This and wall high lockers in high school
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well this was a shitty show.
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.
Never really looked and just realized how cluttered that apartment is.
there’s nothing on the floor, that’s peak organization
That and having time to hang out at the coffee shop all the time. And also Monica who supposedly works in a high end restaurant having as much time as she does to socialize and whatnot. Still love the show tho.
Also in HIMYM how they have time to hang out at a bar every single night.
When I worked in NYC, we generally would meet for happy hour a few times a week after work. So not weird at all.
In the 90s what else were people doing if they weren’t hanging out? If I had no kids it’s perfectly plausible I could meet at the bar every day after work. How is a coffee shop any different? Just for clarity plenty of people drink coffee at night.
It’s true. Try hanging out somewhere outside your house with no modern technology for two hours.
First you’ll realize how long time feels without a smartphone or instant entertainment.
The second thing you’ll realize is how hard it is to keep track of time without a wristwatch.
People socialized more in person because there wasn’t much else to do and it was the best way to do so.
People socialized more in person because there wasn’t much else to do and it was the best way to do so.
Truly dark times.
And everyone has crippling anxiety now lol
In the good old days socially anxious people would just get stabbed in central park.
I thought the show was like a weekend and holidays only view into their lives with a few work stuff sprinkled in, so I discounted all the regular work related loopholes.
So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
👏 👏👏👏👏
🥹
Where breakfast
Chandler being able to afford paying for rent AND providing for Joey is also incredibly unrealistic.
Canonically Chandler is actually super rich from his mysterious nerd job and just lives frugally, and Monica’s giant-ass apartment is rent controlled and inherited from her grandmother.
I don’t think Chandler is super rich, but he’s definitely comfortable. He doesn’t have the money to outright replace their furniture when it is all stolen, for instance. They end up using lawn chairs (and a canoe) as their living room furniture for a while. But yeah, he definitely lives below his means, because he always has money to pass off to Joey whenever he needs it.
He works in data analytics, his friends just don’t care enough to learn what that means.
He probably analyses consumer and advertising trends to guide investments and product launches.
I thought he was a dentist with a hitman friend.
i bet you can hear this
You will care about the W.E.N.U.S because I care about the W.E.N.U.S!
Yep it’s ludicrous
Chandler’s job was just made to be some generic finance sector job, right? It’s definitely possible even today, but he’d be working a lot more hours. You’d never see him on the show.
Ross being stable even as a PhD grad student seems a lot more unrealistic to me. He even loved on his own. But maybe it was family money.
Ross wasn’t a grad student; He had his doctorate. Initially he worked at a museum of natural history, then eventually got fired (for screaming at his boss) and went to work at the university as a professor. Either way, in the mid-90’s, he would have been comfortable.
I mean they mentioned he and Chandler graduated in 1991, so if Ross got a PhD in 3 years that is probably a record, lol. I was always under the impression he was in a PhD program the first season of Friends and that’s why he was working at the museum.
Ross wasn’t a grad student though. he was a PhD researcher + professor. back in the 90s, that would’ve been a decent gig.
It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a decent gig as a young professor, especially not in a field where you can’t bring in much grant money. Making even decent money in academia requires decades of seniority, and the really big bucks requires popular fame (a la Stephen Jay Gould) or enormous research grants that your institution gets to take 30% or 40% of.
I was under the impression Ross was still in a PhD program the first year, working at the museum seems like a gig for a PhD student. Worrying about the museum displays and stuff like that in season 1.
Nah, just your typical PhD paleontologist dinosaur nerd. The times they showed that side of Ross was probabaly some of the most realistic moments in the show.
Chandler was more some bureaucratic data guy. The way they describe him is inputting numbers into speeadsheets at a megacorp. But he eventually becomes a manager.
Post like this are more cliched than the tv shows they try to make fun of. The meme needs to have an annoying kid brought in to save it, because it’s “jumped the shark”.
Capitalism is amazing. We can all just chill and have coffee and have amazing lives.
Now let us buy some American blue jeans and have hamburger sandwiches from McDonald’s.
lol
True if you narrow down the in-group enough and are part of it.
As a temporarily embarrassed future billionaire, I understood that reference.
To be fair they lived 5ft away, it may as well have been one big apartment. And one of them was a chef.
Lol plot twist, it was 4 overtly large apartments right next to each other.
Still. Who does that.
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.
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?
People with close friends, i guess.
My friends definitively don’t want me around. lolAs 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.
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.
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.
My friends definitively don’t want me around. lol
My friends
🤔
