This just in: Meryl and Charlie are from the mean streets (a/k/a This is what shameless looks like)

ETA: This just in. I looked again at the company owned by Charlie's dad. Below in this entry, I mention I'd assumed his dad worked in a corporate office, but when Charlie mentioned his dad worked "downtown", I found the petroleum bulk station was located in an industrial section of Detroit. I then assumed that this was where his dad went every day, as Charlie had implied. Since it's industrial, and there's cracked asphalt and weeds, it looked gritty to Charlie.

That's the bulk station/bulk plant owned by his dad. His dad's business contact information cites Farmington, MI. I googled that too, saw the street view.

Per wikipedia:

Farmington is a city in Oakland County of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is a part of the affluent northern suburbs of Metropolitan Detroit.

The company retails oil and oil services in Farmington. If one looks at the general business statistics available on the web, including its (quite small) number of employees, the estimated annual revenue, and when the business was established*, it seems a good bet that some time back this company hit the (extremely) sunny side of the income/overhead ratio. The type of company that becomes the foundation mare, so to speak, for money applied to other revenue producing and wealth safe-guarding instruments.

Re the below, as I say towards the end of this entry, there's nothing wrong with coming from comfortable circumstances. It's not a character deficit, any more than poverty is a character attribute.

There is something wrong with appropriating a city's misery as a prop.

Particularly when you live a privileged/comfortable existence in an upscale community immediately adjacent to the city in America with the country's highest misery index, and your actual awareness of that reality is somewhere between invisible and nonexistent. #roadtosochi