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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

Quick question: Is the New York of sitcoms supposed to present "good housing"? The two most famous New York sitcoms that come to mind (namely Seinfeld and Friends) present rather small and basic apartments, people using in-building shared washers and driers, doesn't look any better than the ridiculously small apartments we have in Paris.

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Seinfelds apartment seems pretty huge to me, and i dont live anywhere near as expensive as New York

http://img00.deviantart.net/15bd/i/2013/039/8/f/jerry_seinfe...

similarly the main apartment in friends seems pretty large

http://pre14.deviantart.net/3e01/th/pre/i/2016/036/8/8/frien... - note that this diagram is for both the girls apartment and the guys apartment across the hall, so we are looking at two apartments here

quick credit to the artist of these diagrams, they have a ton of other shows on their deviantart page[1]

[1]http://nikneuk.deviantart.com/gallery/

"friends" were indeed huge for such young people...however Seinfeld in-show was supposedly successful enough to buy his father a cadillac as a birthday present, so I can more readily accept that he could afford a relatively spacious 1 bedroom apartment in 80's/90's NYC (remember that the city used to be a lot more affordable back then).

It should be pointed out that Friends was criticized a lot for showing larger apartments in NYC for what people like the protagonists could typically afford.

It's funny how many replies you're getting from new yorkers pointing out that seinfeld/friends actually had much larger than average apartments. The fact that all those years later you still think of them as "small" means the cinematic trick worked!

But why did Seinfeld/Friends engage in this trick?

My guess: Seinfeld/Friends was aimed to appeal to a mass american audience, which is why I imagine they had such large apartments -- they wanted something that still looked "small" to middle americans and outer suburban dwellers, but it still obviously had to be much larger than real manhattan apartment sizes, because filming in a realistic 350sqft apartment set (1) would have been awkward to even shoot (2) would have seemed so small as to be hard to believe or at least steal the scene focus when the apartment is supposed to just be a backdrop.

Some of us grew up in this sort of flat: https://www.gumtree.pl/a-mieszkania-i-domy-do-wynajecia/krak...

So yeah, compared to that, the flat they had in "Friends" was incredibly spacious.

Yeah I think New York was a bad example, but as someone outside the US I have always been fascinated by the US concept of suburbs (showed in a lot of movies and series), big yards, green gardens, big trees, family friendly environments were kids can play outside without any major worry.

Idk what Seinfeld you're watching, but all the apartments in it are massive

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