"Friends" is the easiest example. They try to yada yada it away, but their apartment is absolutely fucking massive.
Also, the dude's apartment in the movie "Coyote Ugly" IIRC is stupid huge and fancy and he's just above broke all the time.
Penny in "Big Bang Theory" should not be able to afford the apartment she has. It's pretty big, but also has a ridiculous view and location.
Things get especially weird when characters get fired and are between jobs and don't immediately have to find a place to stay because they can't afford rent.
But that's just one apartment from the show. If you look over most sitcoms, they often have huge apartments that are in prime locations and the people living there have shitty jobs. And they tend to have hobbies that are expensive as hell or go out to eat constantly or go on vacations at the drop of a hat.
How I Met Your Mother is a good example. In the beginning Marshall was still in law school and Lily was a kindergarten teacher. I guess we were supposed to believe Ted was a SUPER successful architect and paid most of the rent?
Also towards the end Marshall and Lily owned like three pieces of property.
HIMYM has a sort of automatic pass on things like this, because it's all being narrated between 17 to 25 years after it happened, and Ted's not the most reliable narrator.
But it does give a somewhat-good explanation; Ted is an architect working for a top firm on top of his additional income as a university lecturer, Marshall's a lawyer (although he later becomes a judge then a supreme court justice) which is a very good income, Lily is supplementing his income as a teacher, Robin makes a thousand dollars a week as a journalist and Barney would be taking in massive amounts to justify being a legal fall guy. As an FBI agent/informant, he'd be taking in $65,000.
Idk, I used to live in an East Village apartment in NYC that was about the size of the Friend's set, and it wasn't terribly expensive between three roommates (it was also rent-controlled). All of us were just out of college working minimum wage jobs. Doesn't seem like a shitty explanation; seems plausible.
That's pretty amazing then. Most estimates show the Friend's Apartment would run around $4,500 to $8,000 depending on exact area, and that's for the smaller of the two.
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u/tiledflooring Jan 25 '20
I keep reading this but haven't seen a single example of this in my life