Jasmin Humburg provides evidence of naturalist narrative strategies, tropes, and character variations in six contemporary American television series: The Wire, Tremé, Shameless, Ozark, Orange is the New Black and 2 Broke Girls. The author investigates how poverty is negotiated through classic literary naturalism and contemporary televisual articulations, and how the latter may have been influenced by the former in the age of the Great Recession. By connecting literary studies, television studies, and concepts of social mobility, this project contributes to the field of new poverty studies.