Where breakfast
The expectation that you could get an apartment that size in central NYC without being a billionaire is also a lie
It actually addresses this. Chandler was in a high paying job and lived below his means. And Monica’s (much larger, much nicer) apartment was rent controlled; The apartment complex still had her grandmother on the lease from the 1960’s, so Monica was essentially only paying a small increase in 1960’s rent.
That rent control was the topic of one episode, where Joey yells at the maintenance guy. In response, the maintenance guy threatens to tell the landlord about Monica’s grandmother being dead, meaning Monica would need to start paying full price for the apartment. Monica can’t afford the rent, so Joey has to do a favor for the maintenance guy and get back into his good graces.
I think they explained it, the reason they could afford it was because Monica’s grandmother lived there, and they’ve been paying 1950s rent because of rent control or something. Something similar for phoebe as well. Anyway show never explains how joey/chandler/Ross can afford those big houses.
Hi, Chandler and joey’flat is not that big, it was actually the joke between characters often and Chandler had a good job anyway. Ross was good with money and his parents favourite so I think he got more money from them.
Did any of us watch any of it?
Friends fucking sucked.
You okay?
Pretty weird to be so angry about an old TV show and to keep commenting in a thread about it.
You are right.
I was in a pissy mood and never saw what everyone else saw in friends. I could have expressed that differently.
Fair enough! These are trying times, and I have also been guilty of that shortcoming. Good on ya for owning up to it.
Even if that is your opinion, why share it? What value does that provide to anyone, including yourself.
Shitting on things for no reason stopped being popular after the 90s.
You’re right.
Also worth remembering that except for Phoebe. All the characters on the show grew up upper class. Like top 5% upper class.
Also Phoebe lived with her grandmother in a small apartment until her grandmother died and she got roomamates.
I quite like the way How I Met Your Mother handles this - the size of the apartments is the narrator misremembering. There’s an episode where the characters have been viewing a house in New Jersey - they return to the apartment and it’s portrayed as the size it realistically would be.
That would just be a dig on their intelligence. You can’t see the massive problem of not being able to afford housing? How can I relate to this character?
Can you tell which episode it is? I’ve tried watching some but couldn’t find it.
It’s in the intro to S07E11. Took me a while to track it down!
Thanks for tracking it.
Some of that is due to the realities of filming in a stage made to look like an apartment as you need the space for the camera crew to fit. This everyone lives in massive places.
Never thought about this, that a really good input, thanks
NP,I was told the same thing by a camera guy back in the late 1990s about this exact show.
That’s completely not the reason. How other shows manage to show small apartments and poor people houses?
Showing regular people living in big apartment is more appealing to the public. Shows from the 70s or before were more realistic. Mary Tyler Moore was living in a small apartment and sleeping in the sofa despite having a regular job. In All in the family, they were financially struggling especially because of the 70s inflation. Lucy and her husband were living in a small apartment.
Things did change in the 80s and we started seeing families living in big houses with cars. Even Roseanne who normally depicted a working class family was living in a big house and could afford many things.
you think you know better than someone who worked on tv in NYC at that time?
Mary Tyler Moore’s show never had the expectation of holding six or more people in the same room like friends.
All in the family took place in a house. Im not sure how you miss this. It’s in the credits.
Lucy and her Husband never had more than a handful of people on screen at once. They dont need the space Friends does.
Friends needs a space for the main cast plus partners and that requires a larger space plus the ability to fit crew which requires large places. The bit about rent control makes perfect sense if you have experience with NYC real-estate.
There were many episodes where there were more than 6 people in I Love Lucy. I mentioned All in the Family because it was realistic and was showing people financially struggling even with two jobs. They lived in a house but it was small with one bathroom.
Even Seinfeld had a small apartment. Many other shows manage to show people living in small apartments. And even with rent control, it isn’t realistic at all.
So that is clearly not the real reason.
Again their living room had to fit six or more. There are episodes where they have six people in Lucy’s house but rarely is it more than four or five.
Seinfeld had 4 main cast and they rarely had anyone else in their places other than the main 4. No one needed to fit a dozen people in a room.
Were you renting living space in NYC in 1994? I was.
Do you know anyone with a ridiculous place because of rent control policies? I know several. Everything about the show makes sense within the context of the time once you realize that eight or so people need to fit on the stage in many scenes
So writers are like “we will write a sitcom about this poor family of 10. Let’s give them a big house to fit them all”. That is ridiculous.
I won’t continue debating with you. I am amazed at how are you trying to justify everything about the show. Actually you are like the ones I saw on the fan sub on Reddit.
So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
Thanks /s
Now I’ve got that fucking song stuck in my head!
🥹
👏 👏👏👏👏
One too many 👏
I think the bigger lie is you can live in New York City and almost never interact with a person of color, but ok.
This actually used to happen when I was younger. I miss having friends and being able to just hang out in our free time. I miss having some usable amount of free time. Adult life sucks and sometimes I just feel like I want to jump of the Balcony and end it all since I’ll never get the good times back and I’ll never have anymore in the future.
Sorry you’re feeling like this mate, hope you catch a break soon. Wish I could go back to my late twenties too sometimes.
Fight for the future you want everyone to have
Sucks to think about, especially since relative to the past we are in the most prosperous times, but people used to be happier in generations prior because they had cheap third places to go to, had a purpose and community.
And now our lives are surrounded by substitute and vicarious experiences that will never afford us true fulfillment. And like a drug, it saps us of the motivation to actually change any of it.
Convenience at an all time high, wealth inequality at astronomical levels.
Times are different, complaints are valid
What they don’t mention here is that these guys get up at 6:00 AM, have lunch at 7 and leave at 8
What time do they start work? 11am?
They wake up at 4.
It’s the street noise
More time to watch Ugly Naked Guy!
Ew… you go right ahead, while I’ll be over here just ah… doing not that.:-P
Can’t look away 😳
Moooorning’s heeereee!
That was part of a joke at the start of an episode. Everyone complained that their boss didn’t like them and Joey (working at the Central Perk at that time iirc) pointed out “yeah I wonder why none of your bosses like you. Maybe it’s because it’s Wednesday 12 pm and you are hanging out at a cafe”.
When I was a kid, the trope of the neighbor just coming over and having breakfast was real in my case. The neighbor was my best friend, and he was treated like family. Literally the only person who didn’t live at my house that was allowed to just come in on their own. He was the Urkel to my Big Guy.
This and wall high lockers in high school
I’m not sure what this means?
Lots of lockers portrayed in media are the type that go from the floor all the way up the wall. I don’t know about other schools, but my lockers were all pretty small and there were several on top of each other.
Mine were floor to ceiling
I figured there were some like that.
Yeah but I grew up in NJ where my school was 400 students and that was pretty common because most towns are really small. So I imagine space wasn’t as big of an issue as other big schools face.
I had a locker in high school. It was against a wall. Admittedly, it was in a dedicated locker area/room and not in a major plot-device-friendly thoroughfare, but it existed all the same.
Yeah, but all the lockers were stacked in rows with 2 short lockers instead of 1 tall one.
We had lockers in high school but they were always in a large open area. Putting them against a wall in a corridor would be stupid as it would almost always lead to blockages.
I also never knew anyone who had a huge locker large enough to be stuffed into, like always seems to happen on American TV.
Anyone showing up at my apartment to hang out while I’m waking up and getting ready for work is going to get chopped in the throat, that’s my time for rage and hatred for existence.
Yes, but Leave it to Beaver was a faithful documentary of life in the fifties.
True. Many things got left to Beaver, some say too many things got left to Beaver. Much of McCarthyism and the Red scare can be blamed on little Theodore Cleaver.
I think what most people find unrealistic is having more than 1 person you want to spend more than 30 minutes with. In the 90s, nothing about their lifestyle is super unrealistic for New York. The only thing is the money.
Sitcom characters spend ridonkulous amounts of money on stupid things nobody does irl. It’s usually rationalized by saying the character is always broke, which makes sense until they blow $2500 to hire a mariachi band for somebody’s birthday a week later.
Being broke can be the impetus for zany hijinks that sitcoms center around. But actually being broke sucks and is not very funny, so they don’t show you that part.
Otoh, I know quite a few people who fit that exact description. They have jobs that pay them pretty well, but spend recklessly, so they are always “broke” despite having steady, well paid employment.
Also notable that Hollywood types often lead lives with very loose schedules and will randomly hang out in places.
To be fair they lived 5ft away, it may as well have been one big apartment. And one of them was a chef.
Still. Who does that.
Before the internet was widespread, it was extremely common for people to actually hang out in person. The show is set in an era where the internet was something you went out of your way to connect to, not something that was already integrated into every single device you used.
Especially since they all lived so close together, it’s 100% believable that they’d hang out together regularly. People also forget that the show takes place over multiple years, and we only see 20’ish episodes per year. Assuming each episode takes place across two’ish days, they’re still only seeing each other two or three times per week. If I lived across the hallway from my best friends, I’d probably hang out with them a few times per week too.
It’s believable if you imagine yourselves living their lives. But the lie for me was that I could have the same thing when I grew older. That is impossible for me, and a lot of people.
Older gens I’d say. My mother had afriend who always came in without knockin and just…vibed. Like they suddenly materialised in kitchen and talked while eating or materialised near table and drank coffee.
My partner’s mother had someone like that too.
Meanwhile I am having a meltdown if someone tries the door before knocking (they are always locked anyway)
Was your mom always goofing things up and was her friend’s name Ethel?
Not breakfast, but I used to eat dinner with my neighbors allllll the time. They even used my fridge to keep extra food in when preparing for parties and stuff.
That sounds wonderful. I want neighbors like that. I guess I can’t sit around waiting for neighbors like that, eh. I need to go out and make neighbors like that.
People with close friends, i guess.
My friends definitively don’t want me around. lolMy friends definitively don’t want me around. lol
My friends
🤔
As a person with close friends, there’s just no time in the morning. Even if we lived close by, like, no. I don’t even have time to eat breakfast in the morning those days when I drop the kids at school.
Yeah, my best friend lives just around the corner and we have this kind of friendship. We work together and both work from home, so we often work from each other’s houses.
We both have wives and kids but our families are close enough that we often just turn up at each other’s houses without asking or organising anything. We eat dinner together about half the time.
But we pretty much never have breakfast together - mornings are far too busy for that.
each other’s houses.
Must be nice though.
Really depends on your situation. I used to leave the house at 10 to avoid the rush in both directions. This was great until I had kids. With kids it’s an absolute no go.
But most of the friends in Friends don’t have kids.
Really depends on your situation.
I think this is key. Most people don’t have a situation where they both don’t have kids and don’t need to be at work early in the morning.
I have a job where I don’t need to be in very early or at all. But them darn kids gotta get to school or I’m breaking the law. 😅
Lol plot twist, it was 4 overtly large apartments right next to each other.
Ross doesn’t live in the same building. Later on he moves into the building across the road from them though. Phoebe lives elsewhere as well.
King of the Hill showing a group of childhood friends living next to each other, having time almost every day to just hang out near their homes and drink, went from just being a quaint little detail from when I watched it when I was younger to being an almost dreamlike aspiration as I move further into adulthood.
There’s a certain amount of discourse in KotH fandom around exactly how all four childhood friends came to buy houses on The Alley behind Rainey Street. Apparently the canon is hazy and inconsistent, though I can’t remember the details.
Another total lie is almost every TV show character drinking bottled water now. You could legitimately give this the benefit of the doubt because it does mean they don’t have to rig a functional sink on the set with a working tap, but product placement is also such a big thing, I dunno.
My (soon to be ex-) wife buys large quantities of bottled water… One of many things about her I found irksome over the years, I went to the trouble of putting in an RO filter under the sink… and she was always so vocal about recycling… What’s better than recycling? Not buying tons of plastic in the first place…
I had a girlfriend that was utterly convinced that bottled water was healthier for you. Although when pushed she couldn’t provide a reason.
Some people do seem to buy into the idea that bottled water is all collected from some kind of secret magical spring of eternal youth. When really it all comes out of a tap in the factory.
It was astounding to me to find out that plastic bottles have only existed for some 45~ years.
Plastic bottles became common more like 60 years ago. They were invented in the 1950s but were too expensive for a while. I remember as a kid in the 60s there was a commercial where somebody dropped a bottle of shampoo, which normally would have been glass, and was amazed that it didn’t break. This stuck in my mind all these years because of a standup comic named Norm Crosby. who told on a talk show about this scene actually happening to him at the grocery store. The lady in front of him dropped her shampoo, so he picked it up and re-enacted the commercial - “It didn’t break… It didn’t break!!!”. He was hoping for a laugh but she just glared at him and said, “Gimme da soap.” Anyway, that’s how I know plastic bottles were being popularized in the mid-60s.
