[zerospinboson]

What I'm curious about is whether it would be conceivable to create a US analog to "Shameless", or if the fact that you'd be watching at a subculture "at life" that lives by an entirely different rule set (living from day to day, scrounging together what entertainment you can) would be so antithetical the ruling notion that "TV has to be about affluent people" that nobody would watch it. I mean, the US version of Coupling is horrible, because they took out all the jokes, but I wonder if, if that show was 'true to life' (ie accurate without being overdone), the show would get any ratings at all. (I realize that everything related to the casual approach to sex and theft would be controversial, but Rome was a joint project by HBO and the BBC as well, so..) It might be interesting to see what the public response would be to such a worked out example of "life on the bottom," where on one level life truly does suck, but at the same time it would hardly need to show people that were constantly unhappy with their lot in life (that is, the people in Shameless as it is portrayed are quite content living the way they do, they don't know any better).