In his landmark 1996 book, The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith argued that globalisation and the rise of neoliberalism had ‘propelled gentrification from a comparatively marginal preoccupation in a certain niche of the real estate industry to the cutting edge of urban change’ (Smith 1996: 8). Throughout his text, Smith makes repeated references to cinema, identifying what he calls ‘an entire cinematic genre’, including films such as Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Bright Lights, Big City (1988), dedicated to the ‘urban frontier’, tamed just like the ‘Old West’ (1996: 12). Smith valuably highlights not simply how culture mediates the impact of gentrification, but also the ways in which it may be constitutive of it, actively contributing to an enormously detrimental process. The frontier, however, is not the only means by which culture has engaged with gentrification. Stanley Corkin, amongst others, has highlighted connections between the revival of the romantic comedy in the late 1970s, even as its incompatibility with the modern (suburban) world was being confidently proclaimed, and New York's emerging gentrification in that period (Henderson 1978; Corkin 2011).

While Smith's examples are drawn from cinema, I would suggest that television is critical to contemporary cultural engagement with gentrification, not simply because of its significance as a mass medium, but also because television has been undergoing its own class transformation, what Michael Newman and Elana Levine call ‘legitimation’ (2012). Newman and Levine argue that while discourses of television's changing cultural value ‘seem to be according respect to a medium that has long been denied it’, such discourses do not dismantle but rather perpetuate ‘prevailing structures of status’ by ‘[moving] television up in the contemporary cultural hierarchy while leaving in place the distinctions of value and respectability that denigrated the medium in the first place’ (3). While television has largely been understood as a suburban and domestic medium (Spigel 1992), recent scholarship has situated it as urban in terms of sites of exhibition, modes of spectatorship, and settings of its programming (McCarthy 2001; Kooijman 2009; Brunsdon 2018). This reading of the medium as urban might also reinforce parallels that have been drawn between legitimation and gentrification (Hassler-Forest 2014).