They’re a dime a dozen.
These days, it seems like nearly everyone onscreen is rich. The aesthetics of luxury lifestyles is all over TV – whether you’re watching a murder mystery, a satire, or a drama.
Jessica Kender, production designer for the Prime Video series “We Were Liars,” exclusively told The Post that she wanted the show to look like, “Everything that we have been bred to believe will be there, if you follow the money.”
“We Were Liars” is one of the many recent shows with moneyed characters in glam settings. Now streaming, it’s a twisty thriller about Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind), a teen girl from a wealthy family with their own private island.
New Jersey native Kender grew up observing people who vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard, “where the elite go.”
“We tried to hit those notes,” she explained. “It’s everything you’re shown when you open a magazine, like Architectural Digest.”
She added that when a show is aiming to show off wealthy characters, “Everyone knows what that looks like, because it’s what the media shows us. The media tells us, ‘you want this.’ So, that’s what we’re trying to re-iterate onscreen.”
HBO’s hit “The White Lotus,” is about murder and vacations, and the characters aren’t staying in hostels or bargain Holiday Inns – a real-life stay at one of Season 3’s Thailand villas costs thousands of dollars per night.
Even if a TV show’s plot doesn’t directly involve wealth, chances are, the characters live in homes that would realistically cost millions.
The Netflix show “Sirens” starring Julianne Moore and Meghann Fahy was about the complicated relationship between sisters, but it also came with a large helping of “house porn.”
The “Sex and the City” spinoff “And Just Like That,” meanwhile, was ostensibly about friendship and romance — but it’s full of designer clothes and impossibly large NYC apartments. In fact, Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) Gramercy apartment was listed for $4,495,000 in 2019.
“Succession” followed a toxic family with a media empire, “Yellowstone” was about a dysfunctional family with a ranching empire, “The Righteous Gemstones” focused on a televangelist family – and they all have their own versions of mansions and armies of staffers to do their bidding.
Nicole Kidman’s entire recent catalogue shows are chock-full of house porn and millionaire characters, including “Big Little Lies” and “The Perfect Couple.”
Bob Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture, told The Post that part of the appeal of these shows is, “just the fun of seeing this stuff we don’t have.”
“A lot of people used to go in the back of the New York Times Magazine and look at these ridiculously huge houses that were for sale,” he observed.
“I find it much more interesting to watch a series about an organized crime family, ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘The Godfather,’ than I would watching a series about somebody who lived the life I live on a daily basis.”
He quipped that he enjoys his own life, “but I certainly wouldn’t want to watch somebody doing it. And I think there is a sense that TV brings us this stuff that we can’t otherwise see.”
Thompson said that it’s also “easier” to have shows “in settings of the very rich and the very privileged, because it’s kind of an easy source of drama and spectacle.”
The professor and TV expert pointed out that one big reason for the explosion of wealth on TV is that, “in the last 25 years, since around the turn of the century, we’ve become comfortable with our principal characters being bad people.”
He explained that the trend is “relatively new,” because in the history of American TV, shows were usually, “about heroes, good guys. There were antagonists, but the [show] was about the protagonists getting the best of them.”
This trend began to change with the “golden age of TV” in the 2000s” with shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “The Shield.”
“Oftentimes rich folks in at least a supposedly democratic culture, can be hard to portray sympathetically – because they’ve got all this stuff, they’re so privileged,” he said.
Shows that premiered during the antihero boom, “opened the door for a lot more wealthy folks,” he told The Post. “It would have been hard to do a show like ‘Succession’ in 1965, and have it be about a noble media magnate.”
To convey the right aesthetics of luxury, Kender explained that the “We Were Liars” production “tried to be on the same wavelength as a Ralph Lauren polo ad, that makes you feel very aspirational.”
“That’s the aesthetic we were aiming to give the audience – this idea of this perfect wealth. And food porn,” she noted. “Not only did you want to live in their house, but eat in their house.”
Aside from high-end clothes, a home that could be featured in a magazine, and “food porn” like “towers of seafood,” Kender had another key marker to signify moneyed characters.
“I was talking with someone who was telling me that they had been an assistant for a very wealthy family. And one of the things the wealthy family did every other day was have their fresh flowers refreshed.”
So, when Kender worked on “We Were Liars,” she said, “I was like ‘these are the type of people who have their flowers refreshed in their home every other day…Not by the people who live there – it’s almost like elves come in and refresh them.”
There are still some shows featuring characters who have modest homes and jobs, however — such as “Abbott Elementary.”
But shows about blue-collar lives such as “Roseanne” and its spinoff “The Conners” are increasingly dwindling.
“Especially when things are so tenuous right now with our economy, with our world – for the TV viewer [part of the appeal] is seeing the rich being flawed,” Kender said.
“You’re sold this American dream. We’re showing you on TV what you want to be.”
But, on many of these shows, including “We Were Liars” and “The White Lotus,” when the show dives into the dark parts of characters’ lives, “you realize how tragic that life can be, as well,” she said.
She explained, “In the time we live in, it’s almost refreshing to know, ‘even if I hit that point, this is not what’s going to make me happy. I’m going to be able to find happiness with where I am now.’”
