That is, even though you may watch the same sit-com or talk show on various TVs facing various directions, once watching does your mind turn it to a preset viewing direction?
For me the main late-night talk shows (Letterman, Carson, Conan, Leno) all are viewed with the audience facing west and the hosts desk facing east. Don’t know if this is the case in real life but it’s how my mind orients them when I watch.
A lot of sit-coms are direction oriented also. Most for me are viewer facing west (All In the Family set, Raymond, Brady Bunch) while a few are viewed facing south (Growing Pains home, Oprah, The View, Jerry Springer), and very few are viewed facing east (Who’s The Boss). I can’t think of many that have a default viewing direction (in my head) of north with the exception of my local news set.
Do you have any shows that have a default viewing direction in your head?
I can honestly say that A) this thought never crossed my mind before, and B) I now regard you as a very strange person.
No offense, of course. Nothing wrong with strange.
Doesn’t seem strange to me. You have to imagine things to be oriented in some direction, after all.
For me, any kind of sporting event taking place in a stadium, such as football or the Olympics, feels like the field is oriented east-west and the camera is pointing south, so much so that if I visit one of the stadiums and find it facing another way in real life, it’s momentarily disorienting . Chat shows I also imagine to have the audience facing south. News programmes are a funny one, now that I think about it - in BBC News the camera is pointing north, on all other channels I imagine it to be pointing south.
I’m trying to think of shows where I imagine the camera to be facing east or west… music shows, anything with a band on stage, there’s one. I almost always imagine the audience to be facing east.
I’m with Hal Briston in finding this interestingly odd. Unless a show has some actual clues as to orientation (such as the fact that Charlie’s house in Two and a Half Men overlooks the ocean in Malibu so that can somewhat orient the house) it would never even occur to me to think about such a thing.
No we don’t. Imagining spatial relationships (Tim’s house is next to Wilson’s, Melville’s is above Cheers, etc.) doesn’t mean we’re automatically predisposed to assigning specific directional or larger geographical relationships to those environments.
Yeah, unless there’s a specific visual or narrative cue (they’re on the front porch watching the sunset), they all exist in a fictional vacuum to me, direction-wise.
I can sort of relate. When watching any talk show, I always have a mental picture of the audience facing east. This comes up when the host talks about going outside or something similar, and my mind fills in the spatial relationships, placing the studio in the general context of the outside world.
Oh, and the front door on Home Improvement faced north. Probably because it was at the back of the stage.
I don’t mean that you consciously think “that way is north, this way is south” or whatever. Just that you place the setting, in your mind’s eye, in some location. And that inevitably involves orienting it in some way, whether you are explicitly aware of it or not. Otherwise it would be just sort of floating indeterminately in space.
Put it this way - say you were in the David Letterman studio audience one week, and the studio was arranged so that the audience faced south, Dave faced north. Then next week, you visited again, but they switched things round so that Dave was in the north. It would feel different, no?
If you say “no”, then I suppose you’re right and some people don’t have a strong sense of direction (by which I don’t mean an aptitude for navigating or anything like that, I mean a strong feeling in any situation that “this way is north”, or whatever names you want to give to directions). But if like me and the OP you do have that sense, then every space has an orientation, and the same set oriented differently would somehow feel quite different.
I find it infuriating when outdoor shadows create cognitive dissonance w/r/t supposed time of day or geographic orientation, although intellectually I know that it would be impractical to put much effort into avoiding this sort of thing.
I can honestly say I’ve never done this when watching anything. The idea of trying to determine cardinal directions on a TV show’s set just seems bizarre to me. I have to confess, even when there are visual cues, (such as a sunset), it never occurs to me that the characters must be facing to the west. It just doesn’t seem that important. This only applies to a certain extent of course. If someone is driving from New York to California and they happen to travel through Florida that’s going to raise some red flags.
This makes me wonder if there’s some sort of innate trait involved with this. I can’t do it personally, but I can certainly believe that some people might have an ability to orient themselves to true north. Maybe it’s like having perfect pitch or being ambidextrous?
I disagree that we “have to imagine things to be oriented in some direction, after all”. I’d bet most people don’t think about this. And, to judge by the people around me when I mention that the corridor we’re walking in is facing east, most wouldn’t care.
But it would make life interesting… I’ve got to watch me some TV tonight and see how I feel about the cardinal directions, but I will realize that, basically, I’ll be making it up in my mind as I watch.
I will also try to figure out WHY I think Conan’s facing South-By-Southeast (yeah, why are you feeling rigid 90 degree angles whan you watch?) Or why I would need to assign a direction. Is this a case of imposing Order where none exists? (“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”-- Joan Didion)
Yeah, I’ve certainly never thought of this. But just reading this topic made me realize that in virtually all multi-camera sitcoms, the living room is always to the right of the kitchen. The only time it ever seems to break from this tradition are some apartments (which usually have a small kitchen that is rarely used (Frasier) or a kitchen part of the living room (Friends, Seinfeld)) . But never houses. So I would be disturebed to find a sitcom house with the kitchen to the right of the living room.
Don’t you think of it as, like, your own house? Or, failing that, as a map? (Left is “east” to the extent that there is an east, which is… not at all?) I would say that anybody responding to this thread is an insufferable weirdass nerd, but here I am. And now I am all weirded out.
ETA - as an exercise to the reader, explain exactly where the Cosby’s dining room is.
Also, the King of Queens. Basically. any show with the front door on the left, which usually leads to the living room, and then onto the kitchen on the right.
As for the OP, I never think about the cardinal directions for a television show although I do think about the spatial relationships. (For example, if the front door is on the left, with the living room and then the kitchen to the right, it would bother me if the outside door in the kitchen also opened onto the front of the house.)
I always thought of the audience facing north while the set runs from west to east. ie., the front door to Monica and Rachel’s apartment is on the west side of their apartment; the front door to Chandler and Joey’s apartment is on the east side of their apartment.
Unless the show at some point mentions a specific direction, it is floating indeterminately in space.
That’s not a strong sense of direction, that’s a strong delusion of direction. The same set could be oriented differently between episodes for all you know.
You mentioned “multi-camera” earlier, but I don’t know why that’d make the difference. I don’t watch a lot of sitcoms, but just off the top of my head (and going from memory, it’s possible I have some turned around) there’s Happy Days, I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Growing Pains, Who’s the Boss, Step By Step, Full House, Charles in Charge, The Facts of Life (at least until that moved focus, not sure afterwards), How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory (both apartments, granted), King of Queens, According to Jim (I think – only saw one episode), and many others I vaguely remember but can’t recall the names of.
