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.
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.
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.
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
So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
👏 👏👏👏👏
🥹
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.
Well this was a shitty show.
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!
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.
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.
Yep it’s ludicrous
Where breakfast
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.
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.
This is especially true from Chandler and Joey’s perspectives, where Monica’s kitchen is only like eight steps away from their own kitchen. Why bother cooking yourself breakfast, when there’s a professional chef willing to do it for you, and all you have to do is open two extra doors?
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.
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.
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 definitely 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.
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. 😅
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
🤔
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.
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.
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.
They were like “How can we justify them having the place we know we need them to have?” and worked from there.
I know a guy living on Central Park West with 2000 sq ft two floor apartment with park views that was paying less than what I paid for 1k sq ft in the middle of Queens. That’s a nicer place in a better area than Friends had for less than 3k a month thirty years after the show all because of rent control.
We know they all came from money except Joey and Phoebe. They could also be getting money from family.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What time do they start work? 11am?
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”.
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!
The morning’s heeeeere!
Man I love that guy!
He was one of the highlights of the show for me
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”.
