New Yorkers might find that they pay closer attention to fictional TV apartments in the city than the average viewer \u2014 especially if they, like me, were recently scrolling through StreetEasy to secure their own place to live. While watching the Hulu sitcom \u201cNot Suitable for Work,\u201d I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the plausibility of these characters\u2019 lifestyles, and how much their generic Murray Hill apartments differed from the unrealistic luxury of the \u201990s sitcoms I grew up watching. \u201cFriends,\u201d for example, had to come up with a convoluted backstory for why Monica, a sous chef, and Rachel, a waitress, could afford an enormous two-bedroom in Greenwich Village.<\/p>\n
The comparison made me wonder: Have New York sitcom apartments, which used to ask viewers to suspend their disbelief, started skewing more toward reality?<\/p>\n
Charlie Grandy, the showrunner of \u201cNot Suitable for Work,\u201d said he and creator Mindy Kaling wanted the economic situation of its characters to \u201cfeel believable.\u201d The series follows an ambitious set of friends, each of whom strives toward a great career in finance, journalism or the arts; their apartments, spacious yet sparsely decorated, reflect that sense of potential.<\/p>\n
Grandy first moved to New York in 1997 to try his hand at stand-up. He paid just under $500 a month to live with two roommates in the Meatpacking District. At the time, shows like \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d \u201cLiving Single\u201d and \u201cFriends\u201d depicted much larger apartments in the city he lived in. He remembers the discourse about Monica and Rachel\u2019s rent-controlled apartment, which they are said to illegally sublet from Monica’s grandma.<\/p>\n
John Shaffner, the production designer on \u201cFriends\u201d who would later serve as chairman of the Television Academy, is well aware that his work has been critiqued as far-fetched. He said in an interview that realism was never the goal. He wanted the bright purple apartment to look like it was inhabited by two single women in their mid-20s, but it was just as important for it to be a practical set for filming to take place.<\/p>\n
\u201cFriends\u201d was shot with a multi-camera setup in front of a studio audience, which meant Shaffner was tasked with accommodating all that machinery and the crew members using it. He needed to ensure all the action could take place within three walls. A large open floorplan allowed all six characters to appear in the same space at once. All of the doors opened into that space, so the cameras never had to squeeze into a tight hallway.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a huge difference in the way things are shot and the \u2018quality of realism\u2019 that you experience,\u201d Shaffner said. \u201cOur realism was a romanticized theatrical space for these characters to inhabit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The casual \u201cFriends\u201d viewer might also have forgotten that Monica and Rachel, as well as Joey and Chandler across the hall, are supposed to live in sixth-floor walkups, a touch of the true New York City experience. Shaffner pulled this detail from his own life: After completing a master\u2019s degree in 1976, he and his partner found a sixth-floor walkup in the city for $250 a month.<\/p>\n
\u201cFriends\u201d ended in 2004; Monica\u2019s landlord never found out about the subletting.<\/p>\n
Fast-forward to the 2010s, and fictional New York apartments started to look different.<\/p>\n
The single-camera setup wasn\u2019t novel in comedy \u2014 \u201cArrested Development,\u201d \u201cThe Office\u201d and even \u201cSex and the City\u201d shot this way in the aughts \u2014 but it surged in popularity. Without the need for such hulking equipment, shows such as \u201cBroad City\u201d and \u201cGirls\u201d were able to shoot in smaller, more realistic spaces.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith \u2018Broad City,\u2019 we all knew, like, \u2018This is gritty New York,\u2019\u201d said the show\u2019s production designer, Angelique Clark. \u201c\u2018We\u2019re going to make it cool and fun and interesting and captivating, but it\u2019s going to try to show a bit more realism than some other shows.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The character Abbi shares an apartment in Astoria with a roommate we rarely see \u2014 and that roommate\u2019s boyfriend, who hangs around far too often for someone who doesn\u2019t contribute financially. Ilana also lives with a roommate in Gowanus. Even if the best friends\u2019 incomes are low, you can imagine a world in which they each scrape together just enough money to make their half of rent.<\/p>\n
In the first season, scenes set at Ilana\u2019s home were filmed in a real Brooklyn apartment. \u201cThat was teeny tiny and very, very hard to shoot in,\u201d according to Clark, who noted that, while the camera could fit, it was difficult to light from outside. She rebuilt the apartment on a stage for the second season onward: \u201c\u200aLiterally we just [hit] copy and paste.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year, \u201cNot Suitable for Work\u201d adopted a similar approach by shooting on stages in Williamsburg that production designer Bill Groom based on real units in a Murray Hill apartment building. The standard lot size in New York is 20 to 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep, he said, so he modeled the spaces with those building dimensions in mind. The characters\u2019 apartments are essentially mirror images of one another, though the girls\u2019 place is a little further along in decoration than where the guys live.<\/p>\n
Looking for an apartment teaches you a lot about yourself \u2014 what you value, how you spend your time, what absolutely pushes you over the edge. For the creative team behind a TV show, envisioning a character\u2019s space offers a parallel journey: It helps them understand those same things about these fictional people. A carefully thought-out home deepens their characterization. They feel fuller, and more realized.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t expect to find an apartment as extravagant as Monica and Rachel\u2019s in \u201cFriends,\u201d and I definitely didn\u2019t. But while I don\u2019t live in Murray Hill, either, I could very well imagine myself living in one of the places from \u201cNot Suitable for Work.\u201d That connection kept my interest in the show.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re just trying to do our best,\u201d Grandy said, \u201cand hope that the audience comes along for the ride.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Yorkers might find that they pay closer attention to fictional TV apartments in the city than the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-306899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}