LadyButterflyshe/herTotal lie
RizzoTheSmallThe 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 1980s 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.
They’re not all upper class, Joey starts as a small background / ad actor, Rachel and Phoebe do small jobs like waitress and massages - Phoebe living in the street as a kid comes up a few times. An episode has Joey, Phoebe, Rachel point out that they’re poor and often out of a job so they complain that they aren’t nearly as loaded as Chandler, Ross, Monica, and they have a hard time keeping up with their lifestyle. Also confirming Chandler, Ross, Monica are indeed well off. Later, Joey gets a good acting role, Rachel has a good job, and Phoebe gets a good place at some point.
FlamekebabI 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?
Same energy:
In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something?
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, but that a really good input
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. 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.
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.
What time do they start work? 11am?
They wake up at 4.
OpenStarsIt'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
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”.
agamemnonymousTo be fair they lived 5ft away, it may as well have been one big apartment.
Still. Who does that.
People with close friends, i guess.
My friends definitively don’t want me around. lol
My friends definitively don’t want me around. lol
potoooooooo ✅️My 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. 😅
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?
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.
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.
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.
1984Capitalism is amazing. We can all just chill and have coffee and have amazing lives.
True if you narrow down the in-group enough.
As a temporarily embarrassed future billionaire, I understood that reference.
Now let us buy some American blue jeans and have hamburger sandwiches from McDonald’s.
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”.
Chandler being able to afford paying for rent AND providing for Joey is also incredibly unrealistic.