When I read the subject title my first thought was Grimm. While you can think of plenty of reasons, on the show it does seem to be more for narrative contrivance, than any of the practical world reasons stated above.
I always thought the husband sleeping elsewhere after a fight was less a punishment and more an “I can’t bear your presence right now.” Hilariously, a buddy in high school was sleeping on the couch when we arrived one Saturday and tried to play it off as him punishing his wife.* We couldn’t believe couples really did that.
*They got married after 10th grade, both sets of parents consented, and they got a small 1bd house as a gift after the wedding.
Even in a household that definitely does have a spare bedroom, oftentimes that bedroom (and that bed, in particular) is used as a dump spot for various other things. By the time hubby gets kicked out of bed, he’s just too tired to move all that stuff to a better location, and it’s just easier to sleep on the couch.
Plus, the couch is specifically selected to be comofrtable for everyone on it. A spare guest bed is ideally one that looks entirely presentable, but in fact is lumpy enough to encourage guests to move along somewhere else after a night or two.
Watched a TV show recently (won’t say which, etc. due to spoilers), where there was a “couple” who were Russian spies and were pretending to be married (even to the point of having a child). One thing that tipped the investigators off was that the husband was sleeping on the couch and his toiletries were in the downstairs half-bath.
But this was a big house and they had been living there for some time. Why didn’t he just have his own bedroom? There was just the 3 of them.
Very, very contrived.
There are no spare rooms, only more places to put all your stuff.
He couldn’t afford a $100K donation to the DNC…
Or those who could had the place all booked up. “The Lincoln Bedroom is unavailable, but you can choose between the Millard Fillmore alcove and the cozy single in the Warren G. Harding love closet. Checkout is 12 noon, sorry but we can’t extend that, and please don’t tip the Secret Service or ask them to check on your TV set.”
That contrivance has always struck me as totally ridiculous on Grimm!
I have never seen this on TV, but I have slept in a bathtub. It’s definitely cozy but okay if you’re not too tall, and no, it doesn’t get really cold. Maybe it would if you have one of those freestanding metal tubs or a sunken bath in Carrara marble or something, but your typical modern built-in fiberglass bathtub isn’t particularly chilly.
And just off the top of my head, I would think that one reason to sleep in the tub instead of on the bathroom floor if the house is full of people is so that you can draw the (shower) curtain and have a little privacy when people come in to use the facilities. (What, you thought that houseful of people was just going to politely stay out of the bathroom altogether until you’d woken up?)
:eek: Oh my god, spoilers! Or not, since that’s the entire premise of the show (The Americans, by the way).
How about X-files where Mulders apartment has a bedroom that is never shown at all.
(I might be wrong about that, it may have made an appearance in one of the comedy episodes)
I’ve lived in homes with multiple bedrooms. I’ve never lived in a home with beds that aren’t slept in every night. I know it is common, but it has always struck me as odd to keep a extra bedroom set up that isn’t actually in regular use as a bedroom, such a waste of space.
So I just assume they think like me.
I’ll go to the couch if I have a bout of insomnia; the change of scenery sometimes help me get to sleep in a way the guest room doesn’t, for whatever reason.
Other than that, nobody ever spends the night on our couch. We do have a spare bedroom and overnight guests do sleep there. But then again, that never leads to any sitcom-type hijinks, either.
For my money, though, the much more unbelieveable TV contrivance is when characters (usually ones who can’t stand each other) are somehow forced to sleep in the same bed. How often does this happen IRL?
Mulder’s bedroom showed up a bunch of times. Initially it was piled high with boxes and other crap from his FBI career. So he slept on the couch.
But after he switched bodies with Michael McKean, McKean-Mulder bought a fancy water bed that Real-Mulder kept for the rest of the series.
Well for the girls from my HS this happened on every overnight field trip that ivolved a hotel stay (4 girls in a room w/2 beds). Boys were also 4 to a room, but always got cots ordered so nobody got beds. Except when the French class went to Quebec (Mme X wasn’t aware she was supposed to order any) and the senior class trip to Florida (the hotel didn’t have enough). Alot of guys complained heavily on that trip while the girls were just confused as to what the problem was.
The spare room issue was a big one for me in Grimm. In real life, the vast majority of my coupled friends do not have a bed in their spare room unless someone comes to visit from out of town. I get it, that is your room for whatever and beds take up a lot of space. But the timeline on Nick being stuck on the couch was absurd. Even if the room was all boxes, you would make some space and set yourself up with something that resembled a room. Funny that this bothers me so much because I really do enjoy everything about Grimm.
This happened at least once on Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Aunt Vivian got mad at Uncle Phil about something or other and had him sleeping on the couch. Not sure if that is what you had in mind though.
Norberto Barba (Grimm’s Exec. Producer/Director) occasionally posts in the Grimmsters group on Facebook, and we asked him about this. He said the visual displacement of a character sleeping on the couch is a lot stronger than a character sleeping in a spare room. So they’re sacrificing logic for visual impact.
I wouldn’t mind that so much if they hadn’t made a point about how sleeping on the couch is damaging Nick’s sleep. It was actually a plot point in a recent episode that he wasn’t performing as well as he should due to the tiredness his sleeping position caused. So they’re doing something illogical and then really drawing attention to it.
In a somewhat recent episode of **Modern Family **Jay can’t stand Gloria’s snoring so he goes down to the couch, only to find Manny already there, so he has to sleep on another couch. They live in a mansion. IDK how many spare bedrooms they have, but based on how the house looks, you would think that their spare bedrooms would be set up like spare bedrooms. Besides, Jay is a grandfather. He is not a hobbyist. Grandparents with extra rooms are way more likely to use the spare rooms as bedrooms than young couples.
When I lived alone I had 2 spare bedrooms, with 3 spare beds (the smaller room had 2 twin beds that had been my nephews’, and were there for when they visited.) These beds were usually covered with laundry, but that could have been tossed onto one of the other beds in a pinch.
This.
I was going to say, “'Cause that’s where the TV camera is.”