I’m nineteen and have absolutely nothing worked out yet, but I’m living with people in similar situations. It makes sense that I gravitate towards shows with a certain formula. Friends, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Girls, Adults, and many more, all follow young people living together as each other’s primary support systems. They’re figuring life out, which is exactly what you want to watch when you’re doing the same.
These shows are comforting when you need reminding that there’s always someone doing worse than you. But how accurately do they represent living with friends? The greatest mystery of television is how these characters afford their beautiful flats. Despite rarely being seen working, they never seem to struggle with bills, even though most have jobs that realistically wouldn’t rake in the cash. Any relatability in their messy lives goes straight out the penthouse window, when you realise they’ve never slummed it in mouldy student accommodations. There’s no ‘The One Where They Can’t Make Rent’ or ‘The One Where the Dishes Pile Up.’
Equally unrealistic is the sheer amount of sexual tension in these sitcoms. Almost every show features multiple romantic pairings within the friend group, some more questionable than others. Rachel and Joey? Barney and Robin? I don’t know about everyone else, but my flatmates have seen me naked, on the toilet, drunk, throwing up, and deathly ill on the sofa. I can promise you this doesn’t inspire sexual tension. Weirdly, I think the reality is more romantic. Living with friends means seeing each other at your absolute worst and choosing to stick around. Somewhere along the way, they stop feeling like just your friends and start feeling a lot more like family. Whether that’s unconditional love or the crippling fear of ending a lease and becoming homeless is still up to interpretation.
While FX’s Adults still contains these sitcom conventions, living in Samir’s parents’ house and not paying a shred of rent, never being seen carrying out daily errands such as laundry or dishes, and an obscene amount of sexual tension, I feel it is the most accurate in representing what it’s like to live with friends in an expensive city. It’s awful, but it’s a little less awful when you have a friend. In season one, episode three, ‘Spitroast’, Billie needs a colonoscopy, so naturally the entire group accompanies her. Samir tears into the hospital staff, Issa prays to her non-denominational God, and Anton and Paul Baker flirt, I guess?
Hilarity ensues during what should be a thoroughly unpleasant, potentially boring experience. Some of the best days of my life were spent doing very mundane activities and running errands with friends. In Adults, everyone seems to have an annoying trait or some aspect of their life that’s going incredibly bad, and sometimes this is self-inflicted. They obviously love each other very much, warts and all. Everyone can be a bit of a mess — the right flatmates won’t mind.
In How I Met Your Mother, the characters have a fairly realistic attachment to their ‘local’, MacLaren’s Pub. My friends and I rotate between our flat, the same campus café, and the same pub. I used to think the amount of time sitcom characters spend together was ridiculous. Surely, they must occasionally wander to work to afford their lifestyles? But between university, jobs, extracurriculars, and other commitments, my friends and I still spend an obscene amount of time together. Whether we’re studying, running errands, or rotting on the sofa, sometimes it feels like we’re together constantly.
Wait, someone should make a show about us!
Photo by Carlos Hernandez on Unsplash
