Mi Casa Es Su Casa: A Love Letter to Sitcom Apartments

If you’re anything like me — an insomniac kid of the early aughts — you probably spent an awful lot of time watching (and rewatching) 90s sitcoms. While it may be pretty tacky to say something like “Friends raised me” I would be lying if there wasn’t a bit of truth to that. But for me, it’s not the jokes, or the characters, or even the endearing lessons they learn every episode, that left a lasting impression. It’s their apartments. God, do I love ‘em!

What’s the deal with sitcom apartments?

If the popularity of The Friends Experience pop-up events (or the Seinfeld Lego apartment, for that matter) are any indication of the lasting impact of sitcom sets, I don’t know what is. Despite the overwhelming cringe of paying $50 to yell “Pivot!” on an artificial staircase, there’s also an overwhelming sense of comfort in returning to a space we know so well. A space that somehow feels like our own home.

What I love about TV is its domesticity (I wrote a whole thesis on it!) This is content made to be consumed in the comfort of your own home, not in a theatre with a bunch of strangers. Beyond that, multi-cam soundstage sitcoms have an inherent element of interiority because they literally have to be filmed indoors. The audience becomes so intimately connected with the domestic spaces on the small screen that those spaces feel like an extension of their own homes.

When we suspend our disbelief for 22 minutes and reckon with the underwhelming knowledge that these apartments are not, in fact, in New York City any more than they are architecturally possible (I’m looking at you, Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment!), we are invited into a safe-haven that is as predictable as the show itself. At the end of an episodic sitcom, the characters usually come to some pleasant conclusion. The loose ends of their conflicts are tied up in perfect bows and the audience is left assured that everything will be ok in the end. But the best part is that the physical space is just as crucial to the formula of the show as the script.

Apartment Envy

Audiences have been asking the age-old questions “How does Carrie afford her apartment?” and “How do these people have so much free time to hang out with their friends?” and “Who has friend groups like that anyway?” and, worse yet, “Oh god, do I have enough friends?!” since the dawn of time. And this next part might sound cynical, but I couldn’t help but wonder if many people my age find comfort in sitcom apartments because we may never have one quite as nice (or, if we do, would we have the free time to hang out in it?)

In this way, sitcom apartments provide as much nostalgia as they do fantasy. While we may never live alone on a comedian’s salary, or have a massive rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village, or use our ovens to store Manolo Blahnik’s (regrettably, we need them to cook up our designed-shoe-priced-groceries), at least we can always turn on our favourite episodes and keep the dream alive.