Never really looked and just realized how cluttered that apartment is.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Yes, but Leave it to Beaver was a faithful documentary of life in the fifties.
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Chandler being able to afford paying for rent AND providing for Joey is also incredibly unrealistic.
Canonically Chandler is actually super rich from his mysterious nerd job and just lives frugally, and Monica's giant-ass apartment is rent controlled and inherited from her grandmother.
I don’t think Chandler is super rich, but he’s definitely comfortable. He doesn’t have the money to outright replace their furniture when it is all stolen, for instance. They end up using lawn chairs (and a canoe) as their living room furniture for a while. But yeah, he definitely lives below his means, because he always has money to pass off to Joey whenever he needs it.
He works in data analytics, his friends just don't care enough to learn what that means.
He probably analyses consumer and advertising trends to guide investments and product launches.
I thought he was a dentist with a hitman friend.
i bet you can hear this
You will care about the W.E.N.U.S because I care about the W.E.N.U.S!
Chandler's job was just made to be some generic finance sector job, right? It's definitely possible even today, but he'd be working a lot more hours. You'd never see him on the show.
Ross being stable even as a PhD grad student seems a lot more unrealistic to me. He even loved on his own. But maybe it was family money.
Ross wasn’t a grad student; He had his doctorate. Initially he worked at a museum of natural history, then eventually got fired (for screaming at his boss) and went to work at the university as a professor. Either way, in the mid-90’s, he would have been comfortable.
I mean they mentioned he and Chandler graduated in 1991, so if Ross got a PhD in 3 years that is probably a record, lol. I was always under the impression he was in a PhD program the first season of Friends and that's why he was working at the museum.
Ross wasn't a grad student though. he was a PhD researcher + professor. back in the 90s, that would've been a decent gig.
It wasn't (and still isn't) a decent gig as a young professor, especially not in a field where you can't bring in much grant money. Making even decent money in academia requires decades of seniority, and the really big bucks requires popular fame (a la Stephen Jay Gould) or enormous research grants that your institution gets to take 30% or 40% of.
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I was under the impression Ross was still in a PhD program the first year, working at the museum seems like a gig for a PhD student. Worrying about the museum displays and stuff like that in season 1.
Nah, just your typical PhD paleontologist dinosaur nerd. The times they showed that side of Ross was probabaly some of the most realistic moments in the show.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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 Jersey - they return to the apartment and it's portrayed as the size it realistically would be.
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I think they explained it, the reason they could afford it was because Monica's grandmother lived there, and they've been paying 1980s 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.
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.
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.
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To be fair they lived 5ft away, it may as well have been one big apartment. And one of them was a chef.
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What time do they start work? 11am?
That was part of a joke at the start of an episode. Everyone complained that their boss didn't like them and Joey (working at the Central Perk at that time iirc) pointed out "yeah I wonder why none of your bosses like you. Maybe it's because it's Wednesday 12 pm and you are hanging out at a cafe".
Where breakfast