King of the Hill showing a group of childhood friends living next to each other, having time almost every day to just hang out near their homes and drink, went from just being a quaint little detail from when I watched it when I was younger to being an almost dreamlike aspiration as I move further into adulthood.
There’s a certain amount of discourse in KotH fandom around exactly how all four childhood friends came to buy houses on The Alley behind Rainey Street. Apparently the canon is hazy and inconsistent, though I can’t remember the details.
Where breakfast
Well this was a shitty show.
Cringe take, sorry bro
You can say that it isn’t for you but you can’t say it’s a shitty show. It’s one of the most influential shows of the 90s. Cheers, All in the Family, MASH, and Seinfeld are probably the only ones that compare. (I’d like to put Malcolm in the Middle and Married with Children up there too but that’s probably giving them too much credit)
Not judging show, just the comment. Shitty and influential are not mutually exclusive, just look at the state of the web today.
Yes, but Leave it to Beaver was a faithful documentary of life in the fifties.
True. Many things got left to Beaver, some say too many things got left to Beaver. Much of McCarthyism and the Red scare can be blamed on little Theodore Cleaver.
Never really looked and just realized how cluttered that apartment is.
there’s nothing on the floor, that’s peak organization
Also what exactly is this a picture of
It is a slightly resized print of this piece.
I know it is popular to shit on Friends these years, but I think that it captures the growing up part of life pretty well as the show is basically about capturing a snapshot in time of a group of friends when they were the closest before adult life tore them apart. Because that is how the show ends. They all grow up, have adult responsibilities, different priorities and they all leave the apartment complex to start new lives away from one another.
In my 20s I had a group of friends for awhile and we would hang out in each other’s apartments all the time, sometimes we would sleep over at each other’s places and have breakfast together before heading to school. We would go on picnics and excursions together. All pile into the old, rusty car that one of us owned and drive somewhere.
We had a pub we liked to visit semi-regularly and we were pretty 50/50 men and women.
When we got our degrees, most of us packed up and left. We are now in our 30s and some have had kids in the meantime while most of us have grown apart. Some of us still keep in contact and hang out when our schedules permits it, but it isn’t like it was when we were in our 20s.
To me, Friends is an idealized version of the friends group stuff in your 20s. To me it isn’t as unrealistic as it’s being made out to be nowadays, but it is idealized.
I treasure the few years I got to have good friends and classmates that I loved to hang out with and treat as family. No matter how much time passes, whenever we get to meet up again, it is almost like no time has passed at all, and that is such a great feeling, even if we only get to see each other like once a year.
I used to live in a condo with some friends, and there were others in our friend group that would randomly show up throughout the day. The doors were always unlocked, so friends would just walk in. Sometimes it would be early in the morning and would hang out while I made myself breakfast. Sometimes it was late at night after they partied and needed a place to crash.
Seems similar to what you mentioned, I relate. Like you said, Friends was idealized, but not unrealistic.
Yeah, I think those memories are to be cherished. Your apartment setup back then genuinely sounds like a setup for a wholesome sitcom xD
It’s stuff like that, that makes me have very few regret from my 20s because I full on just wanted to make friends and throw myself into a bunch of scenarios with them while I had the chance and was still young.
When I hit 30, I was like “I’m ready to move forward”.
Still miss it sometimes. That closeness and the goofy shit we got up to sometimes. Also just the hanging out on those lazy evenings. Good times ❤️
I mean, you can still live like that if you want to, for your whole life if you want to. Move into or start a housing co-op. Even kids don’t get in the way of this. We’re supposed to raise kids in a village. That’s how children are meant to be raised.
Reading that first paragraph makes me physically sick to my stomach. The impermanence of everything is killing me. There is no point. I cannot find a point of my own. It’s legitimately driving me insane.
I think the impermanence of life is one of the most difficult things to accept, but once you do, there is some beauty to it too.
I think it is or at least should be one of the biggest motivators to try and live in the now. I have been the most happy, when I try to live in the now and appreciate what I have right now. It takes a bit of practice but it is doable and it a great antidote to anxiety and depressive thoughts in my experience. You cannot live in the now all the time, but aiming toward it, is a good way to spend the limited time you have in this life.
Big hugs to you.
It’s not how human beings are supposed to live. We’re supposed to have that close-knit friend community our entire lives. People had this up until only 100-200 years ago or so. People in little farming villages were able to have a stable friend group for their entire lives and have time to interact with them. Kids didn’t serve as a substantial barrier, as the friend group helped raise the children. This is how children are supposed to be raised. It’s supposed to take a village.
It’s only our hyper capitalist economy that atomizes us and forces us to scatter to the winds, endlessly chasing job after job in far flung cities, never able to settle down and form real community anywhere.
The way we live is deeply unnatural and fundamentally at odds with human nature. It’s no wonder we’re all mentally ill.
To be fair they lived 5ft away, it may as well have been one big apartment. And one of them was a chef.
Lol plot twist, it was 4 overtly large apartments right next to each other.
Still. Who does that.
Not breakfast, but I used to eat dinner with my neighbors allllll the time. They even used my fridge to keep extra food in when preparing for parties and stuff.
That sounds wonderful. I want neighbors like that. I guess I can’t sit around waiting for neighbors like that, eh. I need to go out and make neighbors like that.
Before the internet was widespread, it was extremely common for people to actually hang out in person. The show is set in an era where the internet was something you went out of your way to connect to, not something that was already integrated into every single device you used.
Especially since they all lived so close together, it’s 100% believable that they’d hang out together regularly. People also forget that the show takes place over multiple years, and we only see 20’ish episodes per year. Assuming each episode takes place across two’ish days, they’re still only seeing each other two or three times per week. If I lived across the hallway from my best friends, I’d probably hang out with them a few times per week too.
This is especially true from Chandler and Joey’s perspectives, where Monica’s kitchen is only like eight steps away from their own kitchen. Why bother cooking yourself breakfast, when there’s a professional chef willing to do it for you, and all you have to do is open two extra doors?
It’s believable if you imagine yourselves living their lives. But the lie for me was that I could have the same thing when I grew older. That is impossible for me, and a lot of people.
Older gens I’d say. My mother had afriend who always came in without knockin and just…vibed. Like they suddenly materialised in kitchen and talked while eating or materialised near table and drank coffee.
My partner’s mother had someone like that too.
Meanwhile I am having a meltdown if someone tries the door before knocking (they are always locked anyway)
Was your mom always goofing things up and was her friend’s name Ethel?
People with close friends, i guess.
My friends definitely don’t want me around. lolMy friends definitively don’t want me around. lol
My friends
🤔
As a person with close friends, there’s just no time in the morning. Even if we lived close by, like, no. I don’t even have time to eat breakfast in the morning those days when I drop the kids at school.
Really depends on your situation. I used to leave the house at 10 to avoid the rush in both directions. This was great until I had kids. With kids it’s an absolute no go.
But most of the friends in Friends don’t have kids.
Really depends on your situation.
I think this is key. Most people don’t have a situation where they both don’t have kids and don’t need to be at work early in the morning.
I have a job where I don’t need to be in very early or at all. But them darn kids gotta get to school or I’m breaking the law. 😅
Yeah, my best friend lives just around the corner and we have this kind of friendship. We work together and both work from home, so we often work from each other’s houses.
We both have wives and kids but our families are close enough that we often just turn up at each other’s houses without asking or organising anything. We eat dinner together about half the time.
But we pretty much never have breakfast together - mornings are far too busy for that.
each other’s houses.
Must be nice though.
Ross doesn’t live in the same building. Later on he moves into the building across the road from them though. Phoebe lives elsewhere as well.
Anyone showing up at my apartment to hang out while I’m waking up and getting ready for work is going to get chopped in the throat, that’s my time for rage and hatred for existence.
Also they don’t even lock their doors. Same shit with ”Big Bang Theory”. I know, knocking the door or ringing the bell and walking to open the door takes too much time.
This and wall high lockers in high school
I’m not sure what this means?
Lots of lockers portrayed in media are the type that go from the floor all the way up the wall. I don’t know about other schools, but my lockers were all pretty small and there were several on top of each other.
Mine were floor to ceiling
I figured there were some like that.
Yeah but I grew up in NJ where my school was 400 students and that was pretty common because most towns are really small. So I imagine space wasn’t as big of an issue as other big schools face.
I had a locker in high school. It was against a wall. Admittedly, it was in a dedicated locker area/room and not in a major plot-device-friendly thoroughfare, but it existed all the same.
We had lockers in high school but they were always in a large open area. Putting them against a wall in a corridor would be stupid as it would almost always lead to blockages.
I also never knew anyone who had a huge locker large enough to be stuffed into, like always seems to happen on American TV.
Yeah, but all the lockers were stacked in rows with 2 short lockers instead of 1 tall one.
this whole show is fake af
What show is this?
Friends.
That’s supposed to be a new your city apartment lol
Lmao I love it. Everyone has a gigantic apartment or mansion no matter what their job is.
Do we ever see Phoebe’s apartment?
Ross and Monica’s parents were well-off and Monica’s apartment is actually her grandma’s rent controlled apartment I think?
Rachel’s dad is loaded but she wants to be independent so she… Stays with Monica
Chandler has a well-paid job and is likely paying more in rent than Joey for their place in the earlier seasons.
Really, Ross (and maybe Phoebe) are the ones who make no sense. Ross likely has child support payments and let’s be honest, not THAT great a career
I never understood how far away Ross was supposed to live from the others. Ostensibly it’s in a different building but he’s always round at their place so presumably he commuted to see them, unless it’s literally just around the corner. So where did he find time to do that?
I thought he was directly across the street. There are some storylines involving looking across into the other buildings’ windows.
I loved Friends, but yeah, the whole show was a big fat lie and I hate I dont live in that world
The expectation that you could get an apartment that size in central NYC without being a billionaire is also a lie
It actually addresses this. Chandler was in a high paying job and lived below his means. And Monica’s (much larger, much nicer) apartment was rent controlled; The apartment complex still had her grandmother on the lease from the 1960’s, so Monica was essentially only paying a small increase in 1960’s rent.
That rent control was the topic of one episode, where Joey yells at the maintenance guy. In response, the maintenance guy threatens to tell the landlord about Monica’s grandmother being dead, meaning Monica would need to start paying full price for the apartment. Monica can’t afford the rent, so Joey has to do a favor for the maintenance guy and get back into his good graces.
I think they explained it, the reason they could afford it was because Monica’s grandmother lived there, and they’ve been paying 1950s rent because of rent control or something. Something similar for phoebe as well. Anyway show never explains how joey/chandler/Ross can afford those big houses.
Did any of us watch any of it?
Friends fucking sucked.
Even if that is your opinion, why share it? What value does that provide to anyone, including yourself.
Shitting on things for no reason stopped being popular after the 90s.
You’re right.
You okay?
Pretty weird to be so angry about an old TV show and to keep commenting in a thread about it.
You are right.
I was in a pissy mood and never saw what everyone else saw in friends. I could have expressed that differently.
Fair enough! These are trying times, and I have also been guilty of that shortcoming. Good on ya for owning up to it.
Hi, Chandler and joey’flat is not that big, it was actually the joke between characters often and Chandler had a good job anyway. Ross was good with money and his parents favourite so I think he got more money from them.
Also worth remembering that except for Phoebe. All the characters on the show grew up upper class. Like top 5% upper class.
Also Phoebe lived with her grandmother in a small apartment until her grandmother died and she got roomamates.
I quite like the way How I Met Your Mother handles this - the size of the apartments is the narrator misremembering. There’s an episode where the characters have been viewing a house in
New JerseyLong Island - they return to the apartment and it’s portrayed as the size it realistically would be.That would just be a dig on their intelligence. You can’t see the massive problem of not being able to afford housing? How can I relate to this character?
Can you tell which episode it is? I’ve tried watching some but couldn’t find it.
It’s in the intro to S07E11. Took me a while to track it down!
Thanks for tracking it.
Some of that is due to the realities of filming in a stage made to look like an apartment as you need the space for the camera crew to fit. This everyone lives in massive places.
Never thought about this, that a really good input, thanks
NP,I was told the same thing by a camera guy back in the late 1990s about this exact show.
That’s completely not the reason. How other shows manage to show small apartments and poor people houses?
Showing regular people living in big apartment is more appealing to the public. Shows from the 70s or before were more realistic. Mary Tyler Moore was living in a small apartment and sleeping in the sofa despite having a regular job. In All in the family, they were financially struggling especially because of the 70s inflation. Lucy and her husband were living in a small apartment.
Things did change in the 80s and we started seeing families living in big houses with cars. Even Roseanne who normally depicted a working class family was living in a big house and could afford many things.
you think you know better than someone who worked on tv in NYC at that time?
Mary Tyler Moore’s show never had the expectation of holding six or more people in the same room like friends.
All in the family took place in a house. Im not sure how you miss this. It’s in the credits.
Lucy and her Husband never had more than a handful of people on screen at once. They dont need the space Friends does.
Friends needs a space for the main cast plus partners and that requires a larger space plus the ability to fit crew which requires large places. The bit about rent control makes perfect sense if you have experience with NYC real-estate.
There were many episodes where there were more than 6 people in I Love Lucy. I mentioned All in the Family because it was realistic and was showing people financially struggling even with two jobs. They lived in a house but it was small with one bathroom.
Even Seinfeld had a small apartment. Many other shows manage to show people living in small apartments. And even with rent control, it isn’t realistic at all.
So that is clearly not the real reason.
Again their living room had to fit six or more. There are episodes where they have six people in Lucy’s house but rarely is it more than four or five.
Seinfeld had 4 main cast and they rarely had anyone else in their places other than the main 4. No one needed to fit a dozen people in a room.
Were you renting living space in NYC in 1994? I was.
Do you know anyone with a ridiculous place because of rent control policies? I know several. Everything about the show makes sense within the context of the time once you realize that eight or so people need to fit on the stage in many scenes
So writers are like “we will write a sitcom about this poor family of 10. Let’s give them a big house to fit them all”. That is ridiculous.
I won’t continue debating with you. I am amazed at how are you trying to justify everything about the show. Actually you are like the ones I saw on the fan sub on Reddit.
That and having time to hang out at the coffee shop all the time. And also Monica who supposedly works in a high end restaurant having as much time as she does to socialize and whatnot. Still love the show tho.
Also in HIMYM how they have time to hang out at a bar every single night.
I thought the show was like a weekend and holidays only view into their lives with a few work stuff sprinkled in, so I discounted all the regular work related loopholes.
A lot of people don’t actually realise just how much time passes between most episodes if you actually listen to context clues. Obviously there are some exceptions, but generally these shows are not supposed to be assumed to be real time in any sense. Some will have a thanksgiving episode and the next is Christmas or new years. People will mention they’ve been dating for months after a few episodes.
Some vaguely line up with being the week they aired in real life being the week it’s supposed to be in the show. But think about what that would mean. You’re seeing an entire week of their lives condensed into a 20-30 minute segment of highlights. Many episodes span several days of their lives. That means you’re seeing maybe 5-10 minutes of each day the episode involves.
When I worked in NYC, we generally would meet for happy hour a few times a week after work. So not weird at all.
In the 90s what else were people doing if they weren’t hanging out? If I had no kids it’s perfectly plausible I could meet at the bar every day after work. How is a coffee shop any different? Just for clarity plenty of people drink coffee at night.
It’s true. Try hanging out somewhere outside your house with no modern technology for two hours.
First you’ll realize how long time feels without a smartphone or instant entertainment.
The second thing you’ll realize is how hard it is to keep track of time without a wristwatch.
People socialized more in person because there wasn’t much else to do and it was the best way to do so.
People socialized more in person because there wasn’t much else to do and it was the best way to do so.
Truly dark times.
And everyone has crippling anxiety now lol
Please understand an entire generation was gaslit into believing anyone trying to talk to you in public wanted to drug you, kidnap you, and/or rape you. 😂
Or infect you. Don’t forget your hand sanitizer and mask. And keep your distance. Literally everything is crawling with toxic germs.
In the good old days socially anxious people would just get stabbed in central park.
by other socially anxious people, too!
I was in grad school in the '90s and went out drinking six nights a week (Monday nights were for studying, as best I can recall). Like 5pm to 3am drinking plus a bunch of weed at somebody’s house or apartment afterwards. These days I would literally commit murder to not have to do something like that even one night.
Capitalism is amazing. We can all just chill and have coffee and have amazing lives.
Now let us buy some American blue jeans and have hamburger sandwiches from McDonald’s.
True if you narrow down the in-group enough and are part of it.
As a temporarily embarrassed future billionaire, I understood that reference.
lol
