All single, heterosexual males have half-finished paper cartons of Chinese takeaway food in their refridgerators. These are the only items of food they have in their houses if they need to either;
a.) feed a beautiful woman who has arrived at their house to discuss a work related issue (if they’re police officers)
or b.) need to eat breakfast after a long night doing something.
Anything else anyone’s noticed?
Dont forget that all sexy young single women immediately strip down to their underwear upon coming home from work/date/any outing and wander around doing housework/getting ready for bed/whatever.
They all have wooden floors.
The front door is to the right of the living room, the kitchen is to the left; a set of stairs faces us; three or four steps, a small landing and a 90 degree turn to the left, continuing to the upper floor. The sofa (leather, black) is placed in a sunken area, centrally in front of the bottom stairs, a little forward of an imaginary straight line drawn between the front door and the kitchen door. There is dense shrubbery outside the front door.
And from sex education films at school, I learned that many young women need to strip completely to brush their hair effectively.
All beds are equipped with those special L-shaped top-sheets that just come up to a man’s waist and up above the woman’s chest, and everyone always gets into bed on the correct side.
Your in-laws live across the street, but usually walk all the way around the house to enter and leave via your back door.
OK, it’s TV, not the movies.
From both films and TV, people with very modest incomes–waitresses, secretaries, cab drivers, etc.–nevertheless can afford very comfortable living quarters with good furniture even in places like LA and New York. Ramshackle housing only springs into existence during police dramas and immediately vanishes back into an alternate universe when the sitcoms come on.
Furthermore, it takes absolutely no effort whatsoever to maintain or clean an American home. It is never necessary to take time out of an incredibly active life to mop a floor or clean the rain gutters.
They always have matching canisters and coordinated towels/curtains. And they seem to have phones in every room of the house.
They don’t need to be single to do this - that pretty accurately describes my current gf.
And no, I’m not complaining 
Everybody uses a Mac; apparently in Movieland, Microsoft doesn’t exist.
Let’s also not forget:
All houses have the room for open-concept foyers and circular frontal staircases, especially if the film involves a teenaged girl due for a “Beauty reveal” scene.
All houses are equipped with stereos with a Motown classic, like “Ain’t No Mountain” or “Chain of Fools,” queued up on the player, so that the mother and her children can break into a curiously well-choreographed lip-synch of the song, even though 11-year-olds wouldn’t know the words to songs like that. Hairbrushes and such are always conveniently placed around the living room to serve as lip synch microphones.
Irrespective of how luxurious or expensive the house is, it is never equipped with big wooden gates for getting into the back yard, like normal houses often are. Instead you can just walk from the front yard into the back unimpeded.
Actually, every two-story house built post 1975 in my parents’ tri-suburb area has this in some aspect. Granted, I haven’t been in every house in the area, but I’m willing to wager 99.999% accuracy. It’s a common feature.
Also, very common! However, in the city, gated yards are the norm.
With my parents’ house (as well as many other families of four), you will most likely have a phone and a tv in the same room, and it is not uncommon to have as many (or more) phones as their are people in the house. I have two tvs (I never got rid of my college one), and two phones in a one bedroom apartment.
A number of things surprised me when I moved from Mississippi to Maryland. One thing that stuck out was how MD houses are often two-story. This is much rarer down South, since heat rises and no one wants to be stuck in a stuffy second-floor bedroom. MS houses don’t usually have basements or cellars, for storage we’ll either use the attic or a storage house out back. The bsement in my old house in Perry Point, MD creeped me out something terrible!
Americans walk with their shoes on when in-doors. :eek:
This was hideously obvious in the recent remake of The Goodbye Girl. The whole point is that they are supposed to be starving actors in a tiny NYC apartment. The remake has Patricia Heaton in a tastefully decorated expansive place. I’m pretty sure they stuck to the original script and didn’t explain this away a la Friends.
My contribution: what my mom calls “Steven Spielberg” houses; they look unassuming from outside but are huuuge inside.
No matter how large the family is, they all sit on only one side of the dining table.
Everyone, including working class dads with stay-at-home moms, can easily afford a 2,500 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan.
Teenagers never, ever get acne or pimples…unless they have a big date that night, in which case they will get one solitary (albeit very large and gross) zit on their chin or forehead. Naturally, the zit will disappear within 30 minutes or 2 hours, depending on the circumstances. 
All pre-teen children are insufferably cute. The younger they are, the cuter they are, and the youngest will always have an endearing catchphrase like “What’cho talkin’ bout?” or “Don’t have a cow, man!”
No matter where you live in America, it only snows between Thanksgiving and Christmas…never any time else.
Funny thing about those paper boxes…except for steamed rice, I haven’t seen them used for decades! All Chinese take-out comes in styrofoam or metal trays these days.
I’ve had Asian takeout in Tennessee, Nebraska, and Oregon all within the past two and a half years and unless it was really soupy, everything food came in the folded paper boxes.
I’ve never seen it in a metal or styrofoam container.
Is this a description of the living room in Married with children?
The homes have no basements. Only large, old houses located somewhere out in a rural area have basements. The only time anyone goes to the basement is during a power failure, to check the fuse box. The person who goes down into the basement is often the sexy young woman who stripped down to her underwear as soon as she got home.
News flash. She’s not coming back up.