‘Vida’ And ‘The Chi’ Are Working Overtime To Correct TV’s Upper Middle Class Problem

One of the things that struck me as I was watching the premiere of the Starz show Vida for my Stream It Or Skip It review was that the word “vibrant” kept popping into my head. The more I watched the premiere, the more I realized that I was watching something that we don’t see often on television these days: a show that is immersed in a particular urban subculture that celebrates its advantages while not denying its flaws and issues. And it made me wonder why we don’t see it more.

Vida revolves around the Eastside of Los Angeles, a region which is over 90% Latinx. In the particular neighborhood that the Hernandez sisters, Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barerra) return to after their mother Vidalia dies, the Latinx population is mostly working class, but is slowly but surely being pushed out by developers looking to gentrify what they feel is a valuable section of the city.

But, as we see in the first two episodes, the neighborhood is resisting. The most obvious way is via Marisol Sanchez (Chelsea Rendon) who shoots a vlog full of anger and vitriol, decrying the incursion of people like the “Warby Parker bitch” who was shooting a foodie vlog about a local taqueria. In episode 2 she finds a kindred spirit in Tlaloc Medina (Ramses Jimenez), who “meet cute” as they both scream at the workers (many from the neighborhood) renovating a house, including a horizontal fence designed to block out the outside world.

The other way the resistance is seen, though, is between the Hernandezes and Eddy (Ser Anzoategui), who the sisters find out is Vidalia’s wife. Vidalia, and the bar and building she owned, was likely the neighborhood’s crazy aunt, who dispensed advice along with booze, but, judging from the turnout at Vidalia’s memorial, Eddy was the neighborhood’s heart and soul. She knows that, for instance, that Nelson (Luis Bordonada), the developer who is buying out the neighborhood house by house, is a snake, and quietly but forcefully lets Emma know she’ll never sell her third of the building.

“He’s not good gente,” she says. “He gets people in these bad situations. His company, they go around lending people money that they can’t pay back. So these developers, they buy up everything, tear it down, and build it back up in a way that nobody could afford it.” Emma, who hasn’t been there in years, says in a statement as cold as the winters where she lives in Chicago, “Somebody’s affording it.”

Other shows have dealt with gentrification, the most famous recent example is Spike Lee’s Netflix adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It. But in the case of that show, Lee examines what happens to his beloved Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn after the moneyed, and hate to say it, white, population moves in. Vida, on the other hand, is showing a neighborhood seeing art galleries and farm-to-table restaurants move in, but a population who tries their mightiest to hang on to the life they love.

It reminded me of Lena Waithe’s Showtime series The Chi, whose season ran earlier this year. It takes place on Chicago’s south side, decried by many a politician, including our current president, as a festering den of gun violence, unemployment, drug use and hopelessness.

But what Waithe tries to explain in the show’s first season is that, yes, all of that exists. After all, the series starts with the shooting of a neighborhood kid in the wrong place at the wrong time and spins out from there. What also exists, however, are people who live their lives in that neighborhood like anyone else does, going to work, taking care of their kids, just trying to make sure everyone they love is safe and relatively happy. People in the neighborhood have ambition and hope, even if they stay there for their whole lives.

Like in Vida, a long-established ecosystem is in place that supports the people who live there and helps them navigate the challenges. It shows that, even in the toughest neighborhoods, life is life, and for the most part, there are many more people just doing their thing than ones causing violence and chaos.

Shows like Vida and The Chi used to exist, going all the way back to comedies like The Honeymooners in the ’50s and Good Times in the ’70s, to dramas like The White Shadow and ones of more recent vintage like The Wire. Were the people in these shows middle class? No. Did they have difficulties? Yes. But they also lived full lives, ones with plenty of ambition, hope, and the same ups and downs as everyone else.

Since then, though, it feels like TV has gotten very upper-middle class. And, sure, just because a family has money doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems; in fact, the problems might even be worse. But there seems to be a ton of shows like Vida‘s Sunday night companion Sweetbitter, where a 20-something finds out about herself working at an upscale New York restaurant, and very few like Vida and The Chi. In today’s current environment, where racial tensions are running so high that Black people are being arrested for just sitting at a Starbucks, we need more of those types of shows.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.