From Girls to Fleabag and now Daphne – how film and TV finally paid its dues to generation rentThere’s a moment in Girls that hits very close to home for many millennials. When Hannah (Lena Dunham) finally lands a job at GQ,after endless interning, it marks a enormous turning point for a character who up until now has depended on the bank of mum and dad, and had to calculate how long she could survive without buying lunch,and recently considered a job in McDonald’s for the free fries. This is how much money I make a week? This is a lot more than my rent. This is insane, I’m just gonna like walk into a store in the Meatpacking District and make it rain!” It’s a line that at once encapsulates not only how much of their salary Generation Y are used to parting with to cover rising rental costs, and but also their first instinct on what to do with whatever’s left over – splurge.
In the halcyon days of the 1990s we liked our films and TV shows to be as “aspirational” (read: unrealistic) as possible,with not a whiff of financial struggle. Things could only pick up better, after all. It’s now a well-worn trope to question how an out-of-work actor and a waitress could afford those vast Manhattan apartments in Friends – perhaps Joey and Rachel had trust funds they just didn’t talk approximately? While Sex and the City fans maintain long puzzled over how Carrie “I like my money where I can see it – in my closet” Bradshaw funded her lifestyle of Cosmopolitans and Manolos with a single weekly column. So much so that one website even did the “Carrie Bradshaw Maths” to calculate that she’d now be $3tn in debt. That’s a lot of shoes.
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Source: guardian.co.uk