Marty Kaan’s apartment in House of Lies was sweet.
In the books, a lot of new characters assume that Bosch is a dirty cop on the take due to his ridiculously expensive house.
Movie and TV houses can be seen here: Houses Onscreen Archives - Hooked on Houses
They had a nice apartment in Rosemary’s Baby.
The had a freakin’ gorgeous apartment in RB – the exterior shots of “The Bramford”, the fictional building, were actually of The Dakota, the extremely exclusive place on Central Park West where John Lennon, Leonard Bernstein, and a slew of actors lived.
And it was a feature of the story: the reason they could afford that apartment was due to it being preferentially let to them due to Rosemary being a possible surrogate, and it being such a great apartment was a factor in making Rosemary be less inclined to run away the moment weird things happened.
Leornard and Sheldon’s geek collections is what really makes that a great apartment.
Would be even better if the creator didn’t have that lousy theme on it. Shows up as basically really, really dark grey on black on my monitor. And if I highlight the words, they become black!
But he does draw good.
Is there an apartment/house in any tv show in which this DOESN’T occur?
How I Met Your Mother shows the forth wall from time to time. 99% of the time they’re in the apartment, the camera is looking at the characters from the POV of where the TV (in the apartment) is. From time to time, they need to show something on the TV or happening on that side of the room.
It must be a PITA to bring in the wall and the set dressing, move a camera to behind the couch and re-rig all the lights just for one shot, it happens once in a while. Plus, you can see how crowded it gets when you end up with 2-4 actors trying to work in a really cramped spot.
Unless you live in the “converted warehouse loft” where it looks like the character enters their enormous open space via what used to be a freight elevator.
But IIRC, his actual car was a Mercedes. I got the impression that due to his particular set of skills, he could pretty much write his own ticket. Plus he didn’t have a lot of expenses and his work was in the middle of nowhere, USA.
Dan Tanna’s house in Vega$ was pretty rockin’!
Starts at 2:00 in this clip.
My all-time favorite TV apartment was Barbara Gordon (a.k.a. Batgirl)'s high-rise 1-bedroom. I freaking LOVED the turn-table wall to hide her costume. The secret lair and the private lift/secret entrance for her batgirl-cycle sure could come in handy too, but that turn-table wall is what really did it for me.
How she managed to find, or construct her secret lair is beyond me – especially given that she was working at the city library as her day-job. But…turn-table wall!!
Why is it that so many NYC apartments in TV and films feature a step down from the hallway door?
I’ve seen this in dozens of different shows, especially ones from the 50s and 60s, and there must be more to it than a set designer’s trick. It’s even a plot point in Rear Window.
The Petries had that, and they lived in the suburbs.
So did the bridge of the TOS Enterprise. Split-level design was all the rage back then! 
A lot of people (and most often Rob) came into their house. It might not have been so much of a ‘step down’ as much as it was giving the camera/viewers a better shot of who was walking in since it didn’t put them directly behind the person in the foreground.
Regarding steps, the one that I always wondered about was Full House. On the second floor, when they were in the hall, you’d see someone coming up a few steps from a landing. That means that entire second floor set was a few feet off the ground which also means either the entire set was built on stilts or (now that I think about it) a way to build the stairs down into the floor so that people could enter. What always bugged me about it is that, from the hall, you could see into the rooms AND you could see all four walls of all the rooms on a regular basis leading me to believe it was, essentially a fully put together floor of a house instead of a bunch of 3 walled rooms that were ‘geographically’ nowhere near each other (and sometimes even the same rooms just redecorated as needed). Further more, until I just thought about it now, it bugged me because that meant a rather large set being built up off the ground just so people could walk up a few steps.
But, again, I’m wondering if that landing was set into the floor and not the other way around.
Also, when Jesse and Becky moved upstairs a door magically appeared on the landing which is how the got up to the attic.
What?!? You mean there really isn’t a secret Communist lair just a stone’s throw away from a national monument?!? We were lied to?!? :eek:
The only episode of Starsky and Hutch that I ever saw was the one where Hutch unknowingly falls in love with a hooker/porn star. When Starsky learns the truth, he goes to her apartment to “suggest” that she get out of town, and the place is a fucking palace!
I was watching this in Scotland, in the living room of a pen-pal’s turn-of-the-century cottage. Her dad (a lowly groundskeeper on a private estate) turned to me and asked “Is that a typical American apartment?” I just laughed and said “NO!”
Jim Phelps’ place was pretty cool.
She also had a switch that could instantly convert the contents on the other side of the wall into a store room which came in handy when a repairman can snooping around because of noise complaints. With some appropriately named label.