Why is City Living Never Properly Represented on Screen?
Slice of Life dramas and shows about characters in their 20s to early 30s navigating the highs and lows that come their way have always interested me. Living through their portrayals has served as a source of fantasy for me. Who wouldn’t want to live in the world of Zoe Kravitz’s Rob as she meanders through her New York neighbourhood in High Fidelity? It’s cathartic to be able to switch off reality and fall in love with a cast of characters going through rites of passage not too dissimilar from yourself. So when BBC One’s new drama Everything I Know About Love was available in its entirety on BBC iPlayer, I binged the series in one weekend.
Based on the book of the same name by Dolly Alderton, the source material was praised for it’s realistic portrayal of post university, twenty somethings finding their way through friendships, work and sex with London serving as the backdrop. After a few minutes in, however, I realised this realism wasn’t a staple of the adapted drama.
The first and most notable shock being the size and polished decor of the four main characters’ house. Though their rented experience did have one relatable moment, that began and ended with a patch of mould on the kitchen ceiling, and said mould turned out to be used mainly as a plot point for the character Maggie to get a job as a story producer whilst sitting on the sofa. Where’s my landlord with her own TV production company?
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That aside, this depiction of how they lived when two of the four characters worked leafleting jobs for the first half of the series, meant that the lack of outfit repeats, no panic selling anything on eBay and constant nights out made it a stretch to believe that this was their reality. Every episode I calculated the average cost of the copious amounts of drinks and, combining it with decorations for a jubilee party the four hosted, I wondered aloud how on earth Maggie could afford food, let alone a late night taxi ride from London to Liverpool.
Perhaps I’m too old for these kinds of shows, but after a diet of growing up on films and TV shows that gave me unrealistic expectations of how to live, I’m tired of seeing this continue as well as the disappointing reality. Having £20 left in your bank account for the month is not a whimsical character trait but a genuine, migraine-inducing misery.
Further still, the economic struggles of those working secure and seemingly well paid jobs are largely ignored in lieu of the basic equation of ‘have job = no money troubles’ - a poor conclusion that has proved increasingly false with each passing year. These depictions are all the more frustrating when considering the setting. Predominantly taking place in major cities on both sides of the pond, TV shows like this take place in cultural hotspots like New York or London - places renowned for trying to convince you that a broom cupboard is actually a studio apartment.
This is the crux of the issue. The world we’re shown through the eyes of the characters we follow are some of the most expensive in the western world. London in particular is one of the most expensive cities to live in since the late 1990s. Home to more billionaires than anywhere else, a decent standard of living in the capital costs up to 58% more than anywhere else in the U.K.
In June this year The Big Issue reported that most Londoners are paying at the very least, £20k a year in rent. A grim picture considering that the lowest average salary in the city is £21,900 per annum.
The appetite for these shows is unlikely to die down soon and I will undoubtedly watch the next one on the horizon. We all enjoy a distraction, a respite from reality, and perhaps that is why these shows seem unburdened by reality’s yoke. We enjoy living through the lives of these 20-something professionals in this way because in an ideal world, we would live like this too. We would all enjoy not having to deal with the immediate consequences of not paying our rent on time.
When the twenty minute episode ends however, we snap back to reality, and for some of us it informs us that being a young professional in the city is not the be all and end all it’s portrayed. There are other areas in the U.K after all - maybe London shouldn’t be made out to be the only rite of passage that it is portrayed to be. It’s a bit ironic that the majority of Everything I Know About Love has been, very obviously, filmed in Manchester, where it’s 31% cheaper to live. Not an unusual move with other productions such as It’s A Sin also doing this. This is an understandably growing trend considering the cost of filming in London and everything that it brings such as the cost of stylists, make-up artists and overall accommodation, which all adds up when even finding a reasonably priced Travelodge is a feat in the capital.
“We enjoy living through the lives of these 20-something professionals in this way because in an ideal world, we would live like this too. We would all enjoy not having to deal with the immediate consequences of not paying our rent on time.”
Everything I Know About Love is by no means the first show to ignore real financial costs in this regard. Western media is packed with these kinds of slice of life, coming of age films and TV dramas from London’s Fleabag to the problematic, New York based Girls. We need to see more realism injected into these portrayals. In large part because we need to see reality reflected so that we don’t feel alone or sub-par for having to spend most of our wage on bills and rent. And further still, so the shock is lessened for future generations when they strike out on their own in whatever career they wish.
This is why shows such as Spaced, Peep Show and Sweetbitter persist in their relevance as they continuously demonstrate how people cut corners to get by; whether that's Sweetbitter’s Tess sneaking her restaurant’s leftovers or Tim and Daisy posing as a couple to get a flat in Spaced. I’m not asking for shows such as Everything I Know About Love, Girls or High Fidelity to make political statements about the rapidly rising cost of living in most western societies, but what we need is to be shown the realities of city living.
Words: Eleanor Forrest
