New Yorkers might find that they pay closer attention to fictional TV apartments in the city than the average viewer — especially if they, like me, were recently scrolling through StreetEasy to secure their own place to live. While watching the Hulu sitcom “Not Suitable for Work,” I couldn’t stop thinking about the plausibility of these characters’ lifestyles, and how much their generic Murray Hill apartments differed from the unrealistic luxury of the ’90s sitcoms I grew up watching. “Friends,” 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.
The comparison made me wonder: Have New York sitcom apartments, which used to ask viewers to suspend their disbelief, started skewing more toward reality?
Charlie Grandy, the showrunner of “Not Suitable for Work,” said he and creator Mindy Kaling wanted the economic situation of its characters to “feel believable.” 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.
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 “Seinfeld,” “Living Single” and “Friends” depicted much larger apartments in the city he lived in. He remembers the discourse about Monica and Rachel’s rent-controlled apartment, which they are said to illegally sublet from Monica's grandma.
John Shaffner, the production designer on “Friends” 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.
“Friends” 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.
“That’s a huge difference in the way things are shot and the ‘quality of realism’ that you experience,” Shaffner said. “Our realism was a romanticized theatrical space for these characters to inhabit.”
The casual “Friends” 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’s degree in 1976, he and his partner found a sixth-floor walkup in the city for $250 a month.
“Friends” ended in 2004; Monica’s landlord never found out about the subletting.
Fast-forward to the 2010s, and fictional New York apartments started to look different.
The single-camera setup wasn’t novel in comedy — “Arrested Development,” “The Office” and even “Sex and the City” shot this way in the aughts — but it surged in popularity. Without the need for such hulking equipment, shows such as “Broad City” and “Girls” were able to shoot in smaller, more realistic spaces.
“With ‘Broad City,’ we all knew, like, ‘This is gritty New York,’” said the show’s production designer, Angelique Clark. “‘We’re going to make it cool and fun and interesting and captivating, but it’s going to try to show a bit more realism than some other shows.’”
The character Abbi shares an apartment in Astoria with a roommate we rarely see — and that roommate’s boyfriend, who hangs around far too often for someone who doesn’t contribute financially. Ilana also lives with a roommate in Gowanus. Even if the best friends’ incomes are low, you can imagine a world in which they each scrape together just enough money to make their half of rent.
In the first season, scenes set at Ilana’s home were filmed in a real Brooklyn apartment. “That was teeny tiny and very, very hard to shoot in,” 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: “ Literally we just [hit] copy and paste.”
Last year, “Not Suitable for Work” 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’ apartments are essentially mirror images of one another, though the girls’ place is a little further along in decoration than where the guys live.
Looking for an apartment teaches you a lot about yourself — 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’s 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.
I didn’t expect to find an apartment as extravagant as Monica and Rachel’s in “Friends,” and I definitely didn’t. But while I don’t live in Murray Hill, either, I could very well imagine myself living in one of the places from “Not Suitable for Work.” That connection kept my interest in the show.
“We’re just trying to do our best,” Grandy said, “and hope that the audience comes along for the ride.”
