The Drew Carey Show : Drew lived in a house he bought from his parents; Oswald and Louis lived in an apartment above the Warsaw (until they built that house in the park).
NCIS : McGee has his little studio–reasonable for a young federal agent. Jethro is another story–former gunny, now federal agent, 4 marriages, and still lives in a house with a basement large enough to build a boat in! :dubious:
Re The Cosby Show : Also, Dr. Huxtable’s office was on the lower floor of their brownstone, which, if they owned it (which I assume they did), saves a bundle on office rental.
For the record, Monica and Rachel on Friends could only afford the apartment because it was rent-controlled and they fraudulently claimed that Monica’s grandmother was still alive.
Whether that makes it actually plausible or not, I do not know.
Within their means: JD and Turk on Scrubs, first season. Smallish apartment for first year docs (student loans not yet paid off) rooming together. I can buy that. (I haven’t seen the rest of the show yet, we’re Netflixing it, so I don’t know if they remain roommates or not.)
I’m not buying it: Buffy’s house on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mean, not only does it suffer from the Brady topography syndrome (would someone please point out the three large bedrooms, long hallway and bathroom the size of the Plaza which are all upstairs from this exterior shot?) but there’s no way Buffy’s mom as a single mother could have afforded that place on her gallery management job. Not to mention Buffy somehow takes over mortgage payments (and frequent carpentry repairs) with her burger slinging job? This one annoys me because they pretended to deal with it in season 6, but unless that check that Giles handed her is for several hundred thousand dollars, there’s no way the problem went away for the next two years.
Well, on Arrested Development Michael, George Michael, Lindsay, Tobias and Maeby all live in the Bluth company model home together so that is definitely well within their collective means.
And lets not forgot about George Sr. residing in the attic while on the run from the law.
Not that I’ve devoted more than about 12 seconds of thought to it, but isn’t it reasonable to think that Joey and Jesse were contributing to expenses in some fashion?
I’d think by the time that Jesse and his hot wife were living in the attic with their kids, they were paying rent.
Mary Tyler Moore, as Mary Richards, lived in a bachelor apartment with a pullout bed in the living room. It was a nice apartment, but small. Probably exactly the kind of place a young woman writer on a TV show might have.
The gang on Three’s Company lived exactly as I could imagine three single working people living. Except in real life there would be a lot more sexual tension…
Sanford and Son lived appropriately - in a house attached to the junkyard.
The Brady Bunch lived in a big house and had a full-time housekeeper. But Dad was a very successful architect, and designed and built the house himself, so I suppose that one was reasonable as well.
Come to think of it, there aren’t that many sitcoms where the living space seems out of whack. Friends would be a notable exception.
In what episode was that established? He was much more devoted to baseball, cooking, and maybe even model building than he was African art and I don’t remember his collection ever being mentioned as particularly noteworthy.
The Nanny, Mr Shefield came from money, had investments, and was a successful Broadway producer. C.C. also came from money and was Maxwell’s business partner. Niles got free room and board as live-in help. Fran too, she also had a cousin who was a major fashion designer and alot of credit cards she kept maxing out. Morty and Slyvia lived in a rent-controlled 2-bedroom in Queens for 40 years. Val shared a 1-bedroom with her parents.
Mama’s Family, Thelma owned a 3 (later 2) pre-WWII house in a small town in the South. Carl probally had a pension and Vint and Naomi lived in her basement (& later moved into an RV in her driveway).
I Love Lucy, Ricky was a successful band manager (did he own the Tropicana ), the Mertzs owned an apartment building (Ethel could probally afford much nicer clothes and furniture if Fred wasn’t such a tightwad).
Disagree - Buffy’s mom also may have had money coming in via alimony and child support from her divorce. And I have to believe that real estate values in Sunnydale were a bit lower than the average, just based on the weird happenings in the area.
Buffy does take over mortgage payments, but she is undoubtedly helped in this regard by Joyce’s life insurance and SSI benefits.
The Brady Bunch should be an opposite example. Architects don’t build houses. They design them and that is only a tiny fraction of the cost of a house like that. It was still 9 people on one income and they took nice vacations and had nice 70-ish things. A non-working mother with a full-time housekeeper implies a very wealthy family, not a middle-class one. Mike was a crappy architect as well. Six kids shared one bathroom. He would have had to make the equivalent of over 200K to pull that off at all and there is no indication that he was that he was that high up in the firm. He certainly held normal office hours and did some of the drafting himself.
Didn’t he and the boys already live there when he and Carol got married? If so when he designed it would only have been 3 boys sharing one bathroom which sounds reasonable. And this was in an era before each child was expected to have his/her own bedroom and private bath even for the wealthy.
In Season 6, Buffy tries to get a home loan, but is told that it won’t be possible, due to a combination of her low income and the horribly low property values in Sunnydale (due partially to the very high mortality rate of the town, not to mention the gang problems). Other than that, Xander helps fix most of the damage (he becomes quite handy with a hammer), including fixing the picture window in the living room about 8 times in Season 7 before he just decides to nail some plywood over it.
On Babylon 5, Sheridan’s quarters are rather nice and expansive, especially for something built on a space station that doesn’t have room to grow coffee plants. Ivonova’s quarters aren’t too bad either. At one point, due to increasing costs in the space station, they are ordered to pay rent in order to use the quarters (or to even gain access to get any of their stuff), so Sheridan just has the rent deducted from the station’s defense readyness budget (potentially questionable, but nobody in Earthgov or EarthForce ever seemed to follow up on that, but then Sheridan was one of Earth’s greatest heros, even by that point in the show).
Cheers The various times where we see where Diane, Rebecca, Cliff and Woody live, they all seem to be pretty much in line with the characters’ incomes. Frasier, as noted in other threads, was stinkin’ rich, even though we never knew where his money came from. Only Carla’s house, though modest and bought for a steal because it was haunted/at the end of a runway, seems out of line for her wages and tips.
The bigger question on Cheers was how that tiny bar made enough money to pay several full-time employees and have enough left over for Sam – particularly when its best customer never paid his tab.
Actually, as was shown in A Very Brady Sequel, neither spouse died. One faked his own death while on a 3 hour boat tour somewhere in the Pacific, and the other is apparantly a genie.
), the Mertzs owned an apartment building (Ethel could probally afford much nicer clothes and furniture if Fred wasn’t such a tightwad).
