12/27/2023 0 Comments Family therapy vox![]() Instead, we are looking at each set in its baseline state. Lots of shows have episodes in which a space gets briefly messy for story reasons and is then cleaned again, but those don’t count for the purposes of this project. I evaluated each set according to its standard levels of messiness. This judgment call admittedly gets a little fuzzy when it comes to shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (premiered in 2005 and still going), but at the end of the day, this whole project depends on judgment calls. Shows that span multiple decades are included in the decade where they were most part of the zeitgeist ( Seinfeld premiered in 1989 and Friends ended in 2004, but I put them both in the 1990s). ![]() They had to be American (so no Sherlock), live-action (no Avatar), set in the present day (no Young Sheldon), and include at least one domestic space among the principal sets (bye-bye, ER). I picked the most popular shows from each decade that abided by certain rules. To avoid cherry-picking examples, I pulled them all from IMDb’s list of the most popular TV shows of all time. Sadly, I could not get Vox to fund a full PhD on this issue, so I limited myself to looking at 30 TV shows, 10 each from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Even the lid on the blender is slightly askew. Monica’s kitchen on Friends is rigorously organized, but there are plenty of cleaning implements and power cords stored in clear sight. I was going to have to delve into the data to figure it out. I was left with two questions to investigate: Has the mess level on sets actually changed over time? If it has, why has it? It had something to do with budgets, or with social media, or with organizing shows, they told me. “I think it just kind of depends on the type of show.” He allowed that certainly The Morning Show, on which he works as a production designer, has a remarkably uncluttered set, but that was a character choice: “These people have meticulously controlled lives.”Īt the same time, every production designer I spoke to also had highly robust theories for why they thought set mess might have vanished, even if they weren’t entirely sure it had. “I had not heard of this till you set all this up!” said Nelson Coates, president of the Art Directors Guild. And when I called up production designers to see if they thought there was something to this idea, they were disappointingly uncertain. The Euphoria kids, after all, live in the midst of mess! Surely Girls was recent enough to count, and it was pretty grungy. (That’s Marshall’s foot there on the bottom left by the fridge - he just proposed to Lilly and she knocked him over with joy.) CBSīut I could also so easily think of exceptions to the idea of the trend. Ted’s kitchen on How I Met Your Mother sees frequent messes. I had a gut sense that I had emerged from an era of warmly messy TV sets and into a time when all TV sets at all times look as though a real estate agent has just breezed through to get the home staged to sell at an open house. The complaint felt, to me, intuitively true as soon as I saw it. “Nowadays movie and tv home interiors look like they double as the set for a lysol commercial,” complained a tumblr post in 2021. I truly can’t remember the last time I saw a stray power cord onscreen. The Pritchett-Dunphy-Tucker clan of Modern Family never seem to wash their dishes, but they don’t seem to ever have dirty dishes, either: they’re always simply in a state of gleaming readiness. Ted Lasso always seems to have his throw pillows arranged just so. ![]() ![]() Lately, though, all those messes seem to have vanished from my TV screen. Newspapers festooned the living room floor of the Connor house on Roseanne. Monica let dishes dry on the rack next to her sink on Friends. Jerry left cereal boxes out on the counter on Seinfeld. They weren’t necessarily messy, but there was stuff in the homes of our TV friends. ![]() Once upon a time, TV houses were cluttered. ![]()
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