Watching TV series during the endless evenings of the pandemic, I’ve been struck by a recurring theme: family downward mobility. In the US series Arrested Development, the jailing of the conman patriarch dismays his adult children, who had expected to live off the family business for ever. “Great,” grumbles his daughter, “so now we don’t have a car or a jet? Why don’t we just take an ad out in I’m Poor magazine?”

In Schitt’s Creek, another ruined family goes to live in its last asset: the eponymous podunk small town that they had bought as a joke. In Years & Years, members of an impoverished British family move in with the grandmother in her rambling, dilapidated house. In Lena Dunham’s Girls, the twenty-something main character is told by her mother that she will no longer support her. Dunham retorts, horrified: “All my friends get help from their parents.”

The topic of younger generations living precariously off family wealth clearly has particular appeal to TV writers, who are educated people in a precarious profession. But it’s also the middle-class theme of our time, amid the second economic meltdown in 13 years. What is the combination of downward mobility and widespread inheritance doing to families, ambitions and societies?