The expectation that you could get an apartment that size in central NYC without being a billionaire is also a lie
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.
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~~ Long Island - they return to the apartment and it's portrayed as the size it realistically would be.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
Lol plot twist, it was 4 overtly large apartments right next to each other.
What time do they start work? 11am?
They wake up at 4.
It's the street noise
More time to watch Ugly Naked Guy!
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".
So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
👏 👏👏👏👏
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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 though. he was a PhD researcher + professor. back in the 90s, that would've been a decent gig.
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.
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 know it is popular to shit on Friends these years, but I think that it captures the growing up part of life pretty well as the show is basically about capturing a snapshot in time of a group of friends when they were the closest before adult life tore them apart. Because that is how the show ends. They all grow up, have adult responsibilities, different priorities and they all leave the apartment complex to start new lives away from one another.
In my 20s I had a group of friends for awhile and we would hang out in each other's apartments all the time, sometimes we would sleep over at each other's places and have breakfast together before heading to school. We would go on picnics and excursions together. All pile into the old, rusty car that one of us owned and drive somewhere.
We had a pub we liked to visit semi-regularly and we were pretty 50/50 men and women.
When we got our degrees, most of us packed up and left. We are now in our 30s and some have had kids in the meantime while most of us have grown apart. Some of us still keep in contact and hang out when our schedules permits it, but it isn't like it was when we were in our 20s.
To me, Friends is an idealized version of the friends group stuff in your 20s. To me it isn't as unrealistic as it's being made out to be nowadays, but it is idealized.
I treasure the few years I got to have good friends and classmates that I loved to hang out with and treat as family. No matter how much time passes, whenever we get to meet up again, it is almost like no time has passed at all, and that is such a great feeling, even if we only get to see each other like once a year.
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.
I think if they live across the hall then it happens. I have friends that live across the street and they come over for breakfast and we all get our kids ready together and off to school.
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.
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.
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.
Another total lie is almost every TV show character drinking bottled water now. You could legitimately give this the benefit of the doubt as purely a production issue, because it's a simple way to avoid rigging a functional sink on the set with a working tap - I mean, the transporter on Star Trek was invented to avoid shooting lots of shuttle takeoffs and landings. But product placement is also such a big thing now, I'm dubious.
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
this whole show is fake af
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.
Never really looked and just realized how cluttered that apartment is.
there's nothing on the floor, that's peak organization
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
