I actually grew up in a town kind of like the one in Ozark; big resort crowd in the summer, less than 1000 residents in the winter. My dad’s side of the family was like the Langmores in a lot of ways, and so were plenty of my friends. It’s a hard place to grow up if you’re poor.

We weren’t the poorest of the poor, to be clear. We did not live in a trailer or a camper (my dad and my two brothers did, before he met my mom) but in a run-down house on the main road in town. We had a lot of books in the house, I read constantly. I dreamed of escaping.

It was so, so bone chillingly cold in the winter. We had a wood stove in the living room and reserved the furnace for very cold nights, because it cost money to run. Sometimes I’d go to bed in a winter hat, long johns, wool socks, and gloves.

We grew most of our food and raised chickens. Spent a lot of time growing up doing manual labor, we all did. My mom and oldest brother worked the hardest. It was treacherous in the winter; we’d put cold ashes from the stove onto the sheets of ice that coated the driveway.

There’s no real point to this thread, I’m just remembering. I think this show does a good job of showing generational poverty and the contrast between the people who are from rural America and the people who vacation there either literally or figuratively.