Greetings From Mars: Explaining NYC Through Scripted TV Shows
Back in the early 2010s, after living in NYC for just a few years, I reunited with a Midwestern childhood friend of mine who had just moved to the D.C. area. As we got caught up with each other’s lives over the course of a long lunch, I could tell that she struggled to figure out what questions to ask me about my life in NYC because she had absolutely no idea what it was like. To her, I might as well have lived on Mars. (And to be honest, some days I feel like I do. Have you seen @SubwayCreatures on Instagram?)
“So how do you get to work?” she asked. “Do you take a taxi?”
I tried not to laugh when she asked this (what am I, made of money?!), because that probably seemed like a good guess for anyone who’s never been here or only briefly visited, since most people gain a sense of what NYC life is like from what they see in TV and movies. And in those worlds, people are constantly jumping in and out of cabs instead of riding the subway and/or simply hoofing it.
So, I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast (Venn diagram, anyone?) my own life with what’s shown in a handful of popular TV shows from the past 35 years.
And now, on with the shows!
1. Friends
[Coincidentally, I rewatched a few episodes of this show, which I hadn’t seen in years, in preparation for writing this newsletter, mere hours before Matthew Perry passed away. RIP, dear Chandler, my brother in sarcasm.]
I don’t think that even the most “Real NYC”-clueless person watches an episode of Friends and thinks it’s even remotely close to reality. People often point out the huge size of Monica’s West Village apartment, and how that place would not be affordable to someone like her at all. The show does kind of get away with this by explaining that Monica’s grandmother allowed her to sublet her rent-controlled apartment. This, technically, is a real thing. And although I’ve known of a few people (friends of friends) over the years with rent stabilized or controlled apartments costing only a few hundred dollars a month (instead of a few thousand), these situations are highly rare.
Rewatching this show now brought up a lot of questions for me. Where are all the non-white people? The gay people? The disabled people? The fat people? (young, fat Monica does not count and has aged terribly.)
Why is that couch in the coffee shop always available? How is it so clean? If that couch existed in reality, it would be covered in all kinds of food, drink, and bodily fluid stains and either fleas or bed bugs, yet also occupied by a lunatic who bought a small coffee and then stuck around for 8 hours.
Why do none of the characters ever drink alcohol on this show? They never go to a bar and the only time alcohol is mentioned is when it’s an important plot point. In reality this city is full of heavy drinkers. Are you telling me that Joey wouldn’t constantly be at some Murray Hill bar, trying to pick up chicks?
The “Pivot!” episode does ring true to me though. (In attempting to move his new couch up the apartment building stairs, Ross keeps yelling at Rachel to “pivot” around a post that’s in the way.) I believe you’re not a true New Yorker until you’ve carried something large and unwieldy for blocks (bonus points if you get on the subway with it). When I moved into my current apartment, my relatively new couch wouldn’t fit through my front door, so I had a short mental breakdown on my front lawn before realizing there was a back entrance, through the boiler room, where the couch would just barely fit through and into my apartment. The stress I experienced that day shaved approximately 5 years off my life.
I still have yet to play in water fountain with my friends though.
2. Sex and the City (the original series, not those terrible movies or reboot)
Whether they’d willingly admit it or not, I believe there are thousands of Millennial women who moved to NYC purely because of this show. And who could blame them? It showed NYC as a fun, exciting, glamorous, sexy place where cute, single, straight men are seemingly everywhere! Ah, what a wonderful fantasy.
Unlike Friends, this show was actually filmed in and around NYC and not on an LA soundstage. Though the apartments are sets built for the show, the exterior shots are pretty much all filmed on actual NYC streets and many of the stores, restaurants, clubs, etc. are real ones anyone could walk into. Though many of these places have closed now, you can still waltz into Cafeteria for lunch or Magnolia bakery (I suggest you try the banana pudding instead of a cupcake though).
I find it especially funny that the characters in this show are always hopping in cabs because Sarah Jessica Parker herself takes the subway regularly, as she recently talked about on Howard Stern.
In one episode, Carrie reflects that “In New York they say you’re always looking for a job, a boyfriend, or an apartment.” Unfortunately, this mentality is very real; people are always looking for “something better,” even if what they already have is pretty great. It’s exhausting.
Fashion is also obviously a very important part of the show, especially high-end shoes. The women, especially Carrie, regularly drop hundreds of dollars on Manolo’s and Jimmy Choo’s. Perhaps this is something that’s changed since the ‘90s or was never true in real life, but whenever I see a woman in heels like that, I just immediately assume that they either very recently moved here and don’t understand how impractical that is, or they’re very wealthy and are just walking one block from where their car service dropped them off to their final destination. Most women that I know here though are walking around in flat shoes (maybe a short heel on a pair of boots) because they’re likely to get in a couple miles on any given day just going about their normal business.
Also, I’ve gotten splashed by a bus hitting a puddle before and looked nothing like Carrie Bradshaw in the show’s opening credits.
3. Broad City
Though this show was obviously scripted and exaggerated, it was clearly written by people who have fully experienced what it’s like to live in NYC as a twentysomething.
New York is a difficult, often ridiculous city to live in – hard stop. One of the best examples I can give to explain this is an episode of Broad City in which Abbi must go to a UPS location to pick up a package that couldn’t be delivered and finds herself taking the subway to a bus to a speed boat (on which all the other passengers are inexplicably pairs of twins). Over the years I’ve had friends have to go all the way to the Bronx or to a neighborhood out by JFK Airport (the Siberia of NYC) to retrieve a package that USPS or FedEx refused to deliver. But please, non-New Yorkers, continue to complain about having to hop in your car and drive 10 minutes to pick up a package. That must be really rough.
The only thing more difficult than getting around NYC is getting out of NYC, as perfectly demonstrated in another Broad City episode in which the two girls and a few friends are decked out in formal wear, trying to leave NYC to get to a wedding in Connecticut. As the episode progresses, they try taking Amtrak (but accidentally go to Penn Station instead of Grand Central), Citi bikes, renting a car (that turns out to be a U-Haul type truck with a flat tire), and a bus (whose other riders are a guy clipping his toenails, a woman with a taxidermied raccoon on her lap, and guy with a live chicken). That’s as real as it gets!
4. High Maintenance
No other scripted TV show even comes close to accurately depicting NYC as High Maintenance does, though. For those unfamiliar, the show is a collection of short stories about people around the city, where the only real thread between them is that they all happen to purchase weed from the same delivery man. And really, weed is more of a background element to the real stories being told.
Each half-hour episode usually features 2 completely separate stories about the private lives of New Yorkers of all backgrounds – Black, white, Middle Eastern, young, old, American-born, immigrants, gay, straight, wealthy, and poor. We see them at home with their partners or roommates, in their jobs, running errands, hanging out in the park, and on the subway. The apartments look lived-in and real. Unlike most TV shows that take place here, High Maintenance celebrates the individualities and specialness of everywhere here. I don’t really have anything funny to say about it, but encourage you to watch it because it’s criminally underrated and underwatched.
5. Seinfeld
Of course, no TV list of mine would be complete without mentioning Jerry & Co. The sense of humor – dry and observant – feels pretty NY to me. Mentions of specific desserts (often Jewish) like chocolate babka and black and white cookies (“Look to the cookie, Elaine!”) are very NYC-specific.
As is this conversation about the subway:
KRAMER: “All right, Coney Island. Okay, you can take the B or the F and switch for the N at Broadway-Lafayette, or you can go over the bridge to DeKalb and catch the Q to Atlantic Avenue, then switch to the IRT 2, 3, 4 or 5, but don't get on the G.”
ELAINE: Couldn’t he just take the D straight to Coney Island?
KRAMER: Well, yeah…
Though, like on Friends, it seems like 90% of the people in this city are white and that no one ever drinks alcohol, just coffee. Also, why do they drive everywhere? Occasionally the subway makes and appearance, and when it does, it’s pretty accurately portrayed.
For those of you unfamiliar with NYC, I hope this gives you a clearer understanding of what it’s like to live here. If you don’t have a love-hate relationship with the city, then you must have only been here for a short period. Congrats on still being in your honeymoon phase.