Every generation has wanted better for the next. Our grandparents worked to give our parents a better life and our parents did the same for us. For those of us who choose to keep it going, we will do the same for our kids. “Better” often translates to more money. More money usually translates to higher quality resources: access to education, transportation and career opportunities. It does not, however, translate to better values, better outlooks or better character.
Wanting better also does not always mean achieving more. Cycles of poverty are a positive feedback loop. If your parents were poor, chances are you won’t have access to the resources necessary to change that for yourself and your kids. This is the case for the Chance family of “Raising Hope” sitcom fame. You might know them as the small-town blue-collar family supporting single dad Jimmy (Lucas Neff, “Shifting Gears”) as he raises — you guessed it — Hope Chance (Baylie Cregut, debut). The Chances are in the market for an ideological betterment of their family. Whether or not they are able to break down the barriers that prevent them from accessing better resources, the family affirms that they will still forge better patterns and perpetuate altruistic values for their kids.
Hope’s family works hard, but they don’t see a lot of money for all their toiling. Virginia (Martha Plimpton, “Task”), her grandmother, is a housemaid barely making ends meet. Her grandfather, Burt (Garrett Dillahunt, “Sarah’s Oil”), runs a lawn care business that barely scrapes by each month. Jimmy bags groceries for minimum wage. They all live in Virginia’s dementia-diagnosed Maw Maw’s (Cloris Leachman, “Not to Forget”) house, but only because Maw Maw is never lucid enough to kick them all out. There’s no leftover money to fix the laundry machine, the sink or the toilet. Still, they make the most of what they have for Hope.
Their unwavering determination to do everything in their power to give her a good life — one that hinges upon community, not money — propels them through every hard day. They’d love to send her to a private preschool, and they try their hardest to do so. Even without the money for tuition, they apply for a need-based scholarship, groveling in the application with their poverty-stricken story, yet they still don’t get it. The system of exclusion wants to make them dance for the resources they need, but it’s also comfortable throwing them out after the show. Despite this setback, Hope still manages to find her place in the busy backyard daycare run by a family friend. She can make her own friends, and that’s all her family really wants.
This attitude is not quite complacency, but rather satisfaction with what they have. They may live in a house that’s falling apart, sure, but it’s a house full of love nonetheless. They have each other, and that makes all their sacrifices worth the pain. It forces them to find clever solutions to problem after problem that other, richer people could solve simply by throwing money at it. Hold the ironing cord just so, and there will only be three shocks instead of four when the power goes out. Hit the washing machine on the side with all your force, and it’ll start up in about half an hour. Angle the frying pan’s center on the one operational stovetop corner, and your eggs will be ready sometime today. They’re not stupid — they’re creative, no matter how many punchlines the show makes based on that premise.
Laughing at the poor is one of the ways our class structures stay rigidly standing. It’s supposed to be funny when Virginia tells Jimmy, “We’re your biodegradable parents.” The implication here is that any idiot would know how to pronounce “biological,” so the audience should laugh when Virginia doesn’t. We’re supposed to laugh and gloss over it. Just the slightest investigation, though, makes the laughter stop cold. She doesn’t know it because she never got to finish high school; she didn’t finish high school because nobody taught her about contraception during her teenage years; nobody taught her because her school district was underfunded — we could go on and on.
It should not be so easy for us to laugh at the Chances. At the very least, we as the audience should get angry when people laugh at them, particularly those much better off than they are. The show takes great care to show us that, though these people might be better off, they’re not necessarily better. Not better in their skills and definitely not better in their principles.
Take Hope’s mother, Lucy (Bijou Phillips, “Havoc”). Lucy was a one-night stand for Jimmy — way out of his league. Pretty, yes, but also college-educated, living in her own apartment and holding down a well-paying job. However, she has just one fatal flaw: She’s a serial killer. Her parents — also very fucked-up people — still think she’s better than Jimmy (the single father who still lives at home) because of the resources she accessed that he never could. She went to college, and she paid for her own apartment — never mind the serial killer bit. To them, it’s just a formality. Hope would be much better off with them, they think. The rules don’t apply in the right tax bracket (nor do the laws of common human decency) because they have degrees and a white picket fence. It’s important to distinguish that the enemy here is not the one percent. That’s miles away. Instead, it’s the snooty middle class trying to assert its dominance over those it deems beneath it.
The show makes it clear: It’s better to be raised by good-hearted people with little to their name than those who think they’re superior just because of how much money they have. Jimmy’s own backstory sends the same message: When Burt and Virginia were young, in-over-their-heads parents, they gave him up for adoption (for all of two weeks) to a wealthy middle-class family. Upon finding out, Jimmy is angry at them for depriving him of all the opportunities and resources that his adoptive parents could’ve given him. He seeks out his would-be parents, completely enamored by their glamorous real-estate business, and is shocked to find out that, despite all their access to education and worldly connections, they’re racist. He rejects them and re-embraces his own family in a symbolic embrace of their working-class values over the bigotry of the wealthy.
Even the wealthy in this show choose Chance values over their own, most notably Jimmy’s love interest, Sabrina (Shannon Woodward, “Jagged Mind”). Born into a family well above middle-class, she cut herself off from them to work at the same grocery store as Jimmy. Rather than take her father’s endless money at the cost of her autonomy, she makes her own pennies and spends her time outside of work with the Chance family instead of her own. Even so, she initially thinks she’s better than them because of her wealthy upbringing. But through prolonged efforts to understand them beyond the comfort she feels in their run-down home, she overcomes the elitism drilled into her from a young age.
But, make no mistake, this is not a series about the virtues of poverty or the evils of wealth. There are depictions of wealthier families who share the Chance family’s values; they don’t see themselves as above the family just because they’re on a higher rung on the socioeconomic ladder. They don’t try to establish dominance over the Chances when they come over for dinner and find a rickety table and linoleum floors. Actually, it’s the Chances who expect them to be snooty elitists and have to be proven wrong. They find common ground over their histories: teen pregnancies, self-made businesses, a fuck-up son who became a single dad very young. A life-long friendship forms which could only exist on a foundation of mutual respect, even if one half of that friendship can’t give their granddaughter what the other half can.
The Chances don’t have much, but they do have Hope, and so should every person with tired hands trying to scrape together enough money to feed their loved ones. There is nobility in the lower socioeconomic classes. They are the forces fighting elitism in rungs below the very tip-top of the economic ladder. So long as there is a will for working people to make a better life for their children, there is a better future on the horizon.
Daily Arts Writer Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.
