The Money Shot

From TV shows to nepo-baby wars, we're devouring entertainment that satirises the one percent. But what is it about pop culture's roast of the very wealthy that feels so delicious right now?

- LAURA CRAIK

When I was a child, I was given a tape recorder as a present. I taped everything. The radio (illegal). Me singing along to the radio (should have been illegal). And once, accidentally, my mother. ‘We can’t all live in Ravelston like the Browns,’ she’d said – an innocuous comment to me, but not to her. ‘Erase that,’ she commanded. ‘What if they hear it?’

‘They won’t hear it,’ I laughed. ‘How will they hear it?’ But my mother was adamant, so it was erased.

Ravelston was a posher Edinburgh neighbourhood than ours. The Browns had moved there from our street after Mr Brown got a promotion in the impenetrably opaque finance job that all men seemed to do. They’d recently invited us for lunch, and while they were still the same kind, down-to-earth people, their new house was fancy, with high ceilings, six bedrooms and a carp pond. ‘Thick skirting boards,’ my mother had noted, on the bus home. ‘And beautiful cornicing.’ Pause. ‘But a bugger to heat.’

I was reminded of this conversation as I watched Fleishman Is in Trouble, one of a slew of recent TV shows and films satirising the rich. The screen adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner's novel is about many things, including the endless oneupmanship of wealth, and the unhappiness that lies beneath the outward trappings of the extremely wealthy. Too much is never enough, and never will be - a theme also explored in The White Lotus, which invites you to envy the characters' lifestyle and hate their entitlement but also to feel peculiarly sorry for them. Imagine drinking Veuve Cliquot at breakfast before nodding off on your sun-lounger, your diamonds glinting in the sun - yet still feeling empty inside.