There’s only one floor on the set. The stair-climbing scenes are shot in multiple takes on the same few stairs.
How long before they get the damn elevator working? The guys blew it up, the guys can fix it.
That has been proven wrong in so many instances. The guys don’t even know how to do elementary auto repair, much less deal with a demolished elevator. Plus the need to get the work safety-certified, which would require permits, a bonded contractor, inspections, etc.
Of course, IRL the elevator would have been repaired immediately, as it poses not only a safety hazard but probably violates any number of Federal and State laws. Not to mention ADA.
muldoonthief - JPL does all sorts of classified projects. They would have any number of secure labs available for government projects.
I can accept Amy getting a summer visiting professorship with a week’s notice. It could have been a last-minute fill-in, because those things are planned out months if not years in advance. I can accept that Amy would only pack one suitcase for 3 months in New Jersey, because she could always buy new clothes there. But I cannot accept that Sheldon could have carried a fully-packed suitcase down 4 flights of stairs (which he didn’t because the suitcase was obviously empty, just like the boxes Raj and Leonard were carrying.) (They make weighted props for stage use. You’d think they could afford them for this show.)
And they’d have been evicted, sued, and probably arrested and charged.
It doesn’t pay to think about these things too much, though.
There are a few of my clients that do little or no repairs to the apartment building they own. The elevator at one of them has been out of service for a year or so.
The elevator not working was decided early in the creation of the show. The creators wanted the cast to be able to have some time to talk on their way to their apartments. They concluded that the best way would be to have them need to walk to their apartments. They then needed to design the hall so that their was some distance between Penny’s apartment and Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment. The production designer told them that the obvious way was to have an elevator between the left stairway and the right one. The only way to make this plausible was to have the elevator be broken.
The most reasonable backstory for why the elevator was never fixed is that the apartment management decided that it would cost too much to fix it and that it wasn’t worth it trying to find out who caused the explosion in the elevator. While this probably decreased the amount of rent that they could get for the apartments, the management decided that the lesser amount of rent was outweighed by the cost of repairing the elevator. Go to 2:15 in this video:
Is there a law requiring apartment buildings in Pasadena to have elevators?I could find nothing to that effect in the Pasadena city ordinances, and I found this on a website about California law statewide: 404 Error Page
So if I read that properly, so long as one of the units on the ground floor is compliant, the rest of the building doesn’t have to be? So the landlord just had to install a few items and they could then ignore the busted elevator. Good to know. 
:watching video:
That’s Cal Tech outside their window? It looks about two blocks away. Why do Leonard and Sheldon have to drive to work?
The tenants are entitled to things they were promised in their current lease. The apartment management may have decided to reduce the rent for the current residents at the point the elevator quit working and had the residents agree that the elevator wouldn’t be fixed during their current lease. At the time these residents signed their new lease, the residents were told that there was no guarantee that the elevator would be fixed during the time of that lease.
I lived in a place with a busted elevator for almost a year, before they just decided to decommission it.
The law in Indianapolis is that buildings with more than three floors must have elevators. This is why, except for some high-rises downtown, it is very rare to find a building with more than three floors. I’m not sure what percent of a complexes’ rentals have to be ADA compliant. It may be 0 as long as the complex is not taking section 8 or other types of housing assistance.
My thought exactly.
I had the same idea about Sheldon and Raj living together for the summer.
So we could see Raj driven to madness by the ordeal of living with Sheldon and all his rules, just as Leonard was!
To be sure, Sheldon is no picnic; but Leonard’s neediness, insecurity and whining would get old fast. As Penny probably discovers in her future.
Let’s hope as age approaches she doesn’t turn into a mean drunk.
Her drinking will probably make her age faster than she would otherwise.
How is it too small? They share a bed, and it has the standard TV unreasonably large living room. They might need a larger bed, but I’m Amy would be greatly against that.
I think Sheldon was most impressed with Raj’s house skills…cooking meals from scratch, wearing the pin, etc. He preferred him to Leonard as a roommate.