves that genre “constitute particular conventions of content (such as themes or settings) and/or form (structure and style) which are shared by the texts” (ibid., 2).
Chandler suggests that genre frames the way readers and viewers understand and interpret a text, so it is crucial to focus on how genre is identified (Chandler 1997a). Cohen also saw the importance of establishing genres because they involved the human need for distinction (Cohen 1986: 204). The contract theory of genre ramifies within this concept as it “rests on agreement between a writer and a particular public that specifies the proper use of a cultural artifact” (ibid., 208, Jameson 1981: 105, Neale 1980: 51). Neale thereby defines genre as “a set of expectations” (1980: 51). Jameson claims about genre that it is “immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right” (Jameson 1981: 105) which in other words means that genre provides expectations and norms for the interpretation of its text through the viewer or reader. Each recipient signs an invisible contract when he watches or reads a specific genre. Its text and style tell them how to react and interpret the text and what to expect from it. The result of a plot can be anticipated by interpretation of each genre. Tudor (1974), Lichter et al. (1991) and Chandler (1997) note that genre defines the social world and embodies values and ideological assumptions. Lichter et al. focus on televisual genre and reflectors of the values of program-makers, yet can also reflect values that represent an era. Following that, Neale (1980) stresses that genres not only reflect but also shape such values (Neale 1980: 16). Thereby it’s not the economic interest that produces and fosters genre but it’s indeed the capitalist environment and economic factors that perpetuate a profitable genre (Neale 1980: 51).
The genre contract mainly enables viewers and/or readers to judge a text and its reality status and satisfy expectations that are made upon the genre. Chandler notes that “familiarity with a genre enables readers to generate feasible predictions about events in a narrative (Chandler 1997a: 8) which in turn provide help for the interpretation. Because it can be understood as a means of construction of style and text, Fiske sees genre as “a means of constructing both the audience and the reading subject” (Fiske 1987: 114). Thus each genre can be understood as creating its own social reality.
When watching sitcoms, one expects to be amused and entertained. Sitcoms evoke positive feelings, humor and fun. Although this genre creates its own social reality and thus comprises a degree of realism, it presents a social world in which problems can easily be solved. The disruption of the narrative in each episode of a sitcom presents individual problems, such as not being able to pay rent, or not having insurance (examples from 2 Broke Girls). The problems and disruptions can be solved by sheer luck and are therefore are not transferable to society. However, this is how sitcom gives advice and constructs social meaning. It ridicules the presented problem by presenting it as an individual problems, allowing itself judgement over the protagonists who have to deal with the disruption. Humor leads to the problematic situation, but humor also leads out of there, packing the moral message in a u-turn construction. Thereby all bad an evil is constantly excluded from the problem-solving action in the sitcom, thus presenting a constant positive social world by sorting. Foremost, sitcom offers the idea that “all problems can be resolved with wit and humor within a short period of time” (Henry 1994: 86).
Role of television in society
The term society can be broadly defined. According to the Oxford Dictionary online (www.oxforddictionaries.com) ‘society’ can relate to “the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community”, but it can also refer to “an organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity”. Both definitions have in common that society is understood in a paradigm of shared norms, values, orders and purposes. Culture exists within society which is in the Oxford Dictionary defined as “the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group”, but can also encompass “the attitudes and behavior characteristic of a particular social group”. Silverblatt has noted that cultures and thus their realities are neither singular nor univocal. Rather multi-cultures exist, which, in comparison to nature, are various and varietal. As people exist in these multi-cultures simultaneously, interpretation of the texts and messages, these cultures (and hence societies) disseminate cause various interpretations and eventually tension between them (Silverblatt et al. 1995: 49).
Tension can also accrue from change within a society or culture. Social change is a global phenomenon that, Bourdieu (1980) defined as crisis that is a sudden structural change. In a stable social state, specific social rules structure the fields in which participants act and thus define their order. Bourdieu’s notion of crisis functions as a conjuncture that destabilized the general order. What then becomes a historical event can lead to question the pre-existing orders of a society and its ordinary experience and by this means effect the changing of a structured society. The dissemination and representation of the crisis and conjunction of serial effects is important to “maintaining the status quo” (Bourdieu 1980: 268) and implement the societal changes. Crucial hereby is the depiction of these certain causes on different modes of media, particularly on television which is the leading medium since the 1960s and plays a crucial role in disseminating public images and identities. Lull (1982) has argued that mass media such as television is capable of coordinating human interaction with social and cultural institutions and thus form a social
consensus that he defines as “a systematic form of interaction [that] takes place between television’s human senders and receivers” (10) which patterns the collective responses and thus understanding of society of audience members.
French philosopher and sociologist Bourdieu (2001) called the previously explained phenomena a reality effect. Television creates images and social beliefs and suppositions by showing things and making people believe in what is shown. This entails the power to mobilize (248). For Bourdieu is at stake
in local as well as global political struggles, […] the capacity to impose a way of seeing the world, of making people wear ‘glasses’ that force them to see the world divided up in certain ways (…). These divisions create groups that can be mobilized, and that mobilization makes it possible for them to convince everyone else that they exist, to exert pressure and obtain privileges, and so forth. Television plays a determining role in all such struggles today (249).
Because television has the power to mobilize and thus to give life to ideas, it is important for the reinforcement of social change. But Bourdieu also points out that TV creates its own reality which determines its modes of representation and its economical and political system. Both lead to censorship within the medium, which again leads to “homogenization and political conformity” (245). Thereby TV uses modes of exaggeration and dramatization, that blur the reality in which the events took place.
Fiske and Hartley (2003) describe television in a similar sense, mainly as it “occupies the center of its culture” being a “highly centralized institution of modern society” which is also “response to the culture’s felt need for a common center, to which the television message always refers. Its centralization speaks to all members of our highly fragmented society” (Fiske and Hartley in Gripsrud 2007: 482). The topics that are usually thematized in televisions’ messages with respect to social public issues such as “the degradation of family values, civil conduct and democratic values are often seen valuable for their impact they have on social constructs and thus give them meaning rather than for purely their content and narrative (Krijnen et al. 354). Silverblatt (1995) exemplifies TV’s social impact by encompassing certain conditions to its entertainment programming, thus reflecting its mainstream appeal in society. In this way it can be useful to look at the evolution of a certain genre over several decades to make the changes in society and culture visible (40).
Political economic context
Sitcoms and other television genres are nationally or internationally marketed products that are highly influenced by checks and balances from advertisers, network and production companies (Marc 1997: 11). For Vink “the first function of television is to sell an audience as huge and legitimate as possible” (Vink 1995: 214), that are brought to advertisers that interrupt shows and programming with commercials of their commodities. Berman argues that when the plot of a
specific show revolves around current issues and topics, it also is an economically motivated decision. By trying to be relevant in terms of social issues and opinion, networks want to generate higher ratings and attract a bigger audience. This explains their motivation to produce material that will encourage viewers to form an opinion (Berman; 1987: 7ff).
Mintz adds that the topics that are being dealt with also represent the values and ideas of the producers and distributors who ultimately decide what audiences get to see. Producers and distributors in turn have to follow the governments’ regulations which is also why the degree of manipulation remains unclear (Mintz, 1998: 50). This leads to the conclusion that TV programs of any genre are “corporate products, mass consumption commodities and expressions of the underlying assumptions of the corporate culture that has come to dominate society (Henry 1994: 89). The purpose of television thus is to control all these areas, in particular the audience, as they have a pivotal role for the television industry’s revenues and market share.
Since the thesis focusses on the American television industry, this market shall be further explained. American TV has been dominated by three national commercial networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) from the fifties to the 80ies, one public network (PBS) and several private channels (including the most popular and successful cable channel HBO these days) and accounted for 90 percent of all viewing time (Adler and Caterm 1976; Nelson 1979, Mittell 2009). During the emergence and diffusion of enhanced digitalization and media convergence, the Big Three have decreased to a market share of approximately 32 percent in the broadcasting market in 2005 (Hindman and Wiegand 2008). Their goal to attract the broad masses has remained, in order to generate advertising revenues that depend on the number of viewer. Kellner called this action the promotion of “capitalist commodities and consumer values, social conformity, law and order and authority figures, television’s advertising is one of the major managers of consumer demand, its ideas, images, information, and entertainment are ubiquitous forces of socialization” (Kellner 1981: 31). Likewise, in contemporary television, consensus among writers, producers, programmers, advertisers, and audiences leads to the increased omnipresence of socialization forces and television’s impact.
Another crucial role is played by economic pressure that lastly determines what is being produced. Revenue and income is not only provided by owners and companies that pay for the commercials but also by governments that give subsidies. For Bourdieu “these factors, which are so crude that they are obvious even to the most simple-minded critique, hide other things, all the anonymous and invisible mechanisms through which the many kinds of censorship operate to make television such a formidable instrument for maintaining the symbolic order” (Bourdieu 2001: 246). Economic factors are crucial for the production of TV narrative and thus what is being given meaning to and what might be ignored due to the achievement of economic sales figures.
Therefore televisions’ images and messages are economically planned and censored in the interest of the investor, disseminated to a broad mass public in order to reach many viewers and generate high revenue. As Chomsky and Herman (2002 [1988]) have put it, the societal interests are represented and distributed primarily by the representatives that control and finance the system. As structural factor Chomsky and Herman call out “ownership and control, dependance on major
finding sources and mutual interests and relationships” between the television makers and those that provide it with stories. Yet, as they further elaborate, these structural factors are not entirely controlling. “Various papers of media organizations have some limited autonomy” (xx) and thus individual values can influence the messages that are disseminated by television. On the one hand, television then is a means of entertainment, escapism and thus has to fulfill the task of creating a fantasy world. On the other hand, as a cultural good, it is bound to restrictions and producers’ ideas and understanding of what can and cannot be shown in order to earn high revenues with that cultural good.
TV as a cultural phenomenon
Television and inclosed its genre sitcom, like any other medium, encompasses different cultural phenomena. Popular culture does not only encompass and reflect upon social change, but “reinforces cultural attitudes, behavior, values, preoccupations” and thereby forms ideologies surrounding a specific genre or the society in general, which is “the manner or the content of thinking characteristic of a culture” or society (Silverblatt 47). Silverblatt refers to critical theorist Stuart Hall who discussed cultural shaping as a result of the presentation of a worldview (e.g. showing certain lifestyles and occupations) and the hereafter resulting ideology. By being the voice of society and sending out messages, television also educates and insulates the audience in regard to cultural values, attitudes and behaviors (47) and thus, one could argue, gives meaning to them.
Following Hermes (2005), popular texts and thus cultural phenomena or popular culture help the viewer to understand who they are (1) and by this are able to construct meaning to society. Now, not only the nation forms the sense of belonging, right and duties and thus forms the citizenship, but the media, and hence also TV that form new collectives and enables a cultural citizenship (Hermes 2005: 1). As Hermes further suggests,
in (popular) culture, the world, history, relationships between people, and so on are represented to us by means of codes and conventions all of which have their own historical lineage, and that we interpret using the particular cultural knowledges that result from our biographies. Given the enormous range of codes and conventions that are possible, the tension produced by the contradictory forces of history, and the inherent drive in all art and culture to find new forms of expression, popular culture is a domain in which we may practice the reinvention of who we are (2005: 4).
Thereby, the codes and conventions lead to the “social construction of reality” (Pollock, 1997) and thus give meaning of the world, culture and society. Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992) note that “we walk around with media-generated images of the world, using them to construct meaning about political and social issues. And the special genius of this system [the media] is to make the whole process seem so normal and natural that the very art of social construction is invisible” (374).
II
Sitcom and the understanding of the social world
Realism in sitcoms
Sitcom as a genre has been around for decades, rising in the 1950s on American television. Emerging from comedy, sitcom, short for situational comedy, encompasses comedic narrative within an ongoing plot with ongoing characters that deal with different circumstantial problems in every new episode. In many cases, the sitcom orientates on social events and social changes that it includes in its storyline (Marc 1997). Sitcoms thus pertain a claim for realism as they depict the real world. Yet, the use of laughing tracks and other aesthetic means can change its realistic perception. It has also been mentioned previously that television and thus its genres are eligible to reflect on societal changes and consequently maintain or re-establish the status quo and create social relevance for them. The question of interest here is, what kind of relevance or realism can be expected in sitcoms? What is the degree to the recognizability of the social world?
During the last decades, the paradigm of sitcom has changed. In its inception in the 1950s, the portrayed characters were middle class, intact nuclear families who lived in the suburban areas. The topics revolved around patriarchal images, archetypal domestic set ups and domestic spouse conflicts. Early sitcoms established traditional images of family and fostered the ideal of a “sheltered environment dissociated from the real world” (Henry 1994:84), where neither economic nor social problems occurred. The presentation of a happy life didn’t seem to resemble reality but rather tried to give meaning to the sufferings from the depression in the 1920s and Second World War. These shows avoided showing dangerous images, and distributing dangerous messages. In fact, by its setting in which every house looked the same, they represented a common moral will that “ensured a peaceful and prosperous destiny” (Marc 1997: 43).
It wasn’t until the 1970s, that the sitcom incorporated real world problems about individual family and shifted the previous domestic space to workspaces, friend circles and generally out in the open. After the protests of 1968 and the second wave of feminism, women were presented more equally to men, than in the domestic sitcom era, hence they shattered the patriarchy and domestic idealization of the preceding era (Henry 1994, Marc 1997).
Yet in the 1980s, there was a shift back to more family-centered, family-oriented traditional values and morals in sitcom narrative visible. This was caused by the so-called Reagan-era in the United States of America that were led by Republican president Ronald Reagan that was determined by moral messages that were depicted on sitcoms as well (Marc 1997). Since then, the sitcom landscape has undergone further change and evolution such as the society that surrounds it.
Now, sitcom tries to relate to its audience. Characters are supposed to resemble the viewers. But being a form of the entertainment industry, sitcom dramatizes events and conditions (Berman 1987). However, sitcom’s main subject is human manners and the development of social conscience. Sitcom deals with questions and issues about morality concerning feminism, finance, gay rights, personal freedom and so on. They participate in the dialogue and give answers to social
change and the social reality but as Berman notes, “they exploit social issues without always making sense of them (Berman, 1987: 18). As Berman explains, “some value or standard has to be asserted or it has to be given up. Some action has to be permitted or discouraged” (1987: 17). Yet, through the closeness that is produced by the sitcom narrative, mainly by depicting characters from everyday social life, the moral lesson might be more effectively internalized by the audience, because they get the feeling of seeing one of them (Martin 2011).
The genre of sitcom is not the only fictional genre that claims a realistic and verisimilar approach towards the representation of society and social change. In his analysis Vink (1995) has noted that in Brazilian novelas, a type of soap opera which is a series that goes on without closure, the characters resemble members of society, because they have memory, are capable of learning from past experience and their lives revolve around a large, complex community (167). Beside that, telenovelas capture contemporary reality, everyday news and events. Their time shift is adapted to real life events such as christmas or carnival, while political and cultural events are almost simultaneously responded on in the story line, such as references to elections (171). Vink notes that Brazilian novelas quickly capture the temper of the moment (213), but as Grisprud (1999) connotes, often marginalize these events (60) by embellishing the reality (Vink 213). Yet, novelas work through news issues (…) by providing narratives with resonance to the everyday experience or the prevalent thinking of their viewing publics” (Gripsurd 60).
Method
In order to answer the research question, the TV series 2 Broke Girls was chosen in relation to the financial crisis. I have been watching 2 Broke Girls since its first broadcasting and can call myself an enthusiastic viewer. While watching the sitcom, I realized that some episodes narrative was closely linked to social events or seized on contemporary social trends. To find the suitable episodes for this paper, I read the scripts of each episode of the first three seasons which were broadcasted between 2011 and 2013. The plot summaries additionally available on the internet movie data base (imdb.com), where I found titles, short descriptions of each episode and bits of dialogue of each episode. By this means I chose five episodes of the three seasons in total and re-watched each of them. Hereby it was relevant that each episode was linked to either the financial crisis or any event that was connected to it, like the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Actual news footage was then compared to the plot and sitcom narrative and the dialogues, in order to verify the connection. By close contextual reading I made the connection and references to the social event in the narrative of the show.
Moreover I argue that the show 2 Broke Girls is not only a representation of the financial crisis but the consequential poverty that affects especially twenty-somethings in the US. Beside the close reading of the dialogue and the narrative I also analyzed how wealth, respectively poverty is depicted in 2 Broke Girls. Therefor I examined how consumption was presented in the sitcom on the basis of the attire of the main figures, their buying processes of goods they either need or want,
the things they either like or mock, and lastly on general indicators, to which I count their living situation, which again concerns the neighborhood their fictional lives take place and the size and design of their apartment. While the examination of their house and their attire is visible throughout the seasons, the connection to their consumption and to the financial crisis will be made by reference to chosen episodes which reference again to the historical and social events. The chosen episodes are listed in the chart (figure 1).
Figure 1: listing of analyzed topics and the related episodes in 2 Broke Girls and Sex and the City, full summary of the episodes can be found in the appendix.
After the analysis of 2 Broke Girls, I will compare the show to another, earlier sitcom, namely Sex and the City which aired on television from 1998 to 2004, to show that the representation of wealth and poverty has been handled differently before the financial crisis and that this representation shows a direct link to a contemporary economic social event or state. Here again, a close look at individual episodes and contextual reading helped choose the episodes. The main characters’ consumption habits and lifestyles were looked at throughout the six seasons of the series. A specific episode that revolves around financial issues was chosen to mark the different dealing of this topic in the narrative of the show. That there was only one episode that directly deals with topics of wealth and poverty shows how little emphasis was put onto this topic before the financial crisis and how relevant the topic on television narrative has become after the events.
Using the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss 1967), I will lastly analyze the sitcoms The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Dharma and Greg to show how each of the shows is linked to the political events and represents a certain era which is in this case the presidency of a specific
2 Broke Girls Sex and the City
Work “And the very christmas Thanksgiving” (Season 1, Episode 10)
“And the '90s Horse Party” (Season 1, Episode 5)
“Ring a Ding Ding” (Season 4, Episode 16) “The Caste System” (Season 2, Episode 10)
Banking “And the '90s Horse Party” (Season 1, Episode 5)
“Ring a Ding Ding” (Season 4, Episode 16)
Consumption “And the very christmas Thanksgiving”
(Season 1, Episode 10) “And strokes of Goodwill” (Season 1, Episode 3)
“Bay of married pigs” (Season 1, Episode 3)
“Lights, Camera, Relationship” (Season 6, Episode 5)
“All or Nothing” (Season 3, Episode 10)
Social trends “And the Kickstarter”
(Season 3, Episode 2)
“Bay of married pigs” (Season 1, Episode 3)
Insurance “And the broken hip”
(Season 2, Episode 17)
Wall Street “To Market, To Market”
president of the United States. The political eras are in turn linked to a specific representation of certain topics that are listed in a tabular form in figure 2.
The constant comparative method, as described by Glaser and Strauss, is an approach to generate theories inductively, in other words, to define a concept to a theory by using phenomenons or objects. Therefore, the goal is to explain, how the social world works and is given meaning to (Glaser and Straus 1967: 28ff.). The goal of this paper is to show that 2 Broke Girls’s way of dealing with a contemporary social event isn’t bound to just this series, but is a tool of the genre sitcom in general, that, through the help of comedy, addresses social issues and thus constructs meaning to society by representing the social world realistically. I will therefore use the frame of the genre and the frame of the historical period, to answer the research question.
Figure 2: listing of analyzed topics and the related episodes in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Dharma and Greg
Methodology
The best research technique to study and analyze text is the qualitative content analysis. The reading of four sitcoms, 2 Broke Girls, Sex and the City, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Dharma
and Greg, will help to answer the overall research question, how the social reality is incorporated
and represented in sitcom. By reading the text, the dialogues, looking at the setting and the plot of the sitcoms, I examine the structure of this genre and try to find an answer for my research question within the text.
Qualitative content analysis is one of numerous research methods used to analyze text data. Qualitative content analysis goes beyond merely counting words to examining language for the purpose of classifying large amounts of text into an efficient number of categories that represent similar meanings (Weber 1990: 12). It can be a useful technique for allowing to discover and
The Fresh Prince Dharma and Greg
Politics “The Fresh Prince Project”
(Season 1, Episode 1) “Mistaken Identity” (Season 1, Episode 6)
“Pilot”
(Season 1, Episode 1)
“He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father” (Season 1, Episode 9)
“The Mamas and the Papas” (Season 5, Episode 23+24)
Family Values “The Fresh Prince Project” (Season 1, Episode 1)
“Papa's Got a Brand New Excuse” (Season 1, Episode 24)
“Breaking Up is Hard to Do” (Season 6, Episode 14+15)
“Pilot”
(Season 1, Episode 1) “The Mamas and the Papas” (Season 5, Episode 23+24)
Political engagement “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”
(Season 6, Episode 14+15)
“Mr. Montgomery Goes to Washington”
(Season 1, Episode 8)
American history “The Ethnic Tip”
describe the focus of individual, group, institutional, or social attention (Weber 1990: 70). The goal of content analysis is “to provide knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon under study” (Downe-Wamboldt, 1992: 314). Krippendorf defines content analysis as “one of the most important research techniques” (Krippendorf 1989: 403) that “seeks to analyze data within a specific context in view of the meaning someone attributes to them” (ibid.). He distinguishes qualitative content analysis from quantitative research. The latter aims to make “replicable and valid interferences from data to their context” (ibid.). He refers to the scholars Bernard Berelson and Harold D. Lasswell who emphasized “the quantification of the ‘what’ that messages communicate” (ibid.) which leads to identifiable elements that can be either verified or falsified. In contrast, in the qualitative content analysis, meaning is attributed to texts and images. Media content does not have to be described literal, rather its meaning and relevance are examined (ibid., 404f.). According to Krippendorff (1980), six questions must be addressed in content analysis:
Table: line up of Krippendorf’s questions and answers
1) Which data are analyzed? 1) Episodes and abstracts from four sitcoms
2) How are they defined? 2) The studied sitcoms are in chronological order: 2 Broke Girls, Sex and the City, The
Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Dharma and Greg.
3) What is the population from which they are drawn?
3) Each sitcom was broadcasted on American television from the early 90s until now. 4) What is the context relative to which the data
are analyzed?
4) Sitcom is a televisual genre that uses techniques of comedy and disruptive plot narrative which is solved at the end of an episode. The sitcoms that are analyzed belong to four different historical eras and are analyzed in order to show that sitcom is a lens of society.
5) What are the boundaries of the analysis? 5) There are no boundaries, as the data is fully a v a i l a b l e o n l i n e a n d t h e s o c i a l circumstances that it belong to can be accessed on news-websites.
6) What is the target of the inferences? 6) The target is the research question, namely is it specific for the genre sitcom to be a lens of society and represent social reality and if so, how is it done? The phenomenon analyzed in this study is the social ability of sitcom.
The scholars referred to in this study include Henri Bergson, John Fiske, David Marc, Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik. Even though the literature dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, it has to be noted that in the realm of social interrelation between society and television has mainly stayed the same as in its emergence since the 1950s. With the raise of the internet, social and mobile media the focus of research has shifted from traditional media to new media and has viewed television from different perspectives, such as its capability and changing mode of creating flow (Caldwell 2003, Gripsrud 2004, Urrichio 2004, Williams 1974) and user generated content (e.g. Poell and Borra 2011). However strong the impact of the internet has been on the media landscape, television still remains the leading medium. Therefore it is interesting to find out, whether its impact on society has changed since its emergence and whether the representation of society has shifted towards a creation of socially relevant sitcoms. What has changed is how the television industry deals with new competition and market strategy. However, this study focusses on traditional TV and its interrelation without social reality and therefore these scholars can give insights to the works of television. By applying their theories I can also establish whether or not television as a traditional medium has changed in order to convey messages and values and represent social reality.
III
Sitcom and the financial crisis of the 2010s, the case of 2 Broke Girls and
Sex and the City
Analyzing situational comedy shows is important because jokes pertaining to stereotypes are often present in the script which in turn can provide an understanding of society, social groups and the social world respectively. Images and messages have yet the ability to act upon the viewers, influence their attitude, behavior and thinking and foster those stereotypes. What is presented on television is assumed to be relevant to society and in turn construct meaning to society and help understand society understand itself (Silverblatt 1995, Keller 1981, Shrum 2012, Zettl 1998, Chandler 1997, Neale 1980). By the depiction of characters that appear close to real life, thus like real people, respectively like one of the audience members themselves, sitcom relates to the audience and gathers them closer to the story, thus is able to develop social consensus among the audience about certain issues and topics (Berman 1987: 8). This chapter proposes the question, how quickly sitcoms can react and incorporate social events and how this incorporation is narratively dealt with. Does the direct reaction to social (economic) events foster or obstruct the construction of images and stereotypes? In how far can television realistically depict cultural events and how do they influence the narrative?
The American TV series 2 Broke Girls and Sex and the City are representing two eras of society and with it, television content and messages. 2 Broke Girls started in 2011, which can be classified as a post-financial-crisis-moment in the course of the topic, whereas Sex and the City premiered in the late 1990s and aired until 2004, which I will refer to as the pre-financial-crisis-era. Belonging to these different eras, both TV series deal differently with the issue of finance, money and economy. Yet, there is a connection via the cupcake business that the protagonists of 2 Broke
Girls, Max and Caroline attempt to build, to which I will come back later.
2 Broke Girls and poverty
2 Broke Girls is an American comedy series that was created for Warner Bros. Television by
the writer Michael Patrick King and writer and comedian Whitney Cummings. The TV show premiered on the American TV channel CBS on September 2011 during prime time and currently (2015) runs in its fifth season. Although the comedy series has received mixed response from critics, it was nominated for three Emmy Awards in 2012 and won the Emmy for Art Direction that year. Critics point out that the series uses racial stereotypes and relies on overly sexualized humor, using the connotations of so-called rape jokes and other sexist kind of humor.4 The plot of the series revolves around the lives of the two fictive women in their mid-twenties, Max Black and Caroline Channing. Together they share an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. Caroline comes from a formerly financially safe and wealthy background. As the daughter of a multi-millionaire she could live the life of her dreams in New York’s High Society. Due to bad luck and her father’s fraudulent investment operations on the financial market, Caroline is left penniless and disgraced.
By contrast, her roommate Max grew up in poverty and a broken family. Together, they struggle economically and work as waitresses in a diner in their neighborhood Williamsburg, to earn an income. As a result of their backgrounds they have entirely different perspectives on life, yet they befriend each other, and attempt to build up a cupcake business together.
The series shows their efforts to make the money to eventually open their business. Their economic struggles are represented throughout the show, for example when they can’t afford new clothes and therefore go to a thrift store,
Max Black: Lots of people cry at Goodwill. You go to France you eat snails; you come here you cry.
(Season I, Episode 3 “And Strokes of Goodwill)
They also have to work two jobs in order to finance kitchen supplies that Caroline broke out of her clumsiness, and are therefore sleep deprived, tired and overwhelmed with their situation (Season I, Episode 10 “And the very christmas Thanksgiving”)
When they finally have success and open their first, little cupcake store, they don’t cover insurance and explain that with their poverty, leading to them needing insurance because a customer broke his hip in their store and immediately sues them.
Han: Yeah, you're being sued.
Caroline: What law school did you go to, Cal State-the-obvious? Max: Did you graduate magna come rarely?
Han: I told you, I pulled out. But don't worry, accidents like this happen in stores all the time. That's why all businesses have insurance.
Caroline. Well, not all businesses.
Han: How could you not have insurance? You need to get protection. And I'm not talking about condoms.
Caroline: We’re not idiots, Han.We had the insurance discussion. I was like, "Max, we need insurance." And she was like, "Do we have any money?" And I was like, "No." And she was like, "What are the chances something will happen?" And I was like, "A million to one. " And she was like, "I like those odds. Let's go get gummi bears." And I was like, “Okay. (Season 2, Episode 17 “And the broken hip)
This example shows sitcom’s ability to ridicule its protagonists but at the same time offering an advice to the audiences. The disruption of the plot here is that Max and Caroline don’t have insurance and therefore get in a situation where it is needed. Humor is presented in a u-turn construction. It leads them towards a problem, disrupts their lives, and makes them realize that they are not indestructible. But before they experience any significant damage, for example being sued by the guest, they find a solution and solve the problem. The moral message is linked to the presented individual problem, which is the fact that Max and Caroline should not think bad things would not happen to them in this case. Similarly, the solution to the problem is presented humoristic, thus the sitcom gives advice on different levels and gives meaning to the individual and neoliberal nature of the entire situation.
Cupcake, the connection between two eras
The 2 Broke Girls's wish to build the business seems constantly interrupted by their personal living conditions. It is yet very interesting that their pursuited career is represented by the cupcake, which was popularized by anther show in the 1990s and gained its fame. During this decade, the television series Sex and the City was critically acclaimed and celebrated, portraying the lives of four New York women in their mid-thirties who never seemed to have financial troubles throughout the run of the six season. They had successful careers, yet never seemed to work, were always dressed in expensive designer clothes and were always going to fancy restaurants. Financial struggles seemed nonexistent in the pre-financial-crisis-era before 2007. After Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw featured the ultimately most famous cupcake bakery Magnolia Bakery in one of their episodes, the sweet became a luxury item and thus a multibillion-dollar industry (Musser 2009, Goldman 2011, Klein 2012). After having been part on the show, not only Magnolia Bakery’s business grew, but several other cupcake bakeries opened up, selling cupcakes on average for 3 Dollars and making it thus a fashionable dessert (Klein 2012). In 2 Broke Girls, Max and Caroline try to leave their working-class lives behind by entering exactly this luxurious industry and trying to become successful in the cupcake business, as it is referred to by Caroline throughout the series.
Although there is no evident connection between the two series prima facie, I argue that the cupcake is the linkage between them that represents a wishful state of wealth and prosperity and to simply leave the influences of the financial crisis behind. Supposedly by luck I have made this linkage, though I would prefer to characterize this lucky finding as serendipity. Louis Pasteur’s saying, as quoted by Dunbar and Fugelsang (2005), “Chance favors only the prepared mind” helps to understand the occurrence of luck during research. The term was first introduced by Horace Walpole in 1754 when he explained discoveries that were made by accident and sagacity, without having been in quest of (Rosenman 1994). The term serendipity has the connotation of happy accident which can only be exploited by a clever, or in less judgmental words, prepared person. Researchers who recognize serendipitous can generate important research ideas (Stosskopf 2010, Rosenman 1994).
As discovery in a cultural, humanistic and partially anthropological context, a discovery is the “identification of something that will allow the person identifying it to alter their perspective on a given theme or problem and, naturally enable them go forward in the knowledge of their product” (Hazan and Hertzog, 2012). As such I would also classify my discovery of the cupcake as the linkage between the TV series. The cupcake appears to me as they symbol of wealth whose wealth and position was shaped in the pre-financial-crisis-show Sex and the City and on that the post-financial-crisis show 2 Broke Girls tries to build on. Furthermore, the cupcake symbolizes a frivolous behavior of its consumers who can afford to spend their money. Of all possibilities to build up a business today, the creators of 2 Broke Girls who are also the creators of Sex and the
City, chose the cupcake, which symbolizes wealth without being the prerogative of the rich as
classic symbol like jewelry. Even though cupcakes only made one appearance on Sex and the City (Season 3, Episode 5: No Ifs, Ands, or Butts), this one had considerable influence on its popularity.
However, the market entrance to a competitive and successful market branch has become much more difficult since the big financial crisis in 2007, which is also know as the Global Financial Crisis and was considered the biggest crisis since the Big Depression in the 1930s. The results of these events were increased and prolonged unemployment, numerous evictions and foreclosures. Several business failed, international wealth such as consumer wealth declined over the next years and it caused a downturn in economic activity which lead to the 2008-2012 global recession and several national crisis throughout the world8. The glamour of the world that Sex and
the City portrayed has vanished to the portrayal of the lives of 2 Broke Girls, as is also suggested in
the title. The title thus captures the dramatic changes of our society and economy between 1998 and now. The events of the Financial Crisis, though not directly mentioned, seem to have been incorporated into the plot of the series 2 Broke Girls.
Impact of the financial crisis as shown on 2 Broke Girls
In almost every episode their financial situations, respectively their lack of money and savings, seems to dominate the narrative. Most realistically the series shows the struggles of mid-twenty-aged persons, when Caroline discovers Max’ debt and wants to help her pay off her student loan (Season I, Episode 5). This episode will further be the focus of this analysis and case study. In this episode, that was aired on October 17, 2011, Caroline and Max throw a 90s-theme party in order to make money for their cupcake business, but more so to earn money to pay off Max’s student loan.This episode captured the reality of many young people who are unable to pay off their student debts. This episode came up during the Occupy Wall Street Movement which started on the same day as the broadcast of the episode. Occupy Wall Street was about social and economic inequality, corruption and mostly about the unbalanced influence of corporations on government, particularly the financial services sector. Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99%” refers to income inequality and wealth distribution (OccupyWallStreet-About)6.
A lot of students and young professionals participated in the Movement because they were suffering from high debts and low wages. While a lot of TV shows avoid the unpleasant topic of finances, 2 Broke Girls openly discusses them and shows the downsides of economy: poverty, debts and difficulties. The topic of money and finances is represented with a high depth of financial literacy and considerations of societal values. When Caroline discovers Max debt, she tries to figure out the interest rates on Maxs’ credit cards and points out the importance of paying down the student loan debt to avoid bankruptcy.
By this example it becomes visible that media now seems to be able to capture the reality of many young and generally working-class people and thus shows that the days of glamorous rich white people are over7. Quite realistically this scene also shows the fear of a lot of young people who went to college to have a better future and have to start this life by paying off huge loans.
Caroline: You can’t just keep lying to collection agencies. You have to pay your bills. Max: I have a system. I pay everyone 5 dollars a week, just enough to keep hem from freaking out. It’s the methadone-clinic banking system.
Caroline: That is a complete waste of money. Five dollars won't even cover the interest you're accruing.What's the interest rate on your credit card?
Max: Dunno. My interest rate in this conversation is zero. (…)
Caroline: Max, I interned at Merrill Lynch. Let me help you with this. It's the least I can do. I had nowhere to go. You took me in. Let me repay my debt to you by helping with your debt to everyone in the world, apparently.
Caroline: What is this a student loan? Oh, my God.Max, you went to college? That wasn't a judgment. (…) Max, a student loan is the worst bill you can ignore. It can never be
expunged. (…)
Max: Listen, everybody's broke in their 20s. (Season 1, Episode 5 “And the 90s Horse Party”)
When the girls throw a party to earn their money, Carline’s wealthy ex-boyfriend shows up, who separated from her, when he found out that she became insolvent. Caroline then hides from him. Max uses this moment to ask her, whether she felt better luxuriating in unearned wealth and whether it was shameful then to earn her own money by working hard for it.
Caroline: I can't face him because I'm a waitress. Last time he saw me, I was a billionaire in a townhouse. Now I'm a waitress in a walk-in freezer.
Max: So, when you were laying around on your trust fund, doing nothing every day, having other people scrub your toilet, you could hold your head up high? But now that you support yourself by earning your own money, that's somehow shameful? Who cares what he thinks? He is the guy who just paid $100 to party with a horse. He's the loser, not you.
(Season 1, Episode 5 “And the 90s Horse Party”)
In this scene, the show showed a shift of society’s understanding of value from using unearned wealth to working hard for themselves, to being financially responsible for themselves. This moment can be seen as setting 2 Broke Girls, in particular Max and Caroline, as part of the 99 percent of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which are understood as the vast majority of society that has financial problems but values their employment and working hard for money.
Sex and the City and financial issues that never become a real problem
While in the series Sex and the City the four women talked about their hard earned money, their interaction never seemed to revolve about their actual job, but rather about the problems they had as women in successful careers, for example having to prove themselves to men. The era of the society of Sex and the City was characterized by a stable economy and economic growth throughout the nineties, steady job creation, low inflation, rising productivity, and a surging stock market that
resulted from a combination of rapid technological changes and sound central monetary policy. It started after the end of the early 1990s recession, and ended with the start of the early 2000s recession, following the bursting of the dot com bubble that had no visible effect on the narrative of
Sex and the City, because the dot com bubble didn't impact as many people as the big financial
crisis in 2008. The messages sent out by that series rather dealt with feminist questions than social values about money and financial issues. It even seemed that financial issues never were a problem. Even when Carrie realized she had spend over 40.000 thousand dollars on shoes and thus again was unable to pay her apartment, this problem was resolved by a loan of her friend Charlotte who gave Carrie her wedding ring.
Carrie: No. I am. The lady at the bank said I was an unattractive candidate for a loan. Where did all my money go? I know I've made some.
Miranda: At $400 a pop, how many of these do you have? Fifty? Carrie: Come on.
Miranda: A hundred?
Carrie: Would that be wrong?
Miranda: 100 times 400, there's your down payment. Carrie: That’s only $4,000.
Miranda: No, it's $40,000.
Carrie: I spent $40,000 on shoes and I have no place to live? I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes.
(Season 4, Episode 16 “Ring a Ding Ding”)
Because Carrie had spend so all this money on shoes, and because, as she later states but what seems to be her general lifestyle, likes her “money right where I can see it. Hanging in my closet” (Carrie Bradshaw in Season 6, Episode 1 “To Market, To Market”), she doesn’t have assets in the bank and therefore is unable to get a loan in her bank.
Banker: Okay. Let's look at your assets here at the bank. You may be able to use them as collateral for the loan. It says here that you have $700 in your checking account.
Carrie: I just paid my credit card bill. Banker: And $957 in savings.
Carrie: Look, Linda. You're single, right? I'm sure you can appreciate my problem. I just broke up with my fiancé which, trust me, is traumatic enough. And now I have 25 days to either find the money to buy my place or I am out on the street.
Banker: Do you have any other income, besides the column?
Carrie: No. But I was chosen as New York magazine's best pick for city columnist. I was the pick over Pete Hamill.
Banker: What about your assets outside the bank? Property, stocks, bonds? Carrie: No.
Banker: I’m sorry, Ms. Bradshaw, but you are not a desirable candidate for a loan.
Carrie (voice over narration): After assessing what little assets I had, I realized I would have to change my lifestyle.
