I think they had the medallion a long time, and probably pooled all their resources to buy it (doubt they bought it at the top of the medallion boom, and maybe they're even leasing it). They probably once had money but the cab thing hadn't been as much of a cash cow as they expected. Was Jackson Heights really expensive in the 80s? I have a friend from that neighborhood from college, and she wasn't rich as far as I knew (don't know if they had a single family home but think the family had lived in the neighborhood a long time).

When Stone asked them to pay for his services out of the house, they balked. I think it was as much that they were mortgaged to the hilt as it was that they didn't want to give money to Stone. Maybe they bought the medallion through some kind of mortgage or re-financing during the housing boom of the mid-2000s. This is just something that happens in TV shows all the time, and you can't really think about that or you'd go nuts. Most shows are written by rich people who have no clue how most people live. Roseanne was supposed to be about poor people, and they had a huge 2 story house. Same with Married...with Children.

wat

Both shows were about working class (not poor) people, with entirely plausible TV versions of working class homes.

Al Bundy worked in a shoe store. His wife didn't work. They had two kids. They owned a two story house in Chicago. Their poorness was put across with neglect and a bad car. You can't be serious that a one minimum wage income earner can afford a house.

Roseanne was more working class, and their house was way bigger than the Bundys' house. And based on the first season premise, she was a line worker and he got sporadic construction work. It must be a struggle to keep that house, when it seemingly would have been much easier to downsize.

You must have had a nice upbringing to think that resonates with people who actually didn't have money. Most people like those families would have lived in apartments. But again, that's just out of touch writers thinking they're putting reality out there. I'm sure the makers of Growing Pains thought they were a typical middle class family.

nunnehi is straight up aids. lol never once have i watched married with children and thought wow peggy doesnt work and al is a shoe salesman and with 2 kids how do they afford to live in this house. its a ****ing tv show

Two whole stories! Golly gee willikers!

How old are you and where do you live?

Neither of those are any of your business. lol@acting like a 2 story house wasn't a big deal (probably 85 percent of the houses where I grew up were 1 story). On Good Times, the parents both had minimum wage jobs, three kids, and they lived in a tiny two bedroom apartment in a terrible neighborhood....bum bum bum...in Chicago. I lived in my first house at age 31, and my house now is 3 stories!

I lived in Fort Worth, Texas, and was a teenager when Married...with Children started. It was by far the closest thing to reality I had ever experienced on my TV, and the house was laughable even then. You always have to suspend disbelief on TV, but your statement alone there shows how out of touch you are when it comes to money and what most people on their incomes would be able to afford. Again, it's a rich person's take on what poor people or working class people were like. They were not that and never were, so they had to make something up that "seemed" right to them. I'm sure there have been thousands of TV shows that have resonated with your nice existence you grew up in, since you think that having a 2 story house back then wasn't abnormal for people making small amounts of money.

This is just amazing. Is nunnehi always like this?

So far every interaction I've had with you is you being a terrible poster, with a terrible stance, and then acting like you've won. I'm guessing this is always you, because it's all I know of you. You should really just learn to move on when you don't agree with something so that you don't turn every thread into a bad one. Don't blame me for this, and I'm sure Larry Legend is about to bring out his nuke again.

By the way, this is what I said that started this:

That's as close to an objective statement as there can be.

I don't think you know what objective means.

So you're saying that most TV writers are not well off people who have not even come close to the existence they're trying to portray? Got it. Some are or know what they portray. Most are not, especially when it comes to depicting "poor" people on sitcoms.

Good job leaving out the actual quote that I said was "as close to objective" as there can be.

I think this latest tangent stemmed from Trolly's post. Naz's home and his family's finances is not at all more interesting or relevant than the girl's. Naz could have been dirt poor or fairly well off, pretty much anything short of upper class and the story still works. The girl living in a multimillion dollar house is a major plot point and it's inconsistent when the defense notices that as being unusual but the police and prosecution don't.

Of course I believe the less AIDSy response to bringing up something so irrelevant is to ignore it, or to dismiss it with a quick explanation like the above paragraph, not delve into a history of early '90s sitcoms. Some posters prefer different styles.

Nobody cares whether the house in Married with Children fit with their income because it's a regular sitcom lol. Also not sure whether the house is really out of their realms if he bought it in the 60s. But like I said, it doesn't matter.

Sometimes mods delete his posts (and responses to them) and we don't get to read them, so no.

oh man

Not sure, but didn't Al Bundy own (or br the franchiser of) the shoe store? Small business owners owning a home is no biggie.

And in Roseanne, wasn't Dan a union guy? Again, union guys getting a mortgage is pretty common.

I grew up in NJ and most of the guys who worked with my father (UAW union guys) were home owners.

I don't know what happened in later seasons of the show, but no, Al did not own the shoe store. He was a shoe salesman, like the minimum wage type at the beginning.

I don't remember Roseanne well enough, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't union, and I think his frequent lack of work was a big theme in the early part of the show (that she was the main bread winner). She might have been a union line worker, I absolutely don't remember. The early seasons theme was them struggling to make ends meet, but I have never re-visited Roseanne since its initial airings in the 80s, because it had no resonance with me.

Did you ever get to see the second floor of Rosanne's house? My understating was that they could only afford the staircase, not the actual bedrooms. That was mentioned frequently in the early seasons before they won the lottery.

I was in the writers room for a couple of TV shows in the late 80s/early 90s....I didn't make a whole lot of money. It barely paid my rent. All writers on TV shows are not rich...there's a reason why there's a staffing season every year.

***Of course, things might have changed in the 20+ years since I worked in Hollywood. Every TV writer now might have a mansion above Sunset Plaza for all I know.***

Also, it's not up to Married With Children to reflect reality - only to make you laugh.

But if you want to talk about unrealistic homes, how about the Brady Bunch? Mike Brady is a freakin' architect and he has two bedrooms for his six kids? And they all share one bathroom?

Now that's crazy.

Seriously freaking Roseanne doesn't even crack the top thousand of unrealistic TV housing. (mostly because it is basically a reasonable house for a working class factory worker and a drywall worker). Like the apartment in Friends? A waitress lives there? Lol?

Oh and the Roseanne house went on the market a couple of years ago. This palatial four bedroom mansion sold for the surprisingly reasonable price of $129,000.



http://www.realtor.com/news/the-rose...sted-for-sale/

OPULENCE, I HAS IT



DEM CABINETS



SLEEPING IN STYLE

Lol, how many working class families just have George Cloony over like its no big deal? Searing realism there.

Please tell us what shows, and what your capacity was. I think you know very well that I mean the creating type writers (the ones who actually define the direction of the show at inception), not the staff writers, and again, the key word is most of those. Was the head of the writing staff you were on struggling to make rent?

These pictures aren't helping your case. Nice sized living room, fairly modern construction for a house built in 1925, if we are to believe the exterior. You do realize the ratty couch/furnishings is what sells they're not rich, right? Stick a ratty couch in the Three's Company apartment and the three people totally making minimum wage can afford that apartment on the beach in Santa Monica!

That kitchen is seemingly practically the size of the Friends apartment. The kitchen...

Those cabinets, again, are not far from period and mean that they did quite a bit of remodeling to that 1925 house.

King sized bed, plenty of room space for the bed for two king sized people. The interior of this house shares a lot of characteristics with 2000+ sq ft houses. But I guess your point is that there were no apartments where they lived because the houses were/are so cheap.