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It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

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Alex C:
True enough, but the fact remains that the weird gray area between success, mediocrity, and eventually, failure is a place where the show spent an awful lot of time, particularly in the mid-to-late seasons, and as I said, Jerry is always inexplicably successful, living in an expensive apartment and cheerfully renting houses in Tuscany just to prove a point, although he admittedly does come from a decidedly middle class background. I simply don't think KvP's post is as crazy an interpretation as your post made it out to be. Ultimately, a lot of this depends on where you want to draw the line as to where one social class begins and another one ends. Remember that the most common academic interpretation of the phrase "American upper class" applies to so few people in the United States that the term is rather rarely used that way here in common conversation, since a term dedicated to the 1% megarich population is frankly pretty useless. As far as the rank and file working class here are concerned, many doctors and lawyers may as well be considered upper class.

Inlander:
Ah. Well it's hard to remember something I'd never heard before!

We're getting into the "two nations divided by a common language" thing here. In Australia "upper class" still means something pretty close to what it means in the U.K. - namely, Old Money. From that perspective, there's a definite dissonance in trying to think of George, Jerry, Elaine, or Kramer as upper class.

Alex C:
Dammit, US cultural imperialism should have trained you better than that.  :-D

Yeah, when people say upper class in the US, they often mean upper middle class people rich enough to be pretty insulated from working class problems, and that fits Jerry to a T. There are definitely Old Money families in the US that hold themselves apart from the rest of us, but that's an east coast thing in many ways; in a country of 300,000,000 people, it becomes harder and harder to be culturally relevant just by sitting at home turning your nose up at mid-priced sedans. Once you start to get out west it becomes almost purely about how much cash you can throw around at any given time and whether you're a business owner as opposed to an employee. It's more about capitalism pure and simple here, with breeding being a secondary thing, racism aside.

And before anyone says anything, I'm not sure I think this is really any better of a situation than what goes on in the UK. While many of us have a looser definition "upper class", the idea that anyone can become a big player in society often just means we're that much more ready to blame the poor for being poor whether it's an accurate reading of the situation or not.

Muppet King:
Ninjavideo currently has a pre-air of the Christmas special.

Heliphyneau:
I love this show.  I didn't watch it when it first started because I heard people comparing it to Seinfeld and, well, I hated Seinfeld (or at least I hated Jerry Seinfeld enough to not be able to watch his show).  But IASIP is hilarious, surreal, sick -- the first two eps I actually saw, from season 4, I think, were the one where they try and take a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and the one where Charlie writes a musical.  Oh man.  I need to watch more of this show.  Sadly, I always forget when it's on.  But I have season 1 on DVD now, and I will catch up on it.

"You have to pay the troll toll . . ."

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