“Welcome to television’s unchallenged authority on wealth, prestige, and success. It’s another dazzling Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Meet the stars of show business and big business. Discover how life’s winners live, love, and spend their fortunes. Enter their dazzling world of luxury on privileged tours of the fantasy palaces they call home.”

This is the 1990 credit sequence from the syndicated television series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and in this episode, it’s accompanied by a blurry three-second snippet of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson striding purposefully down a hallway, surrounded by press and security.

What better way to evoke the time, place, and mood of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? More than thirty-five years after its 1984 debut as part of the “Operation Prime Time” package of syndicated programming that included American 1980s trash TV mainstays Solid Gold and Entertainment Tonight, the decade-long reign of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous pioneered a format that has by now suffused the media: a near-worship of the signifiers of wealth, fame, and power; cults of celebrity built entirely around softball interviews and profiles; the promotion of the do-nothing scions of the global ruling class as an aspirational ideal. The series became shorthand for wealth and privilege, celebrated in rap lyrics and enshrined in mainstream American media everywhere from reality programming to the local evening news.