Why is it that every sitcom TV show has the same basic house layout? Going from left to right it’s always: front door, living room (with stairs to second floor), then some kind of door to the kitchen (usually with more stairs to second floor) and then a dining room area with a door back out of the house.
Why has this become the standard layout for seemingly every TV show house I can think of? Just to name the ones off the top of my head that follow this layout: Full House, Family Matters, Step by Step, Roseanne, Grounded for Life, Boy Meets World, etc…
I’m not sure that they all do have the same layout. In Married With Children, for instance, the front door was on the right. In Seinfeld the door to the apartment is to the right of center. I’m sure there are other counter-examples.
The premise is fairly sound. Lots more TV houses and apartments have visible stairs than they do in real life. Most real life stairs are in hallways, as seen in BBC shows, which are partly shot in old real buildings.
I think the stairs just add an opportunity for dramatic entrances.
Might it have something to do with ease of camera blocking? If you have a fairly standard kind of set, you can light it and shoot others like it in the same way. Maybe this is the reason sets are reminiscent of one another.
Whle they don’t always have the front door on the left (Everyone Loves Raymond, Married with Children, All in the Family, Brady Bunch all righties) the “linear” setup is just the nature of the beast when setting up the set for camera and studio audience convenience.
Some odd ones I can think of are Happy Days (front door and kichen are both on the right) and Home Improvement (garage on left, backyard on right, front door in the rear).
Set re-use is certainly a possibility, though I’d be surprised if the studio kept the All in the Family set long enough to be re-used for Cosby. Were they even produced by the same company?
Much more likely is that the rowhouse/shotgun layout described above is easy to put together without needing much architectural thought by the scenic carpenters and it works well for TV production - just truck the cameras to the left or right to follow someone from the front door to the kitchen.
To do a move like that in my house would involve tight corners and even a u-turn - it would be hard to do unless one camera shot entrance to hall, one shot in-hall, one shot hall to kitchen entrance and the fourth camera shot in the kitchen. Oops…almost all sitcoms are thee-camera shoots, so you’d need to break to move a camera. Plan B would involve a good Steadicam operaton to follow along that path.
The Nanny
Laverne & Shirley
I Love Lucy
The Simpsons
Family Ties
The Facts of Life
Mad About You
The Jeffersons
The Love Boat (Guests were seen entering from the boarding ramp at stage right)
I Dream of Jeannie
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Brady Bunch
Maxwell Smart’s place
Mama’s Family
Three’s Company
The Ropers
Murphy Brown
All in the Family
Martin Lawrence’s sitcom (forgot the name)
Will & Grace
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Honeymooners
Married with Children
Archie’s Place (the bar)
Designing Women
Ellen
Welcom Back Kotter (the classroom)
Family Affair
Herman’s Head
WKRP in Cincinnati
Friends has both! Then again, it’s an apartment not a house. Worthy of mention is the fact that on Seinfeld, “Bizzaro Jerry”'s apartment had the door on the left.
It would seem weird to me to shoot from the door toward the living room, or to see a living room with the main door behind it. If a show were shot in my living room, it would be door on the right rear, stairs going up, but evidence of stairs going up another level to be had if one were to look a little higher.
Oddly enough, most of those shows listed seems to be older shows while the few I listed seem to be relatively more recently. Must be some modern conspiracy to move sitcom doors to the left; obviously a doing of the liberal media.
Dick Van Dyke Show, door was left, no staircase. Child’s bedroom to the rear, master bedroom to the far left (usually not seen), kitchen to the right, entrance to backyard from kitchen.
Most sitcoms are like most other sitcoms anyway. Every once in a while a sitcom with a unique premise comes along–Frasier and Seinfeld come to mind–and then every sitcom that comes after it copies its formula (even Frasier, which I consider a pretty creative sitcom, feels like a highbrow Three’s Company remake at times). The use of similar sets is probably just symbolic, and hell, maybe it’s subconscious on the set designers’ part. Then again, sometimes a set is just a set.
Quick note: Everyone Loves Raymond may not have had the front door on the left, but Ray, his wife and his brother always seemed to come in through the door on the left anyway. I always thought of that door as practically the front door for dramatic-entrance purposes, with the front door relegated to the status of “Unwelcome Guest Entrance”.
The Seinfeld set changed from the pilot to the show.
In the pilot, Jerry had an atrium-style bay window, which would have put him into a much newer, much pricier building in a different part of town. Also, I don’t think you could see the bathroom door in the hallway, and no hanging bike.
Then again, it’s an apartment not a house. Worthy of mention is the fact that on Seinfeld, “Bizzaro Jerry”'s apartment had the door on the left.